From Amazon.com
Grace Edwards's Mali Anderson series (
If I Should Die,
A Toast Before Dying,
No Time to Die) takes readers on a veritable walking tour of Harlem's institutions and inhabitants. This time out, Mali, a former cop, strolls off a QE2 jazz cruise and straight into murder. Her jazz musician father's pianist, Ozzie Hendrix, has returned from a gig in Newport to find his daughter Starr, a budding singer trying to recover from a heroin addiction, with her throat slashed. With friends and family devastated, Mali's method of detection is anything but by the book, much to the dismay of her boyfriend, detective Tad Honeywell. Her best informers are a slew of Harlem beauticians:
Bertha, my 20-year friend, owns Bertha's Beauty Salon and is a reliable source of street news, gossip, and any scandal worth repeating. She has been on the same location on Eighth Avenue years before it was renamed for Frederick Douglass, and she doesn't have to poke her head out the door to catch a whisper. It flows in automatically as early as 7 a.m., when the regulars from Miss Laura's luncheonette arrive with breakfast and news hotter than grits.
Rumor has it that Starr's death was a brutal payback for her efforts to distance herself from Short Change, her one-time pimp and supplier. But when Short Change is gunned down and the prints of Travis Morgan, a prominent Harlem businessman, turn up on the knife that killed Starr, respectable and not-so-respectable worlds start colliding--and the clash will have Mali fighting for her life.
Edwards's novels tend to be more successful as social history than as mystery. A jumble of characters and incidents muddies the plot, but the author's carefully rendered portrait of Harlem's streets and language carries an unmistakable glow of authenticity. --Kelly Flynn
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
No longer a New York cop, Mali Anderson, the heroine of three previous adventures (If I Should Die, etc.), fights for her man and the truth behind a young singer's violent death in this highly atmospheric if overly ambitious novel. Starr Hendrix survived drug abuse and the lure of prostitution to sing jazz with her father, Ozzie, and Mali's dad in the nightclubs of Harlem. When somebody kills Starr by slashing her throat, her onetime supplier and would-be pimp, Short Change, is the most likely suspect, until he dies and the despondent Ozzie vanishes. At the same time, Mali, fresh from a memorable jazz cruise aboard the QE2, has a sexy new lover in cop Tad Honeywell. Ensuring that Tad stay faithful requires Mali to tangle with Chrissie, a local trollop in too-tight clothes, whose straying third husband might have been the last man in Starr's short, sad life. Edwards's fluid prose, punctuated by historical and architectural asides that illuminate present-day black Harlem, is impressive, but a fine style isn't enough here. Tad and Chrissie are respectively too hunky and too vampish to be credible. The constant cuts to shipboard passion and the endless jazz name-dropping don't advance the story much, and the more somber narrative sections, where Mali meets Short Change's current stable of working girls, don't expand the suspect pool. Edwards has done better and should do so again. Agent, Barbara Lowenstein. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
