Helpful Score: 1
15 short stories Best: in very funny Elsewhere a ringing phone is pivotal to a lonely mans sexual success, Emergency Services featuring a bright & cynical young policewoman, drug kingpins Shale & Ember doing in competition in funny Free Enterprise, in sinister War Crimes a WWII love triangle leads to a brutal murder, a grass gets sent on vacation in Portugal so Iles can pin a murder on another thug in wry For Information Only, Harpurs undercover operation gets help from his favorite grass (Lamb) in funny Rendezvous One, ACC Iles makes a spashy hit (of a likely hitman after a grass) @ the grad ceremony for a grass daughter (the police dept paying her tuition for his grassing) in funny Like an Arrangement and Iles (in a parked car nearby w/his favorite prostitute) becomes the Sixth Man when Harpur/his team nab some killers. Also good: the lit professor forced to change his lecture on crime stories when a hubby barges in & kills his cheating wife (a student with whom the prof was having an affair til she moved on to another prof) in Body Language, Ralph Ember starting to panic after finding a body in his club in Night Light Also incl: 2 stories from Letters from Carthage (Big City and At Home) and the tale of a murder set in a London shelter during the Blitz A Bit of Eternity Lesser/skip: the silly poem Going Straight and dumb Fancy.
Reviews: All are literate, often jaunty, always interestingthe work of a 1st-rate author. Publ Weekly Here James shows that he needs neither his familiar heroes nor the novels length to deliver quality crime fictoutstanding. Booklist
Reviews: All are literate, often jaunty, always interestingthe work of a 1st-rate author. Publ Weekly Here James shows that he needs neither his familiar heroes nor the novels length to deliver quality crime fictoutstanding. Booklist
