Mysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, has written a review of A Nail Through the Heart by Timothy Hallinan. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.
A Nail Through the Heart by Timothy Hallinan
A Poke Rafferty Mystery
Wm. Morrow (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-06-125580-7 (0061255807)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-125580-9 (9780061255809)
Publication Date: June 2007
List Price: $24.95
Synopsis (from the publisher): Travel writer Poke Rafferty is good at looking for trouble—so good he makes his living writing offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored. His Looking for Trouble series is for travelers obsessed with the unusual: how to beat official foreign-exchange rates; how to spot fake amber or counterfeit money; how much to bribe a cop; how to identify a transvestite before it's too late; and how to know, within an hour of arriving in a strange city, where to find the best bars, the best clubs, the best food, the best clothes, and the dodgiest entertainment at the best prices.
Then Rafferty falls in love with Rose, an ex–Patpong Road bar girl, and he badly wants to be a part of her new life. Both Rose and Bangkok itself have stolen his heart. To complete his new family, Rafferty is in the process of adopting a wary eight-year-old street orphan when trouble comes looking for him.
First he takes in another orphan, a troubled and terrifying street urchin nicknamed Superman. Then he agrees to find a distraught woman's missing uncle, a task that seems simple enough given the uncle's predilections for just the kind of shadowy places Rafferty knows well. Finally, in a moment of weakness, he accepts an old woman's generous payment in exchange for locating a blackmailing thief. Soon, these three seemingly disparate events begin to overlap, pulling Rafferty deeper into dark, unfamiliar terrain, and he begins to realize that some people guard unspeakable secrets that don't always show on their faces—and that all this time he's been gliding across the surface of a culture he doesn't understand.
Review: Timothy Hallinan introduces travel writer and sometime investigator Poke Rafferty, a man living on the edge but looking for stability in his life in Bangkok, in A Nail Through the Heart.
Rafferty is hired by the niece of an Australian man who has disappeared from his home in Bangkok. The man's live-in housekeeper, who has also disappeared, used to work for a wealthy woman who is feared by the police and public alike. While visiting the woman during the course of his investigation, she changes the subject and suddenly offers him a large sum of money to find a man who recently stole something from her. Rafferty needs the cash: he's in the process of adopting a little girl and the money will go a long ways towards paying for her schooling. But then Rafferty learns that these two missing person investigations are related, and he's drawn into a world of evil that not only threatens his life, but that of the family he loves.
Hallinan deftly handles the horrifying aspects of his story, torture by the Khmer Rough in the late 1970s and modern-day child pornography, by relating how Rafferty feels and reacts while minimizing explicit details. At times, A Nail Through the Heart is exceedingly difficult to read, not for the lack of well-written prose, but for its subject matter. The intertwining investigations are sufficiently complicated to keep the reader's attention without being overly complex. There are a few points that don't ring quite true, (why, for example, did the old woman keep something that could expose her past in a safe buried in her lawn when she could have destroyed the contents years earlier, or if she wouldn't destroy it, why not keep it in a more secure location in her house?), but they don't interfere with the overall story. The conclusion of the book is surprisingly pragmatic and somewhat open-ended.
A Nail Through the Heart is a terrific opening chapter to this new series, one that has the potential to captivate readers for a long time to come.
Special thanks to FSB Associates for providing a copy of A Nail Through the Heart for this review.
Review Copyright © 2007 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved.
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