Sentinels

Rating:
Summary: Baiting Hate Bears Painful Consequences
Review: If you have not read other Nameless Detective novels, I suggest that you at least read Hardcase before this one. Although this is a standalone novel, the earlier book provides helpful context for Sentinels. Those who love noir fiction in the 30s style will find this book to be a dark update with a contemporary flavor.

The case is simply that of a missing person, but the client is the missing person's mother. There may be nothing wrong . . . or there could be. After the mother's contacts end with her daughter, Nameless heads for where the daughter was last seen, the tiny town of Creekside in northern California. The people there aren't used to strangers and feel inclined to protect their own. As a result, the book has an atmosphere like so many detective novels where it's one person against the town. But Nameless does get help from some people in town, and is eventually able to uncover an undercurrent of white supremacist feelings. How might that backdrop be connected?

As the story unwinds, Nameless uses his usual nerviness to learn the town's secrets while running grave personal risks.

Nameless also develops his working relationship with Tamara Corbin, his new assistant, who becomes a big help with the case.

The book is unusually weak in its character development. That's usually one of Mr. Pronzini's strengths. You usually get a strong sense of the intellect, psychology and background of each character. Instead, he tries here to portray a number of people as unintelligent, weak-minded and corrupt. The characterizations come across as conclusions rather than as being supported by your own reactions to the situation.

The counterpoint is that the dark mood is well developed. It's too bad that it was developed at the cost of the characters.

I was also disappointed to find out that much of the story line didn't connect very well to the rest of the story. It made the main story line seem more like a short story than a full-fledged book.

This is my least favorite book in the series.

As I finished the book, I found myself wondering how my own actions might sometimes trigger hateful reactions in others.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Detective Novel- Somewhat Mean Spirited
Review: The Sentinels was my first exposure to Pronzini's "Nameless detective" novels. "Nameless" narrates the story without revealing his name. His namelessness is neither here nor there unlike Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" movies and neither adds nor subtracts from the telling of the story which, in itself, is a fair detective novel.

In The Sentinels, the narrator travels to Northern California to investigate the disappearance of a college girl. While in the small town where she was last seen, he runs afoul of the locals and a group known as The Sentinels that may or may not have caused the girl's disappearance. Who was the girl travelling with? Why would anyone want to harm her? These questions make for an excellent mystery and needless to say the detective eventually gets the answers at considerable personal risk to himself. All in all it's a good detective story if somewhat familiar.

I did have a few problems with the novel. It seems to me that it's a cliched cheap shot to present all rural people as xenophobic bigots. Similarly presenting fundamentalist Christians as hypocrites is unfair and mean spirited. The novel also deconstructs its own theme that people should be tolerant of those who are different and have different values. Pronzini clearly doesn't show the same tolerance for small town rural people and fundamentalist Christians by presenting them in such a bad light.

I listened to the unabridged taped version which was read with appropriate style and inflection by John Michalski.

Rating:
Summary: Pronzini's done much better than this
Review: This is the weakest Nameless detective novel I've read.

A couple of college kids go missing. Nameless traces them to a town composed almost entirely of bigots. Without giving anything away, I can only say that once a possible motive for murder is discovered (fairly early in the novel), the rest is slow going.

Though Pronzini clearly has plenty of anger towards racism, he has no real insight to offer, and I didn't have much interest in seeing which of his mob of cardboard villains is guilty of murder.

For a much better Nameless Detective novel, try Hardcase.