Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Hard-boiled? or only poached in Tabasco? Either way, private detective Rachel Cord pursues multiple threads seeking a runaway teen and why gay performers are being beaten at Miss Kitty's Kathouse Kabaret. The threads twist and bind becoming a tight cord of lost love, child pornography, rape, murder, and near insanity.

BOOK REVIEW:
I was looking forward to getting my hands on this book as soon as I read the excerpt. Two things were immediately clear to me. It was well written, and it had a fair amount of humor in it. These are both things I love dearly. I wasn't disappointed. The quality of this book is a cut above much of what I've been reading lately, and some tighter editing might have put it up into the ranks of the Parkers and Sandfords that I enjoy.

I did have a few issues with the book, and I'll start with those. First of all, there's far too much talk about Rachel's breasts. One key aspect of the character is the unusually large size of her rack and the problems she has to deal with because of it. In concept, it's a great element to the book, and indeed it is often used very successfully. However, Conary takes it a little too far, and winds up in dead horse territory. Some selective editing of those references would have made the overall theme more powerful.

Another problem I had was with the inexplicable subplot in which Rachel falls prey to an insatiable craving to get off (apparently hands free, lucky girl) to the sound of a drag queen's voice over the phone. Not only does this sideline serve no purpose in the book, it also means that the only sex in a novel rife with gay characters is essentially het sex. As far as I'm concerned, the novel could stand perfectly well on its own feet with no sex scenes at all.

The mystery is solid and complex, and Conary does an excellent job of presenting several different threads at the beginning of the book and slowly and painstakingly weaving them together, so that the resolve at the end is deliciously satisfying. The book is loaded with well defined and interesting characters, and the writing is clean enough to stay out of the way and let us enjoy them. On top of all that, Conary does a wonderful job describing the details of Rachael's investigations which are always my favorite part of a detective novel.

Reader beware, there is one very graphic and disturbing scene of sexual violence. I found it to be a little over the top, but it was well written and had me cringing and horrified the whole way through. The aftermath of this attack was brilliant, and Conary writes an amazing recovery scene that incorporates details given all along into very effective description of the victim's catatonic state.

This book is a great detective novel with sarcastic humor and gritty realism, and I highly recommend it.

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