Rating: 4/5
Read between 22nd January,2017 to 24th January, 2017
Edition Details:
Format : Paperback
Page Count : 200
Publisher : Mastermind books
ISBN: 978-81-89888-18-3
First Sentence:
The first thing that attracted my attention as i came out of St. Raphael City Station was a blonde doll in a bikini swim suit, a straw hat as big as a cartwheel and dough-nut sized sun googles.
Jack Sheepey and Lew Brandon are partners in Star Agency, a private detective firm. Jack had gone to St Raphael City on a case and had called his partner to join him there. He said he needed his help on a case that could make them a lot of money. When Lew Brandon reaches there he finds that someone has murdered Sheepey. He was last seen with a woman and that woman is missing.
Lew decides to find who and why was he killed? For that he needs to find the woman and he’ll leave no stone unturned.
Lee Creedy is the biggest man in St Raphael City. There’s nothing in the city that he doesn’t owns in one way or another. When he finds out Lew is investigating death of his partner he advises him to keep away from the investigation.
Will Lew Brandon heed the advice? What will be consequences of his ignoring it?
I should make this thing clear at the outset that i’m a james hadley chase fan. I love the yarn he weaves there are very less of his works that i haven’t liked that much.s. And this novel is no different.
The novel was first published in 1957. It’s a PI novel. Lew Brandon’s partner has been murdered and he had decided to bring the killers to justice. He starts his investigation and finds the most powerful people in the city don’t want his intrusion.He’s threatened, made an offer to back off but he’s pretty fixed in his resolve. The things he has to do and has to go through during this investigation make for an engaging read.
The characters in the book do justice to the novel. But i could not understand why did the police captain katchen hated PI’s that much. I can understand that he didn’t like them as they undermined his authority. But there was an incident mentioned in the book where he had organised an accident of the PI and that PI had to get hospitalised. I wanted to know what had happened to him that made him loathe PI’s that much.
I also liked character of Detective Rankin . He is one of those cops who were once good and still try to be but they know the system and know they can’t change it. So they have stopped trying. The rest of the characters are according to the novel. These characters over the time have become clichés : the rich dude, the beautiful younger wife of rich dude who cheats on him, the gigolo who has relationship with this wife and her younger step daughter etc. I knew this book was written at a time when they were not so and so i don’t let this thing bother me for books that were published in past. Yeah, if i would encounter such characters in the books that were recently published then i wouldn’t be able to discount that.
In the end i would say i enjoyed reading the book. It’s a page turner and kept me glued to it. If you haven’t read it then i think you should definitely read it.
You can get the book from the following links:
Paperback
The book has also been translated into hindi and you can get it here:
The guilty are afraid(विषकन्या)
