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Summary
Summary
"Led by circumstances to accept the kind of case he dislikes - a "worried mother job" - "Nameless" reluctantly agrees to investigate the strange disappearance of college student Allison McDowell and her mysterious new boyfriend while on a driving strip from Oregon to San Francisco. The young couple vanished suddenly and without a trace after their car broke down and they were forced to spend a night in the tiny village of Creekside, in the remote Northwestern corner of California." "When "Nameless" travels to Creekside and begins to question the locals, he encounters apparent apathy, hostility, and mounting evidence that suggests the couple may have met with foul play. Is one or more of the inhabitants of Creekside responsible? Is it Allison's boyfriend, whose identity is unknown even to her mother? Or is it forces of a far more sinister nature? "Nameless's" search takes him to Eugene, Oregon and then back to the Northern California wilderness. And it leads him from what seems to be a simple disappearance to a complex conspiracy of evil, one which reaches far beyond this remote backwater and threatens to destroy him as well before he can expose the truth."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Bill Pronzini was born in Petaluma, California on April 13, 1943. His first novel, The Stalker, was published in 1971. He is best known for his creation of the Nameless Detective Mystery series, as well as several westerns and novels of dark suspense. He has been a full time writer since 1969. He is also an active anthologist, having compiled more than 100 collections, most of which focus on mystery, western, and science fiction short stories.
He has won numerous awards including three Shamus Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Mystery Writers of America. His book Snowbound received the Grand Prix de la Litterature Policiere, as the best crime novel published in France in 1988. Pronzini has established himself as a master of the Western novel as well as earning a name for himself in the dark fiction genre.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his 23rd Nameless Detective novel, Pronzini (Spadework) sends his PI out to do battle with racism in rural Northern California. Nameless this PI may be, but he's not changeless. Over the years, he's given up smoking and changed his eating habits. After a long relationship, he's even married his girlfriend, Kerry, although they maintain separate places. But Nameless is still a knight errant in the best PI tradition. Here, he leaves San Francisco to try to find Helen McDowell's missing daughter, Allison, a University of Oregon student who was driving home to visit and bringing with her a surprise. But she and her surprise, a black boyfriend, had car trouble in the tiny town of Creekside, Calif., on the Oregon border. Allison had called her mother, saying they should be on their way next day, but she never arrived. In his trademark taut style, Pronzini's detective relates his encounters with the isolated denizens of Creekside: the bully, the crazy, the aging hippie, the sullen waitress, the gin-soaked Bible-reading motel owners. In this fertile ground, white-supremacists have taken root, including a paramilitary group called the Sentinels. Pushing, prodding and provoking, Nameless counters the secretiveness of the townspeople, bringing out a little courage in this person, a little pride left in that one, the festering evil in another. There are no signs that age is diminishing Nameless: Sentinels shows both author and detective in top form. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In the twenty-third Nameless novel, the San Francisco private eye agrees to find Allison, a college student who left school in Oregon with her new boyfriend heading for San Francisco and a surprise meeting with her mom. The trail seems to end in an isolated northern California town where the couple's car broke down. They had the car repaired and then vanished into thin air. After discovering that the town harbors a cadre of paramilitary zealots, Nameless is made to feel decidedly unwelcome. Still, the right-wingers have no motive for harming two college kids. It's only when Nameless abandons his preconceptions that he draws a bead on the real fate of Allison and her boyfriend. The ongoing dramas, large and small, of Nameless' personal life, which Pronzini has so artfully woven into the series, take a backseat here to a damn good mystery. The only personal news is that Nameless has acquired a cat named . . . Shameless. Great reading as always. --Wes Lukowsky
Kirkus Review
Though the publisher maintains a demure silence on the point, this short novel is a lightly revised expansion of Pronzini's novella ``Kinsmen,'' first published, together with long stories by Marcia Muller and Ed Gorman, in Criminal Intent 1 (1993). Here as there, the Nameless Detective (Hardcase, 1995, etc.) is on the trail of a missing University of Oregon student who vanished, together with the boyfriend she planned to bring home to her mother outside Oakland, shortly after their car broke down in that slice of God's country designated Creekside, Calif., pop. 112. Even readers new to the material should be able to guess what happened to Allison McDowell and her lover by the halfway point. Those with memories of ``Kinsmen'' will find more words here, but not much else that's new.
Library Journal Review
The veteran author offers another installment in his popular "Nameless Detective" series. Here, a worried mother hires the private eye to find her college-student daughter. Skillful work. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.