Sentinels by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"These mountains, they got secrets nobody can find out."

Continuing with my Pronzini Binge I have just read Sentinels (1996), the twenty-fifth installment in the now forty-six-year-old series featuring the Private-Detective-Whose-Last-Name-Is-Never-Mentioned. It is a readable mystery, albeit a completely unremarkable one. It also reminds me of some more recent novels by John Shannon, and not in a good way.

The Detective-With-Unmentionable-Name is hired by a woman whose daughter, Allison, a university junior, disappeared on her way home to Bay Area from Eugene, Oregon. Allison was traveling with a young man, presumably her boyfriend whom she planned to introduce to her mother. They took a scenic way south and their car broke down in Creekside, a little town in the northeastern corner of California. They have not been seen since.

The author has a bit of metafictional fun: the detective refuses to use the services of Sharon McCone, a detective friend of his, who could fly him to the remote part of California in her plane. The funny part is that Ms. McCone is a protagonist of detective novels written by Marcia Muller, who is Mr. Pronzini's wife in real life. Anyway, the detective drives to Creekside and gets to talk to the mechanics in the garage where the car was fixed. He also interviews the owners of a small motel and a waitress in a diner. None of these people know much about the couple and - what's worse - they seem to be quite unwilling to talk to the detective, resenting the Big City intrusion into their rural lives.

While the publisher, for once, partly resisted the urge to spoil the denouement in the blurbs on the cover, a hint is given there, one that makes the solution of the mystery easier to guess. It is indeed difficult to describe the outline of the plot even in vaguest terms without providing automatic spoilers. The readers who enjoy the familiarity of characters populating the plot will no doubt be amused by passages featuring Kerry and Tamara Corbin. The comedic space filler about Kerry's friend, Paula, who picked up a new fad - Alida's workshops on the Holy Sexual Communion - would be quite funny were it not so cliché.

The detective's conversation with one of the main characters that directly precedes the final scene is psychologically naive and implausible. The very last fragment of the novel features the probable topic of the next installment in the series - a Shameless Detective Sequel Plug. All in all, Sentinels is quite a weak entry in the series. The unnamedness gimmick may well be its strongest point.

Two stars.


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