Take Hardcase (Nameless Detective, #22) Narrated By Bill Pronzini Expressed As E-Text

that was tense! When Namless is hired to help a young lady find her birth parents things look normal.
But when there is a crime involved it gets harder, And when the crime happend in a small town that wants the past to stay in the past, it gets harder yet.
And tension explodes when one of the birth parents comes looking for revenge, This turn into a real Hardcase! Bill Pronzini is a master storyteller! It not great literature, I admit, but he weaves a marvelous tale of mystery amp suspense.
To my way of thinking, he is a much better writer than several of those who are consistently on the best seller lists.
Too bad more people haven't discovered him, His books are short amp an easy read, amp I love his Nameless Detective series, Hardcase is another chapter in the life of Nameless, I'm glad to see him find some happiness amp make a move into the modern age.
Great detective story Concise and compelling, Nameless embarks on a typical find your adopted parents case and encounters a wall of silence.
He finally breaks the wall and uncovers unsettling info and then has to wrestle with the truth.
Should he should tell the client Meanwhile as a result of his search he pursues on his own dime a scumbag.
You think it's going to wrap up but Pronzini throws some real twists and turns and it gets very personal.
Very satisfying read. Good mystery, good character development, . good feeling. Slow start but filled in origins from later books, Ultimately solid story. PROTAGONIST: Nameless Detective
SETTING: San Francisco area
SERIES:of
RATING:,
WHY: Nameless is hired by a young woman who wants to know the identity of her birth parents.
There's not much information to go on, but he manages to figure out a few things that get him started.
He finds out who her parents are but is reluctant to reveal the truth to her, which leads to an unfortunate conclusion.
Before this all began, Nameless and his longtime significant other, Kerry, finally get married, A competent entry in the series, but not all that enthralling,
Still going strong! This one was rough, Rough things happening, rough things almost happening,
Thisnd entry in the Nameless Detective series is a thoroughly successful “entertainment” to use Graham Greenes phrase which is not surprising, since Bill Pronzini is a real pro.


It starts out, as many mysteries do, with what seems to be a straightforward problem.
Melanie Aldrich, going through the family papers after her mothers death, has just learned that she is adopted, and she wants to know her “real identity”: who her parents were, and if either or both are alive.
At first, Nameless gets stonewalled, for the details of Melanies conception and birth are sad and shabby, and nobody related the case wishes to dredge up the past the past.
But our hero keeps digging, and soon he uncovers, along with the past, a violent vengeful person who threatens not only Melanie, but Nameless and his new wife Kerry too.


Yes, thats right, I said “wife, ” This is one of the reasons why Hardcase is essential reading for Nameless fans: the first chapter recounts the wedding of our detective and his longtime companion Kerry.
Short version: everything go wrong hilariously, but everything turns out alright,

In addition, this book, first published in, gives us an account of Nameless tardy entry into the Digital Age.
No, he doesnt learn to operate the computer itself that would be too much to ask.
Instead, he hires a “hacker,” Tamara Corbin, an African American college girl with a chip on her shoulder.
She and Nameless get off to a bad start, but they soon develop a mutual respect.
She is an interesting character, a good foil for Namless and I hope shell be around for many more books to come.
Though this novel starts off as a very mundane adoption search, it quickly pivots into the story of a serial rapist who has been terrorizing California for decades.
It might just be because I'm reading it in the modernday, when the Golden State Killer was recently caught, but it makes me wonder if the sociopath then known as the Original Night Stalker or the East Area Rapist was on Pronzini's mind.
The two criminals certainly have similar genesises in Sacramento, Whichever the case, it makes the novel that much more fascinating when read from the far side of April.


Unfortunately, the novel takes a notable turn for the worse in its later half.
That starts with Nameless' immoral, stupid, and criminal actions, which should be career ending, He takes a client's money after having decided not to tell her what she's learned, then violates her confidentiality by talking about her to a man that

he already suspects to be very dangerous.


The worst problem with this piledupon stupidity is that most of it isn't acknowledged in the book, and in fact the stupid ball is passed around quite a bit, as a number of other characters all make decisions that are unbelievable, outofcharacter, or both.
Kerry decides to drive up on her own for their honeymoon Nameless' new assistant gives out their address and any number of police are unable or said to be unlikely to respond to calls about a murdering rapist on the stalk for hours at a time.
This sloppy, sloppy writing is all purely in service of moving the plot along to a predetermined point, but Pronzini is so blatantly manipulative in doing so that it drags down the whole book.


And then there's the rapist's final motive, when he decides to start harming women just to get vengeance on "their" men.
It's the whole fridgingwomen trope, but it's actually made concrete in the book as a character's motive.
It goes beyond disturbing to disgusting, and I don't just mean disgust with the character, I mean, Pronzini gets a little bit of a pass because this book was written right around the time that Kyle Raynor was finding his girlfriend in a refrigerator, and years before Gail Simone popularized it as a trope.
. . but it's still a very bad look, especially as I vaguely recall Nameless finding Kerry bloodied in a closet in some recent Hardcase's finale.


Pronzini has never been the writer that his wife Marcia Muller is, but his spare, puzzleoriented books sometimes hit the spot.
However, this book, with its manipulative plotting and its problematic messaging intentional or not may finally be enough to put me off continuing with Nameless.
Mystery Story

I thought I had read all of Prozini's Nameless detective stories, but somehow I missed this one.
It was a nice surprise to stumble across it and then get to read it, His stories are always nimble and a pleasure to read, They are always satisfying. stupid, blabbermouth Nameless screwed up big book on tape
really weak ambling plot, No character development.
no redeeming value. Shamus Awardwining Pronzini delivers a riveting new mystery featuring his acclaimed "Nameless Detective", Newly married and just back from his honeymoon, Nameless thinks his new case will be easy.
But that's before he runs into a shocking small town coverup and some very angry people.
Evil among us, so many more we do not know, Old style detective series with excellent writing, plots and characters throughout Here is a list of all the books in order Happy Reading.


The Snatch Random House
The Vanished Random House
Undercurrents Random House
Blowback Ramdom House
Twospot Putman
Laybrinth St.
Martin's Press
A Killing In Xanadu Waves Press
Hoodwinked St, Martin's Press
Scattershot St, Martin's Press
Dragonfire St, Martin's Press
Bindlestiff St, Martin's Press
Casefile St, Martin's Press
Quicksilver St, Martin's Press
Nightshades St, Martin's Press
Double St, Martin's Press
Bones St, Martin's Press
Grave Yard Plots St, Martin's Press
Dreadfall St, Martin's Press
Shackles St, Martin's Press
Small Fellonies St, Martin's Press
Jackpot Delacorte
Breakdown Delacorte
Quarry Delacorte
Epitaths Delacorte
Demons Delacorte
Hardcase Delacorte
Spadework Crippen amp Landru
Sentinels Carroll amp Graf
Illusions Carroll amp Graf
Boobytrap Carroll amp Graf
Sluths Five Star
Duo Five Star
Crazybones Carroll amp Graf
Bleeders Carroll amp Graf
Spook Carroll amp Graf
Scenarios Five Star
Nightcrawlers Forge
Mourners Forge
Savages Forge
Feaver Forge
Schemers Forge
Betrayers Forge
Camouflage Forge
Hellbox Forge
Kinsmen Cemetery Dance
Femme Cemetery Dance
Nemesis Forge "The deputy was still alive: twitching a little now, moaning softly.
Shot once, in the back just above the right kidney, He'd lost a lot of blood already, the bright arterial kind, "

I have recently reviewed Bill Pronzini's nonseries novel sitelink The Other Side of Silence and quite liked it so I decided to return to his famous "Nameless Detective" series of which I had read two or three installments many years ago.
Hardcasecomes from about midperiod of the series and begins with a momentous event: the NarratorDetectiveWhoseNameWeWillNeverLearnButItIsLikelyItalian let's call him ND is marrying his girlfriend in San Francisco.
The opening scenes are designed to be hilarious, but the comedic payoff is meager and the humor lowbrow and quite cliché.
Mercifully, the crime thread soon begins: a twentythreeyearold woman, who works as a model, hires ND to find her real parents.
She has just found out that she had been adopted,

The case takes ND to a small farm town near Lodi in Central Valley in California where he learns some gruesome facts from the past that are related to the case.
We follow the interesting and fast plot through various places in the Bay Area and for once we have a somewhat believable dramatic twist towards the end.
The Central Valley scenery is quite well captured,

The other thread of the plot focuses on ND attempting to hire a technologysavvy young assistant.
Oh no, not another instance of the "teenager computer whiz" horrible cliché! But there is a cool angle on this.
The assistant is a young female AfricanAmerican student with attitude, The scene of their first meeting is realistic, wellwritten, and addresses issues of race so much better than the usual cloying, inept, and wellmeantbutcounterproductive writing by authors like John Shannon.


While Hardcase is mainly an entertainment read it poses two serious questions.
The first concerns the responsibilities of a private detective to their client, What obligation do they have to convey all gathered information to the client if to the best of their judgment the information will be harmful to the client Do they have a right to "play God" The second is perhaps a bit of my own personal peeve: were I adopted would I be so insistent on knowing who my biological parents were I emphatically say "no" does this make me not normal Why do people need to know who their biological parents were

There are shades of Ross Macdonald, one of my most favorite writers of all time, in Mr.
Pronzini's novel. The prose, though, is not as accomplished as in best works by Macdonald: not as lyrical and not as economical.
Still, the novel perfectly fits this website, It is a good read,

Three.
.