Hardball

Excellently plotted and paced, this third adventure for James Reed, former London cop moved to Malibu Beach, offers the satisfaction of a hard-boiled L.A. detective story overlaid with the nuances of a British mystery. Reed rents his magnificent beach house to Jonathan Bradley, a wealthy young Englishman who turns up missing after his entourage is killed on their first night in Malibu. At the urging of the L.A. police, Reed identifies another corpse as Bradley's; then, when contacted by the international magnate whose wife Bradley had earlier run off with, Reed agrees to search for both of them. It's a complicated trail stretching from California to London, Caracas to the island of Jersey. Making use of old London contacts, police and criminal alike, Reed carefully plans his moves, always remembering that in this case he doesn't know the good guys from the bad. Sangster constructs an intricate problem and lets his intelligent, complex hero loose to solve it. Reed's first two appearances were in Blackball and Snowball. (Nov.)