Publisher Description
BEDROCK FEAR
Grady Haas is a woman possessed, driven by panic, numbed by shock. What happened to her? And is this a case for the "Nameless Detective" or a psychiatrist? Reluctantly, "Nameless" answers her father's desperate summons and agrees to find out what she's running from. Grady herself is untouchable, silent as the grave.
ALIVE AND RUNNING
A skeptical "Nameless" probes the young woman's past, looking for clues to a broken heart. But soon he becomes the quarry as he follows the shocking trail of blood and manipulation... and unwittingly leads a sadistic killer to his prey. Armed with only a few slender clues and his own darkest impulses, "Nameless" must flush out the psychopath before he drives them all to the jagged edge...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pronzini's ( Breakdown ) brisk, efficient, action-packed mystery is set on the earthquake-ravaged San Francisco waterfront and in the now-arid salad-bowl country to the south. Here the Nameless Detective hunts for a methodical, brutal stranger who is pursuing withdrawn Grady Haas, 31, daughter of rancher Arlo Haas, the detective's old friend. Secretive Grady won't tell why she has suddenly left her job as an insurance adjuster specializing in marine claims and returned to the Salinas Valley . Nameless finds that her San Francisco apartment has been thoroughly tossed. All he has to go on are the three claims Grady had been investigating and her ex-boyfriend's savage beating by a stranger seeking Grady's whereabouts. Nameless may lack a moniker but he's full of character, describing himself as a ``throwback--the kind of man who hates progress, mistrusts technology, and never quite feels comfortable in any place where he can't see or touch some small piece of the past.'' Still haunted by the horror described in Shackles (1988), in which he was chained for three months to the wall of an isolated mountain cabin, Nameless now must endure a new ordeal, being locked inside a burning building. The book's exciting final scene nicely plays on the title's double meanings.
