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Summary
Summary
Private eye Stanley Hastings is determined to find out who's making threatening phone calls to a bestselling author's wife. But soon the threats turn deadly, and Hastings is cast as most likely suspect. Stalking Manhattan for the real killer, Stanley can't find a single reason why someone would want him destroyed--until it's a little too late.
Author Notes
Parnell Hall is a part-time actor, a former private detective, singer/songwriter, and full-time writer of novels and screenplays. He writes the Stanley Hastings Mystery series, the Steve Winslow courtroom drama series, and the Puzzle Lady Mystery series. He also writes under the pseudonym J. P. Hailey. He wrote the screenplay to the 1984 movie C.H.U.D.
Hall co-authored New York Times bestseller Smooth Operator with Stuart Woods.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
No bad luck for Hall as he unreels an amusing tongue-in-cheek 13th adventure for PI Stanley Hastings (after Scam, 1997). When Maxine Winnington, wife of bestselling thriller author Kenneth Winnington, hires Stanley to find out who's making threatening phone calls, the list of candidates seems pretty narrow. The Winningtons' unlisted, recently changed phone number has had limited distribution, mostly to people connected to Kenneth. Stanley, an aspiring author himself, is introduced to a bizarre publishing world: editors, agents, publicists and that seemingly limitless tribe who want to be published writers. The milieu with all its vagaries proves a ready target for Hall's well-aimed barbs as he reveals the secret behind Winnington's initial success and offers a delightfully accurate account of a bookstore signing. Stanley receives assistance from the usual sources: acerbic Sgt. MacAullif; Richard Rosenberg, his sarcastic lawyer and frequent employer; and his bemused wife, Alice. When the annoying phone calls lead to murder and Stanley becomes the hunted as well as the hunter, Hall proves as adept at creating on-page suspense as he is at lampooning it. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
I don't deal in danger,"" Stanley Hastings aptly tells his latest client. But Maxine Winnington, who obviously hasn't seen Stanley's râsumâ, hires him anyway to identify the person who's been harassing her with anonymous threatening phone calls. If you expect to see unarmed slip-and-fall specialist Stanley take over as Maxine's bodyguard, think again: His approach to protection is to install Caller ID on her phone and wait to see who calls. Luckily for Stanley, Maxine and her husband, successful suspense novelist Kenneth P. Winnington, have just had their phone number changed to avoid the caller, and when the calls keep coming in, the field of suspects (Kenneth's agent, his editor, his publicist) is awfully narrow. Murder, of course, will winnow the suspects still further, and Stanley--whose name is on slips of paper clutched in the dead folks' hands--will end up in hot water with his nemesis Sgt. Thurman. So far, so appetizing to fans of this rollicking series (Scam, p. 258, etc.). But Stanley's all-too-pointed inquiries into the differences between mystery and suspense novels presage big trouble for the novel he's stuck in, despite his repeated insistence that ""it's not a book."" The result is a cop-out and a cheat, a mixture of a whodunit with clues that ring hollow and a suspense novel with no suspense. In the words of several prophetic characters with more experience in publishing than Stanley: ""What a weak plot. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the latest Stanley Hastings mystery, the New York private eye is hired by a famous novelist to find out who's been making threatening telephone calls to his wife. Soon, potential suspects start turning up dead, and Hastings teams up with a dim-witted cop to unmask the killer. This is a very clever novel that makes fun of itself in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink way: Hall has most of his characters--the author, the author's agent and publicist, even Hastings himself--constantly point out that this case would make a terrible novel. It's rather surreal when a novel's characters comment (albeit indirectly) on the quality of the novel, and it's a gimmick that could have failed miserably. But it doesn't, and the novel is first-class fun from start to finish. An excellent choice for most public-library mystery collections. --David Pitt
