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The Man with No Time

Name: The Man with No Time
Author: Timothy Hallinan
ISBN: 9780380713714

by Timothy Hallinan

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Overview

Raging underneath the high-profile headline crimes that throw a community into uproar are the back-alley wars that really control the pulse of a city. In his latest adventure, Simeon Grist, with his hard edge and sharp wit, takes up his own battle with a set of criminals who are the scourge of the Los Angeles streets: the powerful Asian underground. When a good friend's two young children become the targets of a Chinatown kidnapping, Simeon is drawn into a culture that is almost impenetrable - and incomprehensible - to outsiders. Fearing a crueler reprisal by the forces that took their little girl and boy, even the parents refuse to inform the police. This is a world that defies the criminal justice system and offers only one way to strike back - through vigilante revenge. An unidentified dead body left at the scene convinces Simeon that he has even more on his hands than a kidnapping, especially when faced with the unwanted attention of two Vietnamese guns-for-hire. To get to the bottom of this seedy criminal network that's leaving its mark all over town, Simeon plunges himself into the bloody nightmare that is everyday business in the grisly streets of L.A. But the usual savagery takes an even gorier turn when he discovers a new item in the Chinese black market - the sale of recent immigrants into slavery - bringing Simeon face to face with an inhuman brute who will stop at nothing to silence his enemies. Racing against time to prevent this murderous thug from victimizing more immigrants and killing anyone who gets in his way, Simeon takes on the Asian underground by stabbing at their one Achilles heel - by using their own people against them.

When two young children become targets of a Chinatown kidnapping, Simeon Grist is drawn into a culture that's almost impenetrable and incomprehensible to outsiders. Fearing a cruel reprisal, the victims' parents refuse to inform the police, thus leaving a dead body, an unsolved crime and the unwanted attention of Vietnamese guns-for-hire all in Simeon's lap.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The trail of two missing Chinese children shouldn't lead to a slave market, and Simeon Grist should still be languishing somewhere in academia, not sleuthing his way through Los Angeles. Blunt wit and copious running gags have fueled this first-rate series ( Skin Deep , etc.), whose latest entry features a mostly Asian cast, including Grist's former lover Eleanor, whose brother's two children have been abducted. Horace, the father, promptly vanishes into Chinatown after them, and a beloved uncle gradually emerges as the chief suspect. The kids turn up later, but Horace is still AWOL. Simeon then stumbles into the world of Charlie Wah, who struggles with his English but more than masters the art of killing. Before long, Grist has saved a young Vietnamese boy (then gotten him blind drunk), enlisted a few other unsavory deadbeats and set forth to free a ship full of slaves, with one of the chief slavemasters looking more and more like Eleanor's aunt. The author's relentless quest for wit means that no opportunity for a smart-ass one-liner is ever willingly squandered, and some latitude is definitely required from the more single-minded clue-hunters, as well as from the squeamish, who may find Grist's first grisly encounter with Wah unnecessarily brutal. A not quite up-to-par addition to the Grist canon. (July)

Emily Melton

Spenser's met his match in shrewd, tough, tender-hearted private eye Simeon Grist. This time out, Grist comes face to face--via his Chinese girlfriend Eleanor's family--with the Snake Triad, a particularly nasty Oriental version of the Mafia that makes its millions by importing illegal Chinese immigrants to America and selling them to the highest bidder for the most nefarious purposes imaginable. Grist devises an ingenious scheme to beat the Triad at its own game and assembles a ragtag team of heroes to help him: his buddy Dexter (think Hawk in the Spenser books), a pint-sized Vietnamese named Tran, and Dexter's friends, the six intimidatingly large Doody brothers--Horton, Howard, Hayward, Harold, Hector, and Henry. How this mismatched group outwits the nasties makes for some of the best mystery reading of the year. Hallinan's story is sheer genius, with a highly original plot, snappy dialogue, mind-boggling menace, memorable characters, plenty of nightmare-producing violence, and enough thrills and chills to catch the attention of the most jaded reader. Like Robert B. Parker, Hallinan has a gift for injecting enough humor--sometimes dark, sometimes outright hilarious--to offset the grim and gruesome parts. This book should move him into the upper echelon of hard-boiled detective fiction writers.