Detective Fiction, Crimes - Fiction, Travel & Transportation - Fiction, Occupations - Fiction
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
A powerful new narcotic, soma, appears on the streets of Paris, in the dead hands of a small-time drug dealer from Ibiza. The French police want to discover his supplier before the distribution of soma gets out of control, and they think Hob Draconian is just the man for the job. Hob is living in Paris, and business for the Alternative Detective Agency is not exactly booming. Holding his investigator's license hostage, the police send Hob back to Ibiza to search for the dealer's killer. Tracking clues through the British, American, and French expatriate communities on the island and back to Paris and London, Hob follows his leads down a path that connects many of his own friends and acquaintances on the island and cuts uncomfortably close to home. Before long, Hob is caught up in the machinations of a ruthless international drug cartel. The course of events takes a dangerous turn, and Hob finds himself facing more trouble than he bargained for.Hob Draconian, proprietor of The Alternative Detective Agency, returns again in an adventure that takes him to Paris and London in search of the source of a powerful new narcotic on the world market. The search leads him home to the island paradise of Ibiza and into more trouble than even he could have imagined. 224 pp.
Editorials
Kirkus Reviews
Because Hob Draconian, of the Alternative Detective Agency (Draconian New York, 1996, etc.), once knew Stanley Bower, the drug dealer lying murdered in a Paris street, Inspector Emile Fauchon thinks Hob can help identify the two men who killed him. But Hob's more disquieted by something else he recognizes: a green glass bottle found in Bower's hand, a dead ringer for the bottles Hob once used to package the hash oil he sold his hundreds of intimate friends. So it's not just money that makes him so eager to take a check from Bower's brother Timothy to investigate his murder. Back on his island paradise of Ibiza, Hob doesn't find any trace of the bottles that ended up with his ex- lover Annabelle, but he does find traces of bizarre international intrigue, with a hotelier looking to buy oil paintings by the yard at one end and a seductive new drug called soma at the other. Surviving a spate of Saturday-matinee attempts on his life ("I just hate to see this happening to someone from Ibiza," Annabelle rhapsodizes as Hob is borne implacably toward the jaws of death), Hob ends up floating down gently from his brief stint as a willing human sacrifice to close the case in a flutter of his usual non sequiturs.Enough art dealers, dope dealers, incognito presidents of emerging nations, and unwelcome weekend guests to send you happily off to dreamland, where this wild tale's mad lapses of logic may actually make sense.
Book Details
Published
April 1, 1997
Publisher
Forge
Pages
222
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780312862732