Detective
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Stanley Hastings, the world's most unlikely private eye, a struggling actor/writer trying to support his wife and kid in New York City, who chases ambulances for a negligence lawyer and carries a camera instead of a gun and photographs accident victims and the cracks in the sidewalk that tripped them, tackles his first real case, tracking down the murderers of a client he could not save because he wasn't a real detective.
1988 Edgar Award Best First Mystery Nominee
1988 Shamus Award Best First Mystery Nominee
"Highly entertaining ... this is zesty, shrewdly paced caper-comedyóreminiscent of the best of (among others) Lawrence Block and Joe Gores."
-Kirkus Reviews
"As suspenseful as it is hilarious!"
- Rose DeWolf, Philadelphia Daily News
"A gritty, entertaining mystery!"
-Publishers Weekly
"A terrific page-turner of classic detection."
-Drood Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Martin Albrect stumbles into his detective agency, babbling that he's about to be murdered, Stanley Hastings is incredulousuntil he reads the next day that Albrect has been brutally shot. Albrect has left behind a series of clues, and Hastings feels honor-bound to take the case. He soon deduces that Albrect was a drug runner who double-crossed some members of a cocaine-trafficking ring. Hastings's investigations lead him to New York's Lower East Side, Miami and East Hampton. It's almost an academic exercise for Hastings, until he discovers the killers are on his track. Hastings is a novel addition to the detective genrea down-on-his-luck writer, short-tempered and opinionated, who moonlights as a detective (as does the author) and who has more brains than brawn. There are some obvious flaws to this bookHastings sometimes indulges in diatribes that have disturbing racial overtonesbut on the whole, Hall's good ear for gritty dialogue and his ability to evoke New York's neighborhoods and people make an entertaining mystery.
