Switchback: A Henry Holt Mystery - Hardcover

Wilcox, Collin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805021043 ISBN 13: 9780805021042

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1993

Synopsis

When beautiful Lisa Franklin is found brutally murdered, her body dumped like so much rubbish, Lt. Hastings sighs and wonders aloud at the terrible waste. The victim was young, from a wealthy and respected family, with seemingly everything to live for. Hastings chalks it up with all the other senseless murders he sees in the course of a month, a year, a lifetime, of policing. As he investigates, though, it soon becomes clear that Franklin was far from just another innocent victim - but was she really a vengeful blackmailer? And is the murderer one of her own high-powered lovers from whom Franklin may have been extorting money? Or is it one of her reckless and feckless housemates, high on the drugs they all shared and fueled by jealousy over her many lovers?
Lisa Franklin's wild life provides too few clues and too many suspects. Her journals, however, containing fragments of poetry and ruminations, hint at a fragile brilliance behind the brittle facade and draw Hastings to her posthumously.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

San Francisco homicide co-commander Frank Hastings (Dead Center, etc.), in trying to make sense out of beautiful Lisa Franklin's life and death (a jogger found her body out at Baker Beach), interviews her neighbors, the burned-out Jamie and the spaced-out C.J., along with her roommate Barbara Estes--and learns not only that the two women were lovers but also that Lisa, a self- labeled ``courtesan,'' was being kept in solvency by three men, one of whom was the target of an SEC investigation. Using as an excuse that he needs a woman's insights, Frank draws Inspector Janet Collier into the case; and while Hastings wrestles with his craving for her, she scours Lisa's journals and concludes that the woman was a blackmailer. Then C.J. is murdered; more blackmailers are revealed; and the final unraveling finds Janet going mano a mano with a killer.... Surprisingly sloppy work from Wilcox (he puts credit cards in the victim's purse, for instance, then later says she had no charge cards), but he almost salvages this with a deft plot-twist or two and a compelling portrait of the beginnings of an affair. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

The 19th appearance of San Francisco's Lt. Frank Hastings is a somewhat disappointing offering from one of the masters of the procedural. The body of Lisa Franklin is found in a park near the Presidio district. Lisa, a self-described courtesan, leaves behind three volumes of tortured poetry and several wealthy San Francisco businessmen with some explaining to do. As usual, Wilcox ( Dead Aim ) makes shrewd use of mise-en-scene and meticulously maps out the movement of his plot, but he trips over the relationship that develops between former football player Hastings and female cop Janet Collier. While interrogating the businessmen and quizzing two drug burnouts living in the apartment below the victim's, Hastings and Collier indulge in an overwrought romantic entanglement that doesn't square with the rest of the tale. Wilcox's aim is also off in regard to the killer, whose interspersed musings don't fully mesh with the character as revealed to the reader.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0805021043
• ISBN 13: 9780805021042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256