Betrayers by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Dimly, through a haze of hurt, she saw [him] come inside and push the door closed behind him, throw the dead bolt to lock it. Then he was standing over her, a smile like a rictus on his ugly, blocky face."

As I mentioned several times in my reviews of Bill Pronzini novels I don't really like the newer installments in the Unnamed Detective series (certainly, the detective is not nameless). Well, they are sort of readable, do not require any thinking on the part of the reader, and provide few hours of marginal entertainment. While the soap opera aspect of the novels and the conceptual continuity - the never-ending stories of interconnected lives of the same group of characters - likely make new books in the series easier to write - same old people, same old problems, same old setups - I find it boring not to meet a different set of characters in each novel. So why am I coming back? Just being lazy, I guess.

Anyway, Betrayers (2010) interleaves three separate criminal threads, with the fourth thread emerging later in the novel. Tamara, who runs the agency together with Bill (Mr. Unnamed's given name), is looking for a guy who

"[...] used her, scared her, made her feel bad about herself just when she'd been starting to get her stuff together again [...]"

and who happened to be a small-scale grifter with a stolen identity. Meanwhile Bill works pro bono for two elderly women who hired him because one of them experienced late-night harassment by a specter. The apparition doing the harassment looks like a ghost of the woman's late husband. In the third thread Jake Runyon, who has grown close to Bryn (whom he met in Fever ), has been hired by a bail bondsman and is trying to find a small-scale criminal who has jumped bail.

The target of Tamara's pursuit happens to be a "switch-hitter" (yay! I have learned a new Urban Dictionary term) and we learn a bit about a sports fan club that groups men with similar sexual interests. Tamara's investigation is by far the most interesting and keeps the reader's attention. Bill's case soon loses any paranormal aspects. Instead, in a somewhat unexpected twist, a new thread appears, one that involves Bill and Kerry's 13-year-old adopted daughter, Emily.

The novel could be separated into four individual short stories without any loss of context. Clichés aplenty and the stories are of "paint-by-numbers" variety. Bad guys and gals are really bad, good gals and guys are really good. The stories have a didactic, edifying feel, almost like in the unbearably moralistic late works by John Shannon. The novel is somewhat readable but maybe I should stop reaching for later Unnamed Detective novels.

Two stars.

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