Quarry - Hardcover

Pronzini's ( Breakdown ) brisk, efficient, action-packed mystery is set on the earthquake-ravaged San Francisco waterfront and in the now-arid salad-bowl country to the south. Here the Nameless Detective hunts for a methodical, brutal stranger who is pursuing withdrawn Grady Haas, 31, daughter of rancher Arlo Haas, the detective's old friend. Secretive Grady won't tell why she has suddenly left her job as an insurance adjuster specializing in marine claims and returned to the Salinas Valley . Nameless finds that her San Francisco apartment has been thoroughly tossed. All he has to go on are the three claims Grady had been investigating and her ex-boyfriend's savage beating by a stranger seeking Grady's whereabouts. Nameless may lack a moniker but he's full of character, describing himself as a "throwback--the kind of man who hates progress, mistrusts technology, and never quite feels comfortable in any place where he can't see or touch some small piece of the past." Still haunted by the horror described in Shackles (1988), in which he was chained for three months to the wall of an isolated mountain cabin, Nameless now must endure a new ordeal, being locked inside a burning building. The book's exciting final scene nicely plays on the title's double meanings.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When Grady Haas, depressed and uncommunicative, moves back in with her dad, he asks Nameless to find out what's wrong. Suspecting nothing more than a soured love affair that she'll soon get over, Nameless is surprised to learn that the lover is a true mystery man--with several aliases: Blackwell, Jack King, David Jones. And that he's gone underground. Who is he really, and how did Grady, a claims adjuster at Intercoastal Insurance, meet him? The answers lie in Savarese Importing, but when Nameless is lured there, the owner has been murdered, the door clangs shut behind him, and the snap, crackle, and pop of an arsonist's handiwork warm things up. Nameless escapes (did you doubt it?) and tracks the arsonist to a gravel quarry for a vigilante justice ending. Pronzini, who since Nameless's kidnapping (Shackles) has been pioneering the noir-kvetch novel, whines more than he plots here. Add to this the unappealing wedding-mania that partner Eberhardt is experiencing and the outcome is bathos--plus reader annoyance. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.