Saratoga Haunting (Charlie Bradshaw Series #7)

by Stephen Dobyns

Overview

Everyman detective Charlie Bradshaw finds an old case coming back to haunt him in his seventh mystery in Saratoga Springs.

When a convict Charlie sent down some two decades earlier is paroled, death threats start arriving, while the skull of a woman who supposedly fled to South America shows up on a building site, drawing the detective back to his old case.

Meanwhile, girlfriend Janey wants to see some commitment from Charlie, and Victor is generally being unhelpful in the way that only the world worst hotel detective can.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781405529426
Publisher:	Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Series:	Charlie Bradshaw Series , #7
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	876,765
File size:	753 KB

About the Author

Stephen Dobyns, author of eleven previous volumes of poetry and twenty novels, teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as numerous other awards. His novels include the Charlie Bradshaw Mysteries, the bestselling thriller The Church of Dead Girls, and the acclaimed new novel, The Burn Palace.

Editorial Reviews

Series private eye Charlie Bradshaw, suffering relationship problems with Janie, delves into two cases resurrected after the discovery of a missing woman's skeleton. For another work by Dobyns, see The Wrestler's Cruel Study , reviewed on p. 119.--Ed.

Library Journal

Charlie Bradshaw, thank goodness, is still just an ordinary man who wants to live exactly as he pleases and do precisely what he wants. Unfortunately, the world just won't go away. This time it's the past that comes knocking, in the form of a dead body unearthed from beneath what used to be Jacko's Pool Hall. The body belongs to a woman who embezzled a quarter of a million dollars more than 25 years ago. Charlie, a Saratoga cop at the time, believed the woman had left the country. Poking around in the yellowing files, he must now confront his own youthful arrogance. And then there's the matter of Maximum Tubbs, legendary gambler and Charlie's last link to the vanished Saratoga of "gambling halls and touts and bookies and fast bets." Tubbs is dying of cancer and has saddled Charlie with the responsibility of organizing his wake. Charlie eventually solves his ancient murder, and he even finds a trumpet player who can play Tubbs' favorite song, "St. James Infirmary," but throughout it all he can't quite shake the melancholy that has settled between his shoulders. This is the seventh entry in Dobyns' Saratoga series, which remains an unmitigated delight. Charlie is the regular guy we all want to be, and his presence is as soothing as a taste of sippin' whiskey.

Bill Ott