Back of the Book Blurb:
Private eye Sharon McCone receives an e-mail asking for help from her emotionally disturbed half brother Darcy Blackhawk. She replies . . . but gets no response. As Sharon digs deeper, she discovers that Darcy sent his message from an Internet café in San Francisco, a city he's never been to before. Sensing that her brother is in terrible danger, Sharon begins a search for him throughout the city.
The investigation leads her to the body of a woman at the Palace of Fine Arts, where a witness had told her that Darcy was headed. Then, as she digs deeper, Sharon uncovers a connection to the unsolved murder of a young heiress to a multimillion-dollar banking fortune. Now Sharon must race to solve both murders and ensure her brother's safety, despite the imminent danger that lurks within her own family.
Review: This was an interesting book, a mystery novel/private investigator/hardboiled fiction. It is written in a spare, unsentimental style, using a first person narrative that regularly rotated between successful PI Sharon McCone, her nephew and employee Mick Savage, and her mentally ill drug-addict half-brother Darcy.
The book and many chapters begin and end with the so-called whispers of the book title. The whispers are from the city and heard by Sharon, and in Darcy's head. The whispers are rather enigmatic, and while the intention seems to be to create a moody atmosphere ("The night is different. How could you do this to me? I love you......Dark, like it's supposed to be when you're dead."), the effect was melodramatic. As though a mystical aspect was being forced on an otherwise spare, almost bare-bones style.
The mystery of Darcy's appearance in San Francisco (he's a homeless drug addict suffering from mental illnesses) was well-written and made a solid, "whodunnit" mystery. There was a good cast of supporting characters who were both interesting and intriguing, although not very likeable. (And at times not very believable - for example Lucy Bellassis, a 20 year old drunken millionaire housewife - I would have believed in her actions and behavior if she were 40, or possibly even 30, but 20? Nope.) In spite of spending nearly one third of the book inside Mick Savage's head, I really had no feel for who he was. There was fair amount of prose explaining his background and motivations,but very little coming from Mick, or from Sharon for that matter. She explains a great deal about her adoptive family, her birth family, her growing relationship with her biological father and her Native American heritage, but there is very little emotional impact from any of this. Now this may not be a fair complaint - the book may be more of a tough, gumshoe detective novel than anything else, and that genre doesn't usually spend a lot of time dealing with emotions. But it left me feeling disconnected from the story and the character, and I didn't much care what happened to them.
If you like your mysteries well-developed, and a little gritty, you should check this one out. There are nearly 30 Sharon McCone books out there, so if this is your kind of book you're in for a treat!
(Stylistically, it reminded me of Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, which I reviewed in October on this blog.)
For more information check out the author's website at http://marciamuller.com/.
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