Vengeance

by Stuart M. Kaminsky Narrated by Scott Brick

Overview

After the death of his wife, a grieving Lew Fonesca drives from Chicago until his car gives out in the parking lot of a Sarasota, Florida, Dairy Queen. Trying to avoid his emotions and rebuild his life, he takes up work as a freelance process server. One of the attorneys he works for gives him his first case: A local entrepreneur's trophy wife has gone missing, and Fonesca must locate her. At the same time, a mother comes to him for help locating her runaway underage daughter, whom she fears has been sold into vice. Both cases are more complex than they seem, and Fonesca is kept in plenty of danger. Nonetheless, with a colorful bunch of secondary characters to help him, he'll solve both of them.

“Staked with vivid characters and plenty of local color.”-New York Times

Editorial Reviews

Marilyn Stasio

The new series is...staked with vivid characters and plenty of local color, so it looks as if Lew has a real future ahead of him.
— New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Not content with creating Toby Peters, Insp. Porfiry Rostnikov, and Abe Lieberman, Kaminsky launches a new series about Lew Fonseca, a process server who drifted to Sarasota after a car killed his wife in Chicago. Though he's not a licensed private eye, Lew, who lives and works out of an office right behind a Dairy Queen, agrees to find people sometimes because anybody can ask questions. His first recorded case is a tale of two runaways. Real-estate mogul Carl Sebastian is willing to pay anything to get his beautiful young wife Melanie back; Beryl Tree, who's followed her daughter Adele, 14, from Kansas to Florida, offers Lew fifty dollars, though she might go as high as a hundred. In between burgers and Blizzards, Lew pieces together Adele's story, and it's not pretty: an abusive father, a lowlife pimp, a quick sale of the fresh young thing to major sleazeball John Pirannes. In danger from both her father and the man he's sold her to, Adele is obviously in deep trouble. But it's hard to concentrate on finding her when Sebastian is constantly breathing down Lew's neck, even though everything about Melanie's disappearance—the trail she's left, the stories her friends tell Lew, a meeting in which she begs him not to find her for another three days—spells setup. Though both cases seem predictable, Kaminsky pulls off a climactic surprise for each one. The biggest news, though, is his depressed little Lancelot in Levi's, who's worth at least a dozen more installments.

Publisher's Weekly

The versatile and prolific Kaminsky introduces his fifth series hero, Lew Fonesca, in this outstanding mystery. Fonesca is a middle-aged, widowed process server, a transplanted Chicagoan who has made a new home in Sarasota, Fla. He joins a distinguished and varied stable of his Edgar Award-winning creator's other protagonists: a Russian policeman (Porfiry Rostnikov); a Chicago police detective (Abe Lieberman); a private detective to the stars (Toby Peters); and, of course, Jim Rockford. Fonesca is a friendly, unassuming, slightly depressed fellow who makes a meager salary working for several Sarasota lawyers. Occasionally he uses the investigative skills he developed while employed by the state attorney's office in Chicago to do a little ad hoc sleuthing. In his debut, his skills and fortitude get stretched to the limit as he tries to locate two missing persons: a teenage girl whose sexually abusive and violent father has lured her away from her poverty-stricken mother, and a woman who has run away from her wealthy husband. As always, Kaminsky's sense of place is faultless, and he skillfully captures a parade of lively, credible characters, including psychiatrists, truck drivers, pimps, teenagers and social workers. With an early hook, he grabs readers and takes them on a memorably tumultuous ride of violent dips and turns, careening from Sarasota's most squalid shacks to its richest condos. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172223273
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/01/2001
Series:	Lew Fonesca Series , #1
Edition description:	Unabridged

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