Deep Pockets (Carlotta Carlyle Mystery) Book

With Deep Pockets, Linda Barnes, like Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, usurps the male dominance over American private-eye fiction in the 1970s and 80s. Her six-foot-tall, red-headed Boston snoop and part-time cabbie, Carlotta Carlyle, started out (in 1987's A Trouble of Fools) as a savvy, self-reliant former cop whose potential to become Sam Spade in a skirt was mitigated by her emotional sensitivity and resistance to brash risk-taking. More than two decades later, Carlotta shows herself to be as compelling and credible as ever--if a bit wiser. "Look, I made a mistake. I slept with a student", concedes Wilson Chaney, an African-American professor at Harvard Medical School, as he hires Carlotta to find and foil the person responsible for blackmailing him with love letters he'd sent to Denali Brinkman, a startlingly attractive freshman rowing champ who evidently committed both suicide and arson at a Charles River boathouse. As Carlotta confronts the case's multiplying puzzles, she wonders whether there are answers to be found in Denali's sketchy past--answers that could not only clear Chaney, but protect this gutsy gumshoe from an increasingly dangerous adversary.Carlotta's distractions in Deep Pockets are numerous, from her ebbing relationship with a black FBI agent to her concern over the half-dressing habits of her fast-developing "little sister", Paolina. Yet she rarely misses a clue--except, of course, when it adds to the story's tensions. Barnes fails to fully explain a couple of dramatic plot turns in this 10th Carlotta Carlyle novel (after The Big Dig), and you needn't boast a Harvard sheepskin to figure out her tale's principal twist well in advance of its conclusion; however, those faults are outweighed by one's delight in seeing the pertinacious Ms Carlyle again get her man without entirely losing her femininity. --J Kingston Pierce, Amazon.comRead More