Empress of Coney Island: A Novel of Suspense

In his second appearance (after Print-Out, Ralph Simmons is called out of his retirement from the ad department of the Herald Courier by former employee Toby Ferris, whose fiancee, Opal Wilder, is missing from her Greenwich Village apartment. Simmons had introduced Toby and Opal, and over the years, they'd slowly gone from friends to lovers to separateds and, now, to reuniteds-to-wed. Although Opal is missing, Toby does find in her apartment the dead body of accountant Sarah Goode, with whom Opal had been working on an expose of political corruption inside the D.A.'s office, involving graft in the construction of a hotel/casino, the Empress of Coney Island. With the help of Simmons's former secretary, now wife, Lillian, he and Toby desperately try to locate Opal, aware that they are in a race with the crooks on whom she has the goods. They hijackthe Staten Island ferry in the process and participate in an old-style shootout as well. Gillespie has a beneficent world view, refreshing amidst the muck his characters unearth, but the corruption here is routine and the mystery, unfortunately, mundane. (March)