Emerald Flash
A John Caine Adventure
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In his third adventure, private eye John Caine is in trouble again--only this time it comes looking for him. After saving a California woman and her corporation from certain ruin and acquiring his new home, a classic sailing vessel christened Olympia, he's back in his Hawaiian paradise, working hard at relaxing on the beach and trying to keep to the peaceful side of the street. But a woman named Margo Halliday is about to turn Caine's peaceful world upside down.
One night, as Caine is leaving a neighborhood restaurant/bar, Chawlie's, he encounters a naked woman fleeing from a man who is shooting at her, but fortunately not doing a very good job of hitting his target. Caine easily disables the man and ushers the woman back into the restaurant. The woman, he discovers, is Margo Halliday, and the man, who quickly fled the scene, was her abusive ex-husband.
Caine has almost forgotten about the incident when, months later, he reads about the murder of Margo's ex, who has been found shot to death in her exclusive Hawaii Kai condominium. And the next thing Caine knows, Margo is at his doorstep begging him to hide her from the thugs who murdered her ex and who she now thinks are after her. Desperate to get off the island of Oahu, Margo enlists Caine's help and unknowingly lead him into a lethal game that begins with shots aimed at them with high-powered rifles and leads them deep into the jungles on the island of Kauai, alone and outnumbered against the deadly assassins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A mechanical, macho-minded plot is only one of the problems marring this third installment of Knief's John Caine series (Sand Dollars, etc.). Caine is contemplating leaving Hawaii to take up with girlfriend Barbara Klein in San Francisco when Margo Halliday bursts into his life. Halliday has stolen emeralds from the wrong people, and Caine agrees to protect her. Over the course of their adventures, which include killing a slew of expert assassins, they begin to bond and Caine learns the value of female friendship: women can shoot guns, too. Knief's characters are thin (Chawlie, his Chinese friend, is "inscrutable") and the plot fails to generate proper suspense, as it's more or less an extended chase. Although Knief refers to his hero as a detective, the retired naval officer is really a glorified bodyguard. When he needs information, he rarely has to dig for it; characters more often just cough up the truth when asked. The women here--Halliday in particular--seem intended to provide positive role models for Caine, but ironically, the novel reads as if rife with sexism (Halliday is naked and running from a gun-toting husband on the very first page). Moreover, Knief's prose can be repetitious and awkward ("I saw or heard nothing"). Admirers of hard-boiled fiction with intricate plots and shady characters will be disappointed to find hurry-up storytelling and caricatures here.
