Double (Hardcover)

The book seems primarily inspired by two earlier Pronzini books about the Nameless Detective, Twospot, a "he-said, he-said" collaboration with Collin Wilcox, and the award-winning Hoodwink, set at a pulp writers' convention. As wonderful as those book are, this one vastly exceeds them.

The story is told from the alternating perspectives of the two detectives who are both attending a private detectives' convention at the Casa del Rey on Coronado in San Diego harbor. For Nameless fans, there's quick excitement as Sharon McCone supplies a nickname for Nameless, "Wolf," after newspaper reports of his operating as a lone wolf detective during the years before he teamed up with Eberhardt.

They each stumble onto the sense that something's amiss at the hotel . . . but for different reasons. Wolf finds a boy wandering around among the cottages on the grounds, and later finds that no one was registered to the cottage that he was staying in. Sharon runs into her old boss, Elaine Picard, who runs security at the hotel. Elaine wants to speak with Sharon about something that's bothering her, but there's no time to get together. Then the two leads coalesce as Wolf watches Elaine take a header from a high tower in the hotel to her death. At first the two detectives occasionally share observations, but before long both abandon the convention and begin to search together for answers to the puzzles.

The convention backdrop provides lots of opportunities for humor about the profession, which has increasingly become based on electronic surveillance. Neither Sharon nor Wolf like that development, and you'll enjoy their take on it.

The book starts off slowly as the two narratives repeat each other excessively in the beginning pages. That bogs the book down, and makes it seem clumsy. Soon, the separate action begins and the narration becomes strong and independent.

One of the high points of the book is that three different characters have to locate the same undisclosed place. Each uses a different method to identify the location. From this and other multifaceted perspectives, you get a strong sense of how the same mystery can be attacked from many different directions.

There's also a nice contrast between Sharon's willingness to bend the rules, and Nameless's commitment to following all of the rules.

The book has a wonderful blend of characters, subplots (including both detectives' personal lives), motives and action. Because it has both a "she said, he said" perspective, the book has a balance that few detective novels manage. Perhaps the fact that Ms. Muller and Mr. Pronzini are wife and husband in real life helped contribute the chemistry that makes this book so wonderful.

If you only read one mystery this year, make it this one!

After I finished this book, I wondered about how I could employ a female perspective to round out my thinking more often.