Mon 29 Jul 2019
An Archived PI Mystery Review: MICHAEL ALLEGRETTO – The Dead of Winter.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
MICHAEL ALLEGRETTO – The Dead of Winter. Jake Lomax #3. Scribners, hardcover, 1989. Avon, paperback, 1991.
In this his third case, PI Jake Lomax is hired to find a barber’s missing daughter. The barber’s also a bookie, and the daughter, a sensitive type, has just found out. A good beginning, and the stakes quickly become even higher. The next day a bomb destroys the barber’s car.
Allegretto has a smooth, even style of writing, but until the kidnapping plot is revealed, not much out of the ordinary actually happens. I’m ambivalent about the kidnapping plot, too. It’s an interesting twist, but overall the story line is a combination of bad coincidence mixed with poor judgment.
The Jake Lomax series —
Death on the Rocks (1987)
Blood Stone (1988)
Dead of Winter (1989)
Blood Relative (1992)
Grave Doubt (1995)
July 29th, 2019 at 8:52 pm
Barry Gardner read and reviewed BLOOD RELATIVE, the fourth in the series, and said he liked it more than the earlier ones that he’d read.
You can read his comments here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=35753
July 30th, 2019 at 6:34 pm
“… not much out of the ordinary actually happens …” pretty much describes why I was seriously tapering off private eyes at the end of the eighties.
July 30th, 2019 at 9:12 pm
In many ways the late 80s was like a Golden Age of PI fiction. There were, I agree, too many books and authors writing PI novels to keep up with them all.
Some, but only a few, have managed to hang around and are still active. But that was 30 years ago, and many of them, such as Michael Allegretto, I’m sorry to say, are only faint memories of those of us who are of an equal age.