Kinsmen

Allison Shay was traveling home from the University of Oregon with her new boyfriend, Rob Compton, when their car broke down near the tiny rural town of Creekside, California. Soon after, Allison and Rob went missing without a trace. Whatever happened, it felt like something bad to the Nameless Detective. Five days without a whisper of contact with the outside world. Long past the inconsiderate-kids stage; long past the silly and the harmless. Kinsmen takes Bill Pronzini's classic private investigator to California's northeast backwoods, where an isolated community is determined to keep a deep, dark secret: why Allison Shay and Rob Compton really vanished. The real question facing the Nameless Detective: are they still alive? Cemetery Dance, 2013. Hardcover, 185 pp. *** From Kirkus Reviews (on Sentinels (1996)) Though the publisher maintains a demure silence on the point, this short novel is a lightly revised expansion of Pronzini's novella "Kinsmen", first published, together with long stories by Marcia Muller and Ed Gorman, in Criminal Intent 1 (1993). Here as there, the Nameless Detective ( Hardcase , 1995, etc.) is on the trail of a missing University of Oregon student who vanished, together with the boyfriend she planned to bring home to her mother outside Oakland, shortly after their car broke down in that slice of God's country designated Creekside, Calif., pop. 112. Even readers new to the material should be able to guess what happened to Allison McDowell and her lover by the halfway point. Those with memories of "Kinsmen" will find more words here, but not much else that's new. Version : 5.0