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Liam Yeats and Nell Slack are after the Duchess of Windsor’s emerald-and-diamond engagement ring. They set into motion a scheme to kidnap the present owner’s seven-year-old daughter in order to demand the ring as ransom. In devising their plan they find Mario Rome, a loquacious taxi driver often hired by the owner, a powerful source of information. What none of the three knows is that the owner, Len Lasher, is at the point of death. On the verge of a major business merger that would be jinxed were his real state of health to become common knowledge, Lasher has let out that he suffers from slow-acting multiple sclerosis. In reality, he is dying from the fast-moving Lou Gehrig disease. It is a secret so far known only to his doctors, his immediate family, and his trusted caretaker, Delroy Davenport. As a youth, Delroy was shunned by the Amish and left to make his own way. He guards Lasher’s secret with great care. Delroy is also privy to another secret. He knows that Scotti House, part-time insurance investigator/part-time librarian, is a pre-op transsexual still in possession of a penis. Delroy becomes fascinated by the middle-aged Scotti; when she ignores his advances, Delroy turns to Scotti’s mother for friendship. He also finds comfort in the novels of the writer Patricia Highsmith. These are the principals of a fairly large but quite memorable cast of characters. Scotti’s ex-wife, their daughter, more criminals, and a number of other transsexuals, both male-to-female and female-to-male, appear. Although the transsexuals’ problems in society emerge in discussion, they are treated matter-of-factly, without sensation. The novel contains no sex scenes. Connected mostly in space – the Hamptons, Long Island, with trips to New York – the rich Lashers, their servants, the ordinary townsfolk, and the criminals careen through the novel like so many marbles in a pinball machine, striking off each other and turning up in the most unlikely corners. What in another novel would have seemed a highly improbable number of coincidences comes across as inescapable fate. Highsmith, who was Marijane Meaker’s lover for a number of years, clearly influenced the author in many ways. Quite belatedly Scotti realizes she is in the midst of a crime scene in the making. Aided by circumstance and by intuition, she pulls together various parts of the puzzle. Nothing stays stationary, however; new surprises await. Several are comical in nature. The reader alternates between chills and laughs. The novel needed better editing. Bits of information get needlessly retold; the prolog is superfluous. Yet its prose exerts a hypnotic effect. Each time I put the book down, I could stand to be away from it only so long before wanting to read just one more of its 76 short chapters. Though few of its characters are like people I have met, they came alive for me. This was my introduction to Meaker’s work, so I have no idea how typical it is of other "Vin Packer" novels. The 80-year-old novelist has been a prolific writer. She is credited with launching lesbian pulp fiction in 1952, but only recently has she gained much attention. I was surprised to discover that, as a result of reading this book, I look forward to sampling more of her work.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, October 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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