From Publishers Weekly
Trendy, saxophone-playing PI Laura Principal, introduced in Every Breath You Take, finds herself caught up in one of London's seamier subcultures in a fast-paced adventure that stumbles on elements of motivation. Thomas Butler is a roly-poly West End producer who manages to stage plays that offer biting social commentary while making a pile of money. Because someone has been stealing from the cast and crew backstage during rehearsals of his current production, he calls Principal. On a routine follow-up visit to his posh London townhouse, Principal encounters a young Filipina domestic, Maria Flores, who pleads for her help in collecting wages from a former employer. But when Principal returns several days later, the girl is gone. More unsettling still, Butler?shedding his charming manner?claims he doesn't know whom Principal is talking about. As she hunts for Maria Flores, the PI is drawn into the anguished lives of undocumented workers living as virtual slaves in the homes of London's rich and venal. None of which seems to provide her with some much-needed perspective as she agonizes over how much of her soul she stands to lose should she vacation in Provence with her business partner and love interest, Sonny Mendlowitz, and his children. Spring's offering is carefully plotted, but Principal's meditations on friendship and on the gap between rich and poor are way too easy.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
A second juggling act, and quite an unbalanced one, for Cambridge inquiry agent Laura Principal (Every Breath You Take, 1994). With one hand, she's supposed to solve the mystery of the missing properties at rehearsals for Thomas Butler's new West End play, and with the other, she's to figure out who entered Marcia Shields's house with a key and left with several uninsured paintings. Life gets even more complicated when the first of these cases boomerangs, as the Filipina servant Laura spoke to at Butler's house disappears, along with any acknowledgment by Butler's family that she ever existed. Though Butler wastes no time in pulling Laura off the theater robberies (a disappointing loose end), she's determined to track down Marilou Flores, the missing Butler maid--and then, after the Kensington police find Marilou fatally bashed and trashed, to track down her killer. Treading perilously near the same trails as Ruth Rendell's nonpareil Simisola (1995), Laura discovers the same brutal truths about the ways ``British immigration rules provide structural support for slavery.'' But there's nowhere near as much at stake in the Shields robberies, whose solution Spring saves for last. One case is clever, then, the other deeply felt, though Spring, unlike Rendell, never does manage to meld both kinds of interest together. --
Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
