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Title details for Spook by Bill Pronzini - Available

Spook

#28 in series

by Bill Pronzini
Nick Sullivan
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

Shaken after a hair's-breadth escape from death, Nameless has made changes in his professional life, but he's not put himself out to pasture. Again he enters San Francisco's shadowy underworld, this time in a search for the identity of a gentle, mentally disturbed homeless man who has been found dead in an alley doorway. Clues are few, but Pronzini, working at the top of his form, takes his seasoned private-eye hero to a new phase of a still-evolving thirty-year career.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Nameless Detective

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 1, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780792741824
      • File size: 196497 KB
      • Duration: 06:49:22

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Pronzini and Sullivan are a good match in this audiobook, but that's not a compliment. The book and the performance are equally uneven, combining in a generally unsatisfying experience for the listener. Pronzini's "Nameless" detective, whom everyone calls Bill, is investigating the murder of a homeless man, an event that leads him back to an unsolved seventeen-year-old crime. Helping him are his youthful and willful partner, Tamara, and a new addition to the agency, Jake Runyon, a widower sapped by grief. The mystery takes far too long to become involving, the side stories involving Bill and Tamara are tedious or irritating, and Sullivan's characterizations are mainly pedestrian. Only the tragic figure of Runyon engages, both on the page and in Sullivan's performance. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 11, 2002
      Hints of the Nameless Detective's death or forced retirement in his last book, Bleeders
      (2002), turn out to be premature. (He isn't all that nameless, either—everyone calls him Bill. Could his last name be an Italian one ending in "ini"?) Nameless is slowing down, though, while the central plot of this 28th book in the honored series is one or two twists short of exciting. Hired by a San Francisco filmmaker to discover the identity of a gentle, spook-haunted homeless man shot to death in the production company's doorway where he camped out at night, Nameless spends far too many pages doing just that and far too few offering alternative possibilities for the murder other than the glaringly obvious one: realistic, maybe, but certainly not riveting. Perhaps building a foundation for a series without Nameless, who talks often about "semi-retirement" as he approaches 60, Pronzini gives his hero's young partner, Tamara Corbin, more to do this time out. Unfortunately, it mostly involves being nasty to her family and associates after hitting a speed bump in the road of love. A new addition to the agency staff, Jake Runyon, a seasoned Seattle investigator trying to connect with a lost son, is more appealing here. Three-time Shamus Award-winner Pronzini can still capture the sleazy underside of San Francisco's glitz as quickly and as well as anyone, so, Nameless lives—at least for one more book.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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