GARY PHILLIPS – Shooter’s Point.

Kensington/Dafina; paperback reprint, Oct 2002. Hardcover first edition: Kensington, October 2001.

   If you’re looking for an over-the-top medium-to-hardboiled mystery crime novel starring a statuesque black ex-Las Vegas showgirl as detective, look no further. This is it, the second in the series of adventures of Martha Chainey, courier extraordinaire to the city’s high-rollers, hustlers, players and gamblers.

   While it might be better to read the previous book, High Hand, first, most of the action of the first book is recapped well enough to get the gist of this followup adventure. Which is a Good Thing, as the action more or less picks up where the previous one left off.

   And this one begins with the assassination of one of two boxers during a championship bout taking place in a casino arena, then continues with the simultaneous theft of money that is not supposed to exist from a secret underground room — Phillips thinks locked rooms are an Agatha Christie specialty, but who remembers John Dickson Carr these days — and when Chainey finds her good friend, female boxer Moya Reese, murdered in a shabby motel room, she starts to take it personally.

   Also involved is a hugely popular rap star, King Diamond, a cult of positive-thinking Nymnatists who have been sponsoring the murdered boxer, and various and sundry other casino owners and scam-artists. Martial law is imposed, Jaguars are wrecked by runaway tanks, and the usual Vegas night life goes on.

   If you turn your mind off and go with the flow, Phillips has a take-no-prisoners approach to crime fiction that will keep you jazzed for hours. It’s not a detective mystery, I warn you, though. Any attempt to keep track of who knows what when and why (or why not) is doomed to failure. In the over 24 hours it takes Martha Chainey to call the case closed, she does not sleep at all, and in her wanderings here and there across Las Vegas, everywhere she goes she just happens to meet someone else involved in the plot.

   Personally I hit page 118 and realized I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, kept on going and discovered it didn’t really matter. Sound like your kind of novel? If you’ve read this far, I’ll bet it is.

[UPDATE] 11-16-08.   I’m going to have to find my copy of High Hand, which I still haven’t read. (I always seem to read books and their sequels in the wrong order.)

   While these are the only books that Martha Chainey has appeared in, she also was in a short story called “Beginner’s Luck” (Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Writers, Berkley, hc, 2004; trade ppbk, 2005).