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Brilliance, $23.95
Audio ISBN 1561007595
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Review by Tom Corcoran
A year has passed since San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone last saw her trusted flight instructor, Matty Wildress. Out of the blue, Matty calls Sharon to remind her that it's time for her FAA-required check-up flight. McCone knows that the flight review isn't due for five more months. But she rents a Cessna 150 on a cold November morning and flies to Los Alegres for a reunion lunch and check flight. On arrival she senses something wrong. Her flight instructor looks to have aged beyond 12 months. Matty's laugh is gone, her eyes shadowed. The airport snack bar meeting is strained and cold.
Stalwart, fearful of prying ears, Wildress waits until she and McCone are aloft in the Cessna to explain her distress. Seven days earlier her live-in companion, a widower, John Seabrook, secretly packed a duffel full of survival gear and a .44 Magnum, then disappeared. He left not only Matty behind. He left his 11-year-old son Zach (in Matty's care) and a successful tree farming business. There has been no word, no explanation. Marcia Muller's "Both Ends of the Night" begins, then, as a missing person search. It accelerates into a case of multiple murders as it explores friendship, loyalty and dedication.
To find John Seabrook, McCone must track an invisible threat, must sift through an array of revelations regarding 10-year-old drug scams and murders, warring partners in an aircraft manufacturing business and persons hiding either in remote wilderness or the Witness Protection Program.
Sharon McCone made her first appearance in 1977 as the first female detective in the "hardboiled" genre. Over the years she has jousted with private security forces, the power elite, gentrified radicals from the old protest days of Berkeley, and Third World scams and justice. In "Both Ends of the Night," her eighteenth appearance in print, McCone employs bona fide late-1990s sleuthing -- combining aircraft and the Internet -- with standbys like confidential information contacts inside official agencies and indistinct moves based on gut logic and experience. Sharon McCone, like all of us, must do her job as she deals with complex day-to-day realities. She must juggle relatives, employees, and her relationship with environmental activist Hy Ripinsky. From those categories derive problems of jealousy, favoritism and philosophies of child rearing and parental duty.
As a confident detective, Sharon McCone, however, tends to disregard self-preservation in her clamor for facts and solutions. In "Both Ends of the Night," even as solutions become evident, the facts are most difficult. Readers who join McCone in this suspense are surprised and well rewarded.
Tom Corcoran is a writer and photographer in Florida.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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