Hard Light (A Maggie MacGowen Mystery)

by Wendy Hornsby

Overview

Filmmaker and amateur sleuth Maggie MacGowen is approached by a beautiful Vietnamese expatriate to find a scholar who escaped from Vietnam after the war, and abruptly disappeared. Also missing from Vietnam is a fortune in art which vanished around the same time as the scholar. Maggie reluctantly agrees to take the case, but her only link with the Vietnamese community is her ex-husband, who used to conduct business in Vietnam. Now the web of intrigue, lies, and betrayals--surrounding the case for two decades--is about to trap everyone it touches, Maggie, her ex-husband, and even her daughter!

77TH Street Requiem was chosen as one of the best books of 1995 by Publishers Weekly The Dutton hardcover edition of 77TH Street Requiem received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist Wendy Hornsby is an Edgar Award-winning author Hornsby's Maggie MacGowen character has been critically acclaimed as one of today's best-loved female sleuths

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525940678
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/01/1997
Series:	Maggie MacGowen Mystery Series
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.76(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.09(d)

Table of Contents

Editorial Reviews

In her fifth adventure, documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen (77th Street Requiem, etc.) is caught up in an intricate and long-reaching web of family problems. With her lover, LAPD detective Mike Flint, only months away from retirement and burnt out from the juvenile offenders he constantly arrests, Maggie, who has recently had a miscarriage, becomes just as disenchanted with the bleeding-heart stories of criminal youths and their dysfunctional families that she is expected to produce for her TV network bosses. After her old friend Khanh Nguyen is hurt when her home is invaded, Maggie agrees to track down the Vietnamese man who attacked her and find out why the Khanh's former friend would beat her. Meanwhile, she's busy trying to sell her San Francisco house while Mike works at placing his alcoholic father in another treatment center. As she questions people and uses her network of informants to locate Khanh's assailant, Maggie is stunned to learn that her ex-husband, Scott, was involved when Khanh and others smuggled Vietnamese museum treasures out of the country during the war. Delving into the circuitous route that the treasures have taken and finally understanding how many people are looking for the artifacts, she ends up endangering both herself and her extended family. The familial twists and turns occasionally become too obscure for the reader to follow, but Hornsby's fluent style carries this story to its satisfying conclusion. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen (Bad Intent, LJ 4/15/94) decides to sell her San Francisco houseall she has left from a long-dead marriage. Murder claims the would-be new owner (a long-time client of her ex-husband) and then the ex-husband himself, so Maggie looks for the connection. A winning series.

Library Journal

Documentarist Maggie MacGowen has just decided to turn her latest film, a study of Los Angeles kids gone wrong, from another pro forma denunciation of the uncaring system that failed the kids to an unsparing look at the teens who tortured and killed Pedro Alvaro, the gardener who, flush with his paycheck, tried to pick up a pair of teenaged welfare mothers. It's a big change and a big commitment, and she doesn't need the unsettling news that she's just had a cash offer on the house she once shared with her magnetic, untrustworthy husband Scotty back in San Francisco. The time is right to sell the house, since Maggie's dancing daughter Casey is getting ready to move out, and Maggie's squeeze, Mike Flint of the LAPD, is only 67 days from the new horizons of retirement. But the sale doesn't feel quite right, maybe because Scotty pops up and appeals to Maggie to sell it to him, maybe because some of Scotty's most suspicious old friends from Vietnam have been making news themselves. Khanh Nguyen has just been robbed by her cousin (though he never reported a robbery to the police, and the undocumented, accused Bao Ngo has vanished without leaving footprints on a single database), and Minh Tam, the cousin she sent Maggie looking for after the robbery, has disappeared too. What's going on here will be obvious to everybody but Maggie, who's understandably distracted by all those domestic shakeups. What's meant to be the main mystery in Maggie's fifth case (77th Street Requiem, 1995, etc.) is shoveled mostly into the last few chapters, completely upstaged by the calmly horrific series of confessions documenting the Pedro Alvaro killing.

Kirkus Reviews