A MAJOR PRODUCTION!
(2018) by Thomas B. Sawyer
Reviewed by Barry
Ergang
New Yorker Barney Moon,
private investigator, hates Los Angeles, a city for which he has a number of
unflattering appellations including “Whackoville,” “Tinselburg,” and “Goofyland.”
But after clearing up a case for a client of the Eller Insurance agency, one
involving a corrupt judge and an incriminating file labeled Stuff, Barney gets a phone call from his
old friend Saul Flockman. A hedge fund manager, he and Barney exist “in distant
worlds, largely out of touch except for several instances of Saul’s personal
stress during which he had hired Barney for domestic surveillance.” Saul
constantly worries that his actress wife Wanda Gooden is playing around on him,
and has on three prior occasions hired Barney to check up on her. Barney has
yet to catch her “in anything even approaching compromise or lying.”
Now Saul wants to hire
Barney again, and for the same purpose. One of Saul’s clients, Hollywood agent
Irwin Kerner, has told Saul that if he—Saul—invested half a million dollars in
an independent film production, Kerner could get Wanda a good role. The
production company is Ganell Films, about which Kerner has been unable to find
any information. Wanda has gone to L.A. to try to learn why her part hasn’t yet
happened.
Saul explains that over
time, Kerner has come to owe him over a million dollars—money he paid the agent
to help along Wanda’s career. He suspects Kerner has gambled it away at
“casinos and the like.” But as much as he needs to recoup his losses to Kerner,
Saul needs to know if Wanda has been cheating on him with the agent. He also
knows Barney hates L.A., and is willing to double the usual fee plus a bonus,
also figuring the job will be a quickie: “red-eye out, red-eye back.”
Barney feels for his
friend, but also “knew himself. That no matter how simple his cases were, there
was almost invariably something else that would catch his eye—and his curiosity…a kind of a fatal flaw.” But because both Saul and
Wanda are friends, he curses and takes a flight to Los Angeles.
Having grown up and lived most
of his life in New York City, Barney has never learned to drive. Thus, he must
avail himself of the services of the lovely Melodie Seaver, whom he’s known
from a prior visit to L.A. With her chauffeuring, he stakes out Kerner’s home,
then Kerner at a Rodeo Drive restaurant with Wanda, and later Kerner’s office.
At the latter he observes an attractive woman who emerges and burns some papers,
after which he goes inside to case the office himself and rifle it for some
evidence for his friend and client, Saul Flockman.
When he cautiously returns
to the car, police vehicles and sirens having pierced the vicinity, Melodie
tells him she witnessed the shooting death of the woman whom Barney had earlier
seen outside of Kerner’s office.
What ultimately ensues and keeps
Barney an unhappy professional captive in Cloud- Cockamamie-Land, in part
because of his aforementioned fatal flaw, is his inadvertent embroilment in situations
that involve, among others, the mechanically-skilled brothers Cory and Pete
Bilchek; drug dealer and money-launderer Renaldo Esteban and his crew; fledgling
screenwriter Jonah Whiting, and Homeland Security Agents Vincent Rogers and
George Lippet—all while trying to solve the murder of Phyllis Carridi, wife of
powerful mob boss Angelo Carridi. Caught between Carridi and the cops and D.A.,
and up against a literal deadline,
Barney will need all of his wits to figure out everything that’s going on in
this entertaining rapid-fire amalgam of thriller, whodunit, and screwball
comedy.
The version I read was a
digital advanced reading copy which contains some typos and other errors, the biggest
problem being a plethora of incorrect punctuations. I hope and assume an
editor/proofreader corrected them in the paperback and electronic final
editions.
© 2018 Barry Ergang
Some of Derringer
Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon
and Smashwords.
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