Swann's Last Song

Despite a strong beginning, Salzberg's debut takes too many wrong turns to satisfy. Henry Swann, a throwback to the 1950s PI, subsists on a bleak if steady diet of repo work until Sally Janus, an attractive, well-to-do woman, shows up at his seedy upper Manhattan office and asks him to find her missing husband, Harry. The lucrative assignment proves to be short-lived as Harry's corpse turns up in a sleazy local hotel, the victim of an apparent robbery. When Sally hires Swann again to find her husband's killer, the investigator embarks on a meandering and less-than-plausible international trek that takes him to Mexico and Germany in search of a conspiracy possibly connected with the Peking Man fossils. The contrast between the compelling and gritty opening scenes and the later tepid action sequences suggests Salzberg would be better served by focusing on the former in future books. (Sept.)