Word: scribner
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CITIZEN WELLES by Frank Brady (Scribner's; $24.95). Anecdote and scholarship are nicely balanced in this biography of the late Orson Welles, whose roller- coaster career in stage, screen and radio covered the spectrum from classics to commercials...
CITIZEN WELLES by Frank Brady; Scribner's; 655 pages...
Among other hard-boiled writers, the most impressive effort of the past year comes from Michael Allegretto. His Blood Stone (Scribner's; 261 pages; $16.95) is a superb example of the "cold crime" subgenre. A seedy private eye, approached by an even seedier pal, starts looking for the proceeds of a famous jewel robbery out West a couple of decades after the theft. His allies and enemies in an ever shifting set of alliances include an aging femme fatale, a spunky tomboy and her ex-con grandfather, a trio of murderous Indians, a small-town newspaper editor and a crooked...
...Kaminsky's sleuth Toby Peters is hired by General Douglas MacArthur on a matter of national security and gets a helping hand from Dashiell Hammett on a spree. The volume is one of the sprightliest in the series built around Peters but is overshadowed by A Cold Red Sunrise (Scribner's; 210 pages; $15.95), which features Kaminsky's other recurring detective, Soviet policeman Porfiry Rostnikov. That sly and assiduous investigator is dispatched to Siberia to look into the killing of another officer, who in turn was probing the killing of the daughter of a prominent dissident. Despite the smallness...
...slippery and criminous as Melita Pargeter, a white-haired, well-heeled widow of a burglar whom Brett beguilingly introduced in 1987's A Nice Class of Corpse. Having skewered the pretenses of her fellow residents of a retirement hotel in that volume, she returns in Mrs, Presumed Dead (Scribner's; 248 pages; $16.95) to expose the follies of an executive suburb where the previous owner of her home has disappeared. Aiding in her attempts to locate the missing woman are a wry assortment of her late husband's crooked cronies, all of them, like Mrs. Pargeter, now at least semilegit...