Wed 22 Feb 2012
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: MICHAEL ALLEGRETTO – Blood Stone.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews1 Comment
Allen J. Hubin
MICHAEL ALLEGRETTO – Blood Stone. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1988. Avon, paperback, 1990.
Michael Allegretto’s second about Denver private eye Jacob Lomax (the first was Death on the Rocks, which I missed) is Blood Stone.
I liked this quite a lot: the narrative moves, the plot is sound, and Allegretto has a nice ear for dialogue. Lloyd Fontaine, a burned-out drunk of a private investigator, asks Lomax for help. Lloyd is he’s still on the trail of millions in jewelry stolen twenty years earlier.
Jake doesn’t take Fontaine seriously — until he finds Lloyd tortured and dead. To complicate matters, Jake’s nemesis in the cops thinks this is the chance he’s long lusted after to put Jake away. The man convicted in the robbery has just been released from prison, and all manner of greedy nasties have gathered for the kill.
You’ll enjoy this.
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
The Jacob Lomax series —
1. Death on the Rocks (1987) [Nominated for the 1988 Anthony and Macavity Awards; winner of the Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel]

2. Blood Stone (1988)
3. The Dead of Winter (1989)
4. Blood Relative (1992)
5. Grave Doubt (1995)

Jake Lomax was also in a handful of short stories, including “The Bookie’s Daughter,” which appears in Justice For Hire: The Fourth Private Eye Writers of America Anthology (1990)
February 22nd, 2012 at 11:26 pm
I liked this series well enough to obtain them all in hardcover, although I have not read them all, nor do I remember the ones I did read particularly well.
Which doesn’t form much of a basis for a recommendation, I know, but what I do recall about them is that if you like PI fiction, starting with either Hammett or Chandler on down, you’ll find much to like with the Lomax books, even though (of course) neither Hammett nor Chandler wrote them.