Author Description

Product DescriptionStreet-smart reporter Sam Dean finds himself embroiled in another whodunit when the television producer who offers Dean the onscreen job of investigating a murder is himself murdered, leaving Dean to solve both mysteries.Amazon.com ReviewSam Dean is one of the most interesting characters in recent mystery fiction--a black freelance journalist and amateur detective living in London, who gives us the chance to see a decidedly different side of British life than the ones we usually get in genre fiction. When a documentary about a convicted murderer begins to take on a dangerous life of its own, Dean is drafted by his film-maker friend to find out why. This allows Sam to do some digging into his own life as well as the chances his teenage son has of finding success and happiness.From BooklistBlack investigative reporter Sam Dean is hired to find the missing lover of a married woman who was brutally murdered. Independent TV producer Wyndham Davis is an old colleague who is trying to launch a tabloid TV series; he's not really interested in who murdered the woman--her husband has already been charged with the crime--but he is intent on spreading enough sensationalistic innuendo to snare a contract and a steady paycheck. Dean has serious misgivings about why he's been hired: Is it because the suspect is black? Or is Davis trying to use Dean's credibility to lend cache to a sleazy production? Either way, the reporter is soon drawn into the search, which takes him from a poverty-stricken London housing estate to the posh offices of a TV network executive. Phillips' grimly realistic novel offers vivid descriptions of London's mean streets; a lean, workmanlike prose style; and a clear grasp of the murky motives that often drive people to commit desperate acts.Joanne WilkinsonFrom Kirkus ReviewsEven before he's found out why an old friend, TV producer Wyndham Davis, has asked him to pop over, rolling-stone London journalist Sam Dean's confronted with a corpse: a production assistant knifed outside the apartment where Davis is taping an interview for a true-crime program he's trying to sell. Inside the apartment, things aren't going much better: Davis's plan to exculpate Leon Ross, convicted of hacking his wife and young daughter to death, is foundering with the disappearance of Helen Ross's half-caste boyfriend Amaryll Johnson. ``I never liked being brought in to do the black stuff,'' grumbles Dean, but he agrees to go hunting for Johnson. What he finds along the way is a world of rapacious creditors, abandoned lovers, and casually disintegrating families--as well as his own dangerously rekindled affair with Davis's importunate wife Sarah, who's learned quite a few new tricks since their long-ago romance, not to mention some sordid secrets about the TV production crew that's trying to one- up the justice system. It's only a matter of time before Sam's thrown off the case and has to continue on his own, ``for revenge, or because I'm obsessed, or because I can't think of anything else to do, or because I'm in selfless pursuit of the truth.'' The jagged, propulsive rhythms of Phillips's writing carry Sam's fourth case (Point of Darkness, 1995, etc.) over the bogs of overplotted intrigue. --Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.