cover image A Nice Steady Job

A Nice Steady Job

Gregory Dowling. St. Martin's Press, $20.95 (263pp) ISBN 978-0-312-11035-2

While teaching English language in Verona, Italy, young January Esposito is persuaded by his slick half-brother Luigi to search for the missing son of the wealthy Sir Alfred Ainsley. Esposito, an indifferent teacher, is an equally unlikely sleuth. That, combined with Luigi's skewed cockney speech (""`This is Jan, me bruvver'"") and an unremittingly flip, quickly wearisome, tone mar this third in a series, following Every Picture Tells a Story. Sir Alfred's son Piers, traveling in Italy with the lovely, long-legged Rita, was last seen talking to a drug dealer who was then murdered in the quaint village of San Giorgio Veronese. Esposito finds himself involved in a case that reaches back to the death of a WWII partisan hero and a lost silver statue dating from the Middle Ages. Dowling knows Italy and its history, but in this tale he deals less authoritatively with issues of plotting and finer points of characterization. (Sept.)