Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509010090
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By K.K. Beck. Mysterious Press. $18.95.
THE BOOKMAN'S WAKE.
By John Dunning. Charles Scribner's Sons. $21.
"Don certainly sounded," says K.K. Beck's narrator-heroine Jane da Silva of a commercial fisherman who quotes Bible verses to support his view that God didn't intend halibut to be raised on fish farms, "like someone who had got his chubby hands on a Concordance during a bad acid trip."
With lines like that, "Cold Smoked" - Beck's fourth da Silva mystery - easily overcomes the basic ludicrousness of the series' premise: that to qualify for an inheritance from her rich uncle, a Seattle-based, 40ish, widowed lounge singer trots the globe solving murder cases for the Foundation for Righting Wrongs.
The wrongs aren't wholly righted; murder victims don't come back to life. But in "Cold Smoked," Beck serves up wit, three-dimensional characters, a decent plot and more than you probably ever thought you wanted to know about the salmon industry.
The premise in John Dunning's "Bookman" series, of which "The Bookman's Wake" is the second, is somewhat more plausible. Sleuth Cliff Janeway is, like Dunning in real life, a bookman - that is, a dealer in rare books and valuable first editions. Also like his creator, Janeway is from Denver.
By making Janeway an ex-cop as well, Dunning invests in his hero an air of procedural verisimilitude; it's not utterly off the wall that Janeway would get sucked into a murder probe by a private investigator who's a former acquaintance on the force.
Like "Cold Smoked" and commercial fishing, "The Bookman's Wake" offers up a heaping side dish of information about the rare-book business - but not, unlike "Cold Smoked," to joke about it. The tone is somber, the mood darkly suspenseful, "The Bookman's Wake" is an A-rated mystery with an apt climax, but it is not light-hearted.
Geoff Seamans is associate editor of The Roanoke Times editorial page.
by CNB