Gumshoe Rock
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- £14.99
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
USA Today best-selling author
"Mortimer Angel is my favorite private eye." —John Lescroart, New York Times best-selling author
Embezzlement case turns murderous
Early in July, northern Nevada's senior Internal Revenue Service agent, Ronald Soranden—disliked by every agent in the Reno IRS office—vanished without a trace. In September, he makes a dramatic reappearance, of sorts. His skull—stripped clean and white—is dropped through the slashed top of a Mustang convertible. The vehicle belongs to Lucy Landry, PI Mortimer Angel's gorgeous young assistant now working with him on a seemingly unrelated embezzlement case.
But Mort is a former IRS field agent in Reno. He'd done his time during the tyrannical reign of Soranden, quitting, he says, "when I discovered I have a soul." Now that his former boss's head has appeared, he and Lucy find them themselves under the annoying surveillance of a pair of IRS enforcement agents.
When the FBI are brought in to investigate the murder, Mort and Lucy realize shocking details about their own case—primarily Soranden's involvement. It becomes evident that events and suspects of the embezzlement case and Soranden's murder are heavily entangled with those enmeshed in an ugly case of blackmail. Mort and Lucy are roped tighter and tighter into the Soranden investigation while they grapple with the deadliest situation of their PI careers. Mortimer Angel has been in harrowing, lethal situations before and has suffered incalculable losses, but none more horrifying than the trap embedded in Gumshoe Rock.
The perfect mix of John Sanford and Carl Hiaasen
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Leininger's sluggish fourth novel featuring former Nevada IRS agent turned PI Mortimer Angel (after 2018's Gumshoe on the Loose), the skull of Mort's missing former boss, Ronald Soranden, turns up in the vandalized Mustang of his assistant, Lucy Landry. The discovery leads to an FBI inquiry and increased scrutiny for Mort, amid a case involving an accountant who embezzled money in an attempt to pay back unpaid taxes, only to fall prey to the blackmail plot of an unscrupulous IRS agent. With Lucy's help, Mort's ensuing investigation to recover the missing money connects to other seemingly unrelated cases occupying their agency. Mort never misses the opportunity to ramble about generational differences as well as the government-sanctioned criminals working in the IRS. The relationship between Mort and Lucy functions as wish fulfillment, robbing her of agency as well as necessity to the story. The convoluted buildup, meanwhile, supersedes the effort to construct a dramatically satisfying mystery. Those who prefer an antiquated take on the hard-boiled genre will best appreciate this one.
