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Judith Paige has been married to Walter Paige for 3 months, and the honeymoon appears to be over. Judith hires the Nameless Detective to find out why Walter has to take a "business trip" every weekend and adds over 200 miles to the mileage of their car. She suspects that he is having an affair and hires Nameless to follow Walter. This isn't Nameless' favorite kind of gig, but he has a soft heart for a girl like Judith, who seems wholesome and sweet and deserves better treatment from her husband. Nameless follows Walter to a resort area and doesn't see any immediate indication of an affair. He's got Walter's room under surveillance, when it finally dawns on him that he can't see the rear entrance. When he goes to check it out, he finds something that he didn't want to-Walter's dead body and indications that there had been a female visitor. Was he killed by this unseen lover? Or is there something else going on? The only thing that seems out of place is a copy of an old pulp fiction book called The Dead and the Dying by Russell Dancer. Walter doesn't seem like the reading type. As Nameless investigates, he finds out that Walter is not a very well-liked man. He had a way with the women. There are a group of people that associated with him in the past. Nameless works hand in hand with the cops to investigate the murder. Pronzini excels at depicting the course of the investigation, never slipping into having Nameless do anything that he shouldn't in the situation. The book in question does have a clue that helps resolve the situation, but it's rather a stretch that several people were killed to cover up the clue. I didn't like this book as well as the previous book in the series (The Vanished), although I think the character of Nameless is a wonderful creation. I never really understood why Walter had married Judith. At times, Pronzini tried to wax eloquent on the "undercurrents" theme used for the title, but it felt totally artificial to me whenever he did that. Undercurrent is the third in the Nameless Detective series which now numbers more than 25 books. It's a good book but didn't knock my socks off.
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, January 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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