Electric City - Hardcover

Why would inoffensive Irene March of the Columbia Clipping Service have gone AWOL just a few days after her triumphant TV stint on Jeopardy! left her $20,000 richer? That's what her fellow clippers at Columbia want Jane da Silva, Seattle's pro bono sleuth of last resort (A Hopeless Case, 1992), to find out, and it isn't long before Jane has a theory: Irene was taking advantage of her nose for news to run a little petty blackmail on the side, and one of her victims (the charter fisherman arrested for soliciting? the mother who moves from town to town organizing fund-raisers for her ``critically ill'' daughter? the state senator's wife carrying on with a much younger apple-orchard heir?) may have learned enough about her to track her down. Meantime, though, Jane's inquiries have taken her over the mountains to Coulee City and Pateros, where she meets the apple-grower in question, sexy sometime country singer Jack Lawson, and falls into his arms. Will she be able to keep cool enough to solve the mystery of Irene's disappearance- -oops, Irene's murder--ahead of the police and to satisfy the demanding board of the Foundation for Righting Wrongs so that they'll approve her funding? Well, no. Jane and her story are as likeable as ever, but the mystery is a muddle of suspicious behavior, broken alibis, and enough unanswered questions (e.g., what does all this have to do with Irene?) to keep a reference librarian--or a clipping service- -busy for years. No wonder Jane's foundation won't pay her off. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In a rambling adventure, following Amateur Night , Jane da Silva, Beck's Seattle sleuth who must investigate hopeless cases in order to inherit her eccentric uncle's fortune, searches for a missing woman, a recent winner of $20,000 on TV's Jeopardy! Irene March, employed by a news clipping service, has been missing for a week when two co-workers ask Jane to find her. Jane learns that Irene had developed a blackmailing operation using the news stories she came across in her job and that at least two of her victims--a woman exploiting her daughter to raise funds for a bogus operation and another whose distinctive car was seen leaving the scene of a hit-and-run accident--had reason to want Irene dead. When Irene's body is found at the bottom of a ravine, Jane sticks with the case and gets caught up in a complex chain of events that leads her into a confrontation with a killer in Electric City, near the Grand Coulee Dam. Although Beck gives readers an appealing tour of Washington State and provides Jane with a country-singer love interest, this tale is underpowered.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.