cover image Friends in High Places

Friends in High Places

Michael Hendricks. Scribner Book Company, $18.95 (230pp) ISBN 978-0-684-19264-2

Rita Noonan, a high-heeled gumshoe who does most of the legwork for her New York City detective agency, is wishy-washy and amateurish; it's no wonder business is bad. Yet Hendricks's ( Money to Burn ) tough-talking heroine is totally nonplussed by the sleaziness of her work world, with its cops on the take, philandering spouses and druggies. Only messy murder victims make her queasy--but when one shows up spattered all over her one-room living quarters and turns out to be her ex-husband's ex-police buddy, she feels honor-bound to track down the perpetrator. From this point, the sordid tale becomes muddied with excess characters, all of them seedy and unsavory, and bogged down in a plethora of possible solutions, none of them especially engaging. Worst, the narrator herself appears incapable of reacting, no matter how extensively she is insulted. As the book evokes sympathy for neither victim nor Noonan, even the reek of police corruption and cover-up, another corpse and an attempted rape do little to enliven the proceedings. (Jan.)