Dearly departed A Holland Taylor mystery

Housewright's third entry in the Holland Taylor series is an entertaining missing-person yarn. St. Paul private eye Taylor is asked by low-life lawyer Hunter Truman to find the lovely Alison Emerton, who has mysteriously vanished from her home. After listening to Alison's tape-recorded message (to be played in case anything happened to her), Taylor quickly finds himself attracted to and fascinated by the missing woman--shades of the movies Laura and Vertigo. Housewright endows his protagonist with an annoying habit of dismissing his boorish or chauvinistic behavior with an annoying, "Gee I'm a guy, what do you expect?" While this is unlikely to appeal to the predominantly female mystery audience, women readers will appreciate how much smarter the female characters are than Taylor--or any of the other male characters, for that matter. Overall, this is an enjoyable mystery with a corker of an ending. --Jenny McLarin

Sleazy lawyer Hunter Truman sends cop-turned-Twin Cities PI Holland Taylor after a missing woman in Housewright's disappointing third novel. Alison Emerton has either been murdered by Raymond Fleck, a convicted rapist who was stalking her, or has left to start over someplace far from Fleck and her insensitive husband, a man clearly more concerned with collecting the insurance money for her presumed death than with grieving for her loss. Taylor is smitten by an alluring photograph of Allison and quickly becomes emotionally involved in the case. His search leads out of St. Paul to a lakeside town enveloped in a debate over Native American casino rights. Housewright's Penance (1995) won an Edgar for best first novel, and once again he shows a sure narrative touch through the voice of his engaging and quirky shamus. Yet the novel hits several wrong notes. An overly dogmatic antidrug tirade, an obvious final twist and a murky series of legal/business machinations over casino and water rights all detract from what has been a singularly pleasurable series filled with light crime tones. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

212 days after Alison Emerton disappears, her husband's attorney asks Holland Taylor if he'll start looking for her. Since litigation-happy lawyer Hunter Truman's closest prior approach to Twin Cities p.i. Taylor (Penance, 1995; Practice to Deceive, 1997) was to sue him, Taylor wonders why Truman's chosen him for this work'and why Alison's boorish husband Stephen seems so little concerned about Alison's reports that rapist Raymond Fleck was stalking her. When he starts to talk to the people who knew Alison best, though, Taylor gets the first inkling that this is going to be a chimera of a case, one as hard to hold onto as a greased pig. Fleck guilelessly admits his interest in Alison but says she returned it with interest. When Taylor attacks Fleck's alibi and gets the cops to arrest two different suspects, at least one of whom is obviously covering for the other, it ought to be a great day (even if it'll mark the last of Truman's $400 daily paychecks). But Taylor, still unsatisfied, suddenly gets a completely new idea about what happened to Alison, and takes off for the Wisconsin town of Deer Lake to dodge bullets, dish dirt about a new local casino, share drinks and conversation with its presumptive Native American owners, and follow Alison's loyal friends around very, very closely. Understated, literate, and tricky as they come, even if the last few surprises aren't up to the first dozen.