Boiling Point Book

Frank Lean's Manchester private eye, Dave Cunane, has always had a weakness for beautiful and slightly dangerous women and, because the father he gets on with less than well was a senior policeman, has always fancied himself as smarter than the police. When, in Boiling Point, he is asked by the hard-drinking loud-laughing Marti King to help prove her safe-cracker father innocent of murder, he can hardly resist, especially since the policeman who put King inside was a crook whom Dave's father tried for years to convict. Marti is married to Charlie Carlyle, one of a crime family gone more or less straight and very rich, and the Carlyle family take a serious dislike to Dave. This is an ingenious thriller that makes elegant use of time--part of the solution has to do with the past and with the way things change; Cunane is as attractively pig-headed as ever as he works his way diligently through evidence and interview taking care to annoy as many of the pompous or pretentious as possible. This is an entirely superior private eye novel whose strong sense of place is as good on North London as it is on mean Mancunian streets. --Roz KaveneyRead More