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Summary
Summary
A scintillating new thriller by one of the masters of the genre, following his Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
"When Geena finally left him and filed for divorce, Fallon put the Encino house up for sale and took the last two weeks of his vacation from Unidyne. Then he loaded the Jeep Liberty and drove straight to Death Valley. The desert country had a way of simplifying things. It cleansed your mind, allowed you to think clearly. Allowed you to breathe. The one place he truly belonged."
So opens Bill Pronzini's exciting new thriller. On his third day in the Valley, Rick Fallon comes upon a deserted Toyota Camry, and soon thereafter, the almost-dead body of Casey Dunbar. Having rescued her, Fallon soon learns what had driven her to give up on life...and, his own life on hold, he resolves to unravel the twisted and dangerous strands of hers, a quest that leads him to the glitter-dome of Las Vegas among other locales. The result is a story as dramatic and memorable as anything Pronzini has written, reminiscent of his classics Blue Lonesome and A Wasteland of Strangers . In The Other Side of Silence , Bill Pronzini is indeed a Grand Master.
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 (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The client: a woman in peril. The case: a missing person. The hero: an investigator. The complication: thugs and secrets. MWA Grand Master Pronzini (The Crimes of Jordan Wise) has used this recipe effectively for nearly four decades, including in this highly competent, if somewhat mechanical, suspense novel set in Las Vegas and California's Mohave Desert. While camping in the desert, Rick Fallon, a corporate security officer whose marriage has finally crumbled in the wake of his son's accidental death, comes across Casey Dunbar, who's tried and failed to kill herself after months of fruitlessly searching for her young son, who's been abducted by her ex-husband. Fallon empathizes with the woman, and what follows is a good old-fashioned search-and-capture mission with all the usual Pronzini virtues: a simple yet disciplined prose style; a strong, multilayered central character; and a compelling plot that builds to a nice little closing twist. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The Nameless Detective (Savages, 2007, etc.) sits this one out while Pronzini dances up a storm with a younger version. Rick Fallon is a bedrock loner. The awful accident that robbed him of his young son has left him disenchanted and disaffected, resulting in a painful divorce from his equally disenchanted, disaffected wife. So Fallon seeks solace in the heat and silence of Death Valley, a place he's always loved, "a place made for loners." He finds a new direction for his life with unexpected suddenness. On a remote, little-traveled road, he comes upon Casey Dunbar's abandoned car with a note that begins, "I can't go on any more." He saves her life, earning at first little enough thanks. Casey, it turns out, has also lost a son. Casey's eight-year-old has been kidnapped by his father, not because cruel, unregenerate Court Spicer has any feeling for the boy, but because he's determined to punish his wife. For Casey, it's been a long, expensive, fruitless chase, and she's worn out. Fallon, a former military cop, decides to make the boy his mission without knowing why. Maybe it's just a case of one lost boy reaching out to another, leaving a bereft father with no choice. A tight, twisty tale that an old pro's sure-handed way with character makes both believable and engrossing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Pronzini's latest stand-alone thriller is a prime example of the Chandleresque atmospherics and character-driven plots that have made his novels consistently entertaining. The author's landscape artistry is a main pleasure of this book: he makes the ever-changing colors of Death Valley come alive, and he skewers Las Vegas as a creature that swallows up the surrounding landscape and entombs the people within it. Hero Rick Fallon has come unmoored: his marriage has finally ended after the death of the couple's son three years previously. He visits Death Valley to recharge and stumbles upon an abandoned vehicle with a suicide note on the driver's seat. In a nice twist on the expectation that the hero will find a body, Fallon finds an almost-dead woman. Behind her suicide attempt is the husband's kidnapping of the couple's son. Fallon takes up a knight-errant role for the woman, trying to salve his own loss by finding her son. The false notes in this book come from Pronzini's instantly morphing his everyman hero (once the head of security at a druge company) into Mr. Hard-Boiled Detective. Despite this awkward grafting, this is a stylishly written, achingly melancholy tale.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2008 Booklist
