Deep Pockets
-
-
4.2 • 33 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
The Boston PI gets caught up in extortion, murder, and Ivy League secrets in a “poisonous . . . nail-biter” by the Anthony Award–winning author (Publishers Weekly).
Six-foot-tall, redheaded ex-cop and Boston-based private eye Carlotta Carlyle is “the genuine article: a straightforward, funny, thoroughly American mystery heroine” (New York Post).
Harvard professor Wilson Chaney is in a comprising position. His marriage, his reputation, and his career are all being held hostage. Chaney needs Carlotta’s help to ferret out the blackmailer and retrieve the last of the incriminating love letters he sent freshman student Denali Brinkman—before she committed suicide in a Memorial Drive boathouse. It’s a nasty bit of business, but Carlotta reluctantly agrees to help the dishonorable mentor.
However, Chaney isn’t the only one with something to hide. Just as Carlotta closes in on the suspect, the case takes a stunning detour. It seems Chaney’s amorous indiscretions have a farther and more threatening reach than either he or Carlotta imagined. The PI now realizes that the going price for secrets has just gotten higher—because murder has become part of the deal.
“The most refreshing, creative female character to hit mystery fiction since Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone” (People) is back in her “bold, powerful, and shattering . . . best to date” (Kirkus Reviews).
Deep Pockets is the 10th book in the Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her 10th robust Carlotta Carlyle mystery (after 2002's The Big Dig), Barnes weaves an intricate web with a pleasingly poisonous spider at its center. African-American Harvard professor Wilson Chaney asks Boston PI Carlotta for help because someone is blackmailing him over his affair with Delani Brinkman, a seductive Harvard rowing star. When Delani turns up dead in a boathouse on the Charles, incinerated on a gasoline-soaked futon, a note left by the victim suggests suicide. But Brinkman herself remains quite the puzzle a loner who slept with her kayak in her room, then abandoned her dorm to camp in the university boathouse: "Her mother was an American Indian.... Her father was Swiss, but she didn't learn that until much later. She had no brothers and sisters. She never went hungry, but there wasn't much kindness in her life." When Delani's ex-con boyfriend is killed by a hit-run driver on a dark city street, suspicion points back to the urbane Professor Chaney or does it? Almost every character carries a secret, including Carlotta, who's gingerly resuming her romance with a charming Mafioso. If a couple of red herrings aren't fully explained, Barnes makes superb use of town-gown tensions and the contrasting worlds of Harvard bureaucrats, blue-collar cons, the Brattle Street swells and more. The twists and turns in this nail-biter are at once startling without ever becoming absurd. 3-city author tour.
