Summary
Private detective and retired colonel Art Hardin usually stays away from the flashy kind of PI work, preferring to pay his bills by checking up on false disability claims, routine surveillance, and the like. So when the senior partner of one of the premier legal firms in Grand Rapids approaches Hardin about a job protecting his niece from her soon-to-be ex-husband for a couple of days, Hardin isn't exactly eager to take on the job-especially since the niece herself is under house arrest pending a murder investigation of her former boss, and the sudden disappearance of eleven million dollars. However, Hardin finds that the fee offered is too great to pass up. Of course, after a hatchet attack, a house burnt down, and a few violent encounters with some crooked cops, Hardin can hardly wait for the case to be over... Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.
Publishers Weekly Review
While this debut novel, winner of the First Coast Writers Festival's Josiah W. Bancroft Jr. Award, has its faults, it deserves praise for sheer action and suspense. PI Hardin, a retired counter intelligence officer, is asked by a prominent Grand Rapids, Mich., lawyer to protect his niece from her estranged police officer husband, who is likely to beat her up on sight. The husband turns out to be the least of Hardin's worries, as the plot immediately becomes increasingly violent and complex, requiring one to pay close attention to who did what to whom and why or be lost forever. Bailey has a good sassy sense of humor. He also has a peculiar vernacular of his own. For instance, in a scene in which two characters smoke, the author writes, "He started plumbing his costume for a cigarette." Plumbing? His "costume" is a pair of overalls. A few lines later: "I took a long pull on my smoke, extracted it from my face, and looked out over the river." Now, for a bit of local color: "Popsicle sticks weathered to gray and the silver pull tabs from beverage cans littered the ground." Pull tabs on the ground? This detail would seem to set the action a generation or so ago, but in fact period and, for that matter, place are irrelevant in this hard-boiled homage, in which the villains get stacked up like cordwood. Bailey's prose can be eccentric, but there's no denying his narrative drive, which keeps the reader moving right along until the last page. Agent, Andrew Zack. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc.
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