From Publishers Weekly
Jahn, winner of an Edgar for The Quark Maneuver, spins a twisting techno-mystery for his brainy NYPD Lt. Bill Donovan that culminates in a shoot-out amid the glass display cases and towering saurians of New York's American Museum of Natural History. Bill and his partner Moskowitz use laptop computers, cellular phones and modems, along with ordinary gumshoeing, to track the killer of an Italian billionaire. Through a series of generous bribes, ex-playboy explorer Paolo Lucci uncovered the Lost Treasure of the Silk Road in the former Soviet province of Pamiristan. Included in the treasure is Kublai Khan's dagger, a copy of which was used to stab Paolo. Suspects include bankrupt Steven Clark, a conspicuous consumer with a Trumpian ego; Paolo's gorgeous wife, Kathy, who once was married to Clark and who makes a play for Donovan; Kathy's first husband, a former flower child; a pair of corrupt Pamiristani nationalists; and a Muslim fundamentalist terrorist. Donovan, who at 50 has abandoned booze for books and is currently split from his lover, the spitfire Marcy, is hard put to resist Kathy's unsubtle advances. Jahn's latest is suffused with a sense of place and a fitting irony.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Except for Lt. Bill Donovan--a last-minute substitute for the NYC police commissioner--the guests at the opening of billionaire industrialist-turned-philanthropist Paolo Lucca's fabulous Treasure of the Silk Road exhibit at the Museum of Natural History are all certified VIPs, even if, as one of them tells Donovan, they've shown up in order to get paid off for their part in Lucca's wholesale raid on their countries' antiquities. But they're out of luck, because somebody's stabbed Lucca to death with Kublai Khan's bejeweled dagger. The obvious suspect is Palmiristan terrorist Mohammed Akbar, who'd blow up the pyramids if it would stem the flow of Westerners to the Islamic East. But Donovan, rousing himself from his pursuit by Lucca's widow, Katy (a model/actress who's suddenly developed an improbable yen for NYPD officers who are also paragons of recherch‚ learning), wonders whether the alibi of Katy's former boyfriend Steven Clark, Lucca's business partner, is quite as ironclad as it looks--and whether he can goad the discarded lover to action by slowing down enough to allow the alluring widow to overtake him. If you race to beat the contestants on Jeopardy!, you'll love Donovan, who's so well-informed about everything that you just want to pinch him--hard. The real disappointment in this pleasant diversion is that the author who so hauntingly evoked St. John the Divine in City of God (1992) makes such perfunctory use here of a potentially great setting in one of Manhattan's most magical museums. --
Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
