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The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn is a new book from the creator of Inspector Charlie Salter, another one of those under-appreciated mystery writers, Eric Wright. Protagonist Joe Barley is a part-time college professor and an occasional private investigator. That means that to pick up extra money sometimes he works for a security agency He's asked a favor by someone he just can't turn down; Helena, the woman who cleans his house. Helena is worried about another client, a woman who apparently is a high class prostitute who has simply disappeared. Joe's a bit of a wimp, actually. He doesn't really like academia, but he teaches. He doesn't really like working his second job, but he needs the money. I cannot figure out why he's with Carole, a truly unlikable woman who lives to read to the point of obsession. What's there to talk about with her - why bother? She's rude, uninterested in others, often clueless (okay she seems to get her clues from reading - John O'Hara?) and uninteresting. That Joe is with her is symptomatic of Joe, who just sort of skates along. There were at least two different points in the story that I found pretty unbelievable; I won't give it away but I just felt that author Wright wanted to speed things up and had Barley figure something out way too quickly. He makes some leaps in logic and has reasons that work out every time. I don't think it very realistic. And despite this being a rather short book of 213 pages, we don't need paragraphs on how Joe folds his underwear; that he discovers it's been gone through should be sufficient. Joe's clearly intelligent, but he's a bit of a waste of time; he's so smart about some things, like helping his annoying office mate through an accusation of racism by a student. This is one of those reviews where I will recommend the book anyway, despite my misgivings. I've been rather cranky lately and maybe I'm being unfair to Eric Wright, whose work I've liked in the past. The book feels uneven to me; slow when it should move quickly and way too fast when things should be examined more. See if you can ignore my annoyance with it all and enjoy the story. -- http://www.drizzle.com/~roscoe/tshirts.html - Sherloc kian, Wodehousian & more
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, September 2000
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