From Publishers Weekly
She's feisty, independent and aggressive, and in her third appearance (after By Evil Means) Phoebe Siegel, a Billings, Mont., PI, is the driving force in a mystery that never lets up. Potential gubernatorial candidate Bob Maitland has asked Phoebe to look into the 25-year-old unsolved murder of his wife, heiress Ellen Dahl Maitland. Phoebe, often uncannily prescient, correctly assumes that the glib and opportunistic pol has another agenda and, instead, agrees to help an impoverished parolee, Frank Chillman, whose sister, a prostitute, had been bludgeoned to death 24 hours after Ellen was murdered. Frank is convinced that the two killings are connected. Unfortunately, he's murdered before he can speak further with Phoebe. But Phoebe, with grit and considerable courage (she barely escapes several murder attempts), pieces together a string of pungent interviews that suggest a long-lived and sinister conspiracy. Her wide circle of friends (Maggie, an earthy lawyer; deputy sheriff Kyle Old Wolf, an intriguing romantic prospect; Dougie, a repellent but valuable snitch) are energetic and vividly portrayed. Her fractious but caring Catholic-Jewish family fills her with just the right amount of guilt. This mystery, nicely balanced between wit and terror, owes much to its outspoken heroine, whose motto, "Investigations with an Attitude," says it all. Mystery Guild featured alternate; author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Approached by a well-known gubernatorial candidate-to-be, series sleuth Phoebe Siegel, last seen in The Killing of Mandy Brown (LJ 4/1/94), considers investigating the years-old unsolved murder of the man's errant heiress wife. She soon uncovers ties to another murder. Sudden violence follows each discovery, especially when Phoebe pursues the political angle. Well-written prose, surprising complications, and a tough heroine in tough terrain. Highly recommended.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Bob Maitland is preparing his run for the governorship of Montana, but there's a nagging little detail in his past: 27 years ago, his wife was brutally murdered. He hires private investigator Phoebe Siegel to find the killer, but Siegel senses an ulterior motive--the candidate may be using the murder to generate sympathy. When a man who claims to have information about the killing is himself murdered, and Siegel is the target of a sniper's bullet, it's clear that someone doesn't want the killer found. The third Siegel novel builds steadily on the promise of the first two. It's a portrait of a modern single woman as well as a mystery. Siegel has to cope with her loneliness, her own family crises, and her growing fondness for a local cop. In addition, she feels a sisterly empathy for the murder victim, who deserved a better fate than to be remembered only in terms of a tawdry political campaign nearly three decades after the terror of her death. Siegel has become an outstanding heroine, and this is her finest outing yet. Wes Lukowsky


From Kirkus Reviews
Billings, Montana, during a killer winter is the setting of this third Phoebe Siegel outing (The Killing of Monday Brown, 1994, etc.), with the contemporary West once again providing a charismatic venue for violence. Gubernatorial candidate Bob Maitland approaches p.i. Siegel before the upcoming election: He hopes to clear his reputation once and for all of the murder of his wealthy wife, found prostitutionally clad and terminally battered in a motel of ill-repute 27 years before. Phoebe soon parts ways with Maitland, a self-serving sleaze, but now--fortified by independent means to accompany her independent attitude--she pursues without client the case of the enigmatic Ellen Dahl Maitland, heiress to old money and old evil. Gathering information from an ex-con and a professional snitch--both soon murdered--and a retired madam who continues to thrive, Phoebe finally joins forces with her dad's old police partner. Her efforts will reveal the truth without quite achieving justice. Between professional challenges, however, Phoebe belts Nyquil and has scraps with mom, siblings, and boyfriend in a way that threatens to undercut a denouement with some of the majesty of Ross Macdonald. An overbusy story, with an overbearing heroine, is redeemed by genuine readability and wit--plus an atmosphere that makes it a natural between the covers. Prowell's tour of snow-blasted Billings puts it most colorfully on the map of our collective imagination. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Tough as barbed wire and just as tightly strung, Phoebe Siegel is a cop turned private detective with too much past, too much family, and a talent for diving too deep into a case.Bob Maitland is the golden boy of Montana politics, poised to run for governor. There's just one loose end in his life--the 27-year-old killing of his heiress
wife, Ellen, which was never solved. Maitland wants Phoebe Siegel to find the long-missing construction worker who either committed or witnessed the murder. Phoebe, no fan of Maitland's style, promises only to think it over. After Maitland trumpets their supposed agreement to the press, Phoebe hears from another potential client. Frank Chillman swears Ellen Maitland's murder and the murder of his prostitute sister, one day later, are related. Before Phoebe can even check out his story, he's found shot to death. With a dead man for a client, she plunges into the case, trying to find the connection between a rich wallflower and a hard-luck call girl who died three decades ago. The trail is long cold, but it heats up quickly as someone starts stalking Phoebe, with another killing in mind....


From the Publisher
"Phoebe [is] one of the most endearing private eyes in the genre....An exciting ride."
"Powerful...In the class of female private eyes, with outstanding authors such as Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky, Prowell now takes top marks."
"Phoebe's smart enough to track down the killer, tough enough to take a bullet, and still nice enough to retreat home to her mother to recuperate."
"A rip-roaring read."

From the Inside Flap
Tough as barbed wire and just as tightly strung, Phoebe Siegel is a cop turned private detective with too much past, too much family, and a talent for diving too deep into a case.

Bob Maitland is the golden boy of Montana politics, poised to run for governor.  There's just one loose end in his life--the 27-year-old killing of his heiress
wife, Ellen, which was never solved.  Maitland wants Phoebe Siegel to find the long-missing construction worker who either committed or witnessed the murder.  Phoebe, no fan of Maitland's style, promises only to think it over.  After Maitland trumpets their supposed agreement to the press, Phoebe hears from another potential client.  Frank Chillman swears Ellen Maitland's murder and the murder of his prostitute sister, one day later, are related.  Before Phoebe can even check out his story, he's found shot to death.  With a dead man for a client, she plunges into the case, trying to find the connection between a rich wallflower and a hard-luck call girl who died three decades ago.  The trail is long cold, but it heats up quickly as someone starts stalking Phoebe, with another killing in mind....


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I'd been selective about the cases I was willing to commit to.  When you rub up against or jump into the middle of someone else's life, you end up dealing with the sludge of human misery.  Some of it sticks.  Investigators get dirty. To maintain a balance you have to protect yourself, keep your edge, form no opinions until you have all the facts.  Problem was, I was already forming an opinion about Bob Maitland.  One little statement threw me, turned me off.  He had referred to his wife, murdered wife, as "Ellen, the daughter."

I picked up the box he had brought in with him and piled the folders on my desk as I mulled it over.  Why, after this long, could the memory of Ellen Dahl Maitland bring tears to his eyes but miss the mark on what came from between his lips?

I opened the first file and looked into the face of a younger Bob Maitland, his face frozen in grief, his lips formed in a silent no that screamed off the page.  Disembodied hands, product of a poor crop job, clutched both of Maitland's shoulders as he strained forward.  The headline read:

ELLEN DAHL MAITLAND FOUND BRUTALLY SLAIN IN SOUTHSIDE MOTEL

It was enough to start the most pious of tongues wagging with speculation.  The Dahl name placed in a headline with a southside motel was scandal at its best. The meat of the article was lean on details; her body was found, identified by Maitland, no further details available, and Rosella Dahl was in seclusion.

Other photos, neatly clipped and dated in pen, showed the motel, the Dahl mansion, the chief of police fending off the press in front of the courthouse, the victim.  I had no idea what the murder statistics were back in 1968, but this particular murder must have rocked the state.  I scanned my memory for what I knew of the Dahl family and found very little.  The house was another story.

Everyone in town knew it had been designed by the same architect that designed the Dakota apartment building and the Plaza Hotel in New York City.  Any Billings tour guide knew the name Henry James Hardenbergh.  It was a small sidebar in Montana's history that spoke of better days and separated the old money from the new.  I opened the next file.  A full-page spread, folded neatly in quarters, gave a history of the Dahl family.

Willard Dahl, a rounder with an eye for the women, won the house in a poker game shortly after it was built.  A cattleman who never spent a night on the plains, he lived long enough to spawn a son, Willard II, and leave a widow in the driver's seat of the Dahl fortune.  Willard II was sent out of state to schools in the East, came home an attorney with a proper Bostonian wife on his arm, and laid claim to the family legacy.  The Dahl law firm was founded.  When Willard III was but a babe in arms, Willard II decided to blow a clot in his brain and become the most celebrated coitus interruptus in Billings's brothel history.  The press must have loved it.  Willard III eventually found his way into the arms of an inferior (his mother refused to attend the wedding) by the name of Rosella Moore.  He moved his new bride into Dahl's House the same day Mother Dahl moved into the carriage house.

There were more moves to come.  Willard III moved into the great beyond, victim of a gun-cleaning accident; there was some speculation that had he not been trying to clean the barrel of a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun with his tongue, he would have lived to see his daughter Ellen grow to womanhood.  Oddly, Mother Dahl moved from the carriage house back into the big house the day of Willard's funeral.  It ended there.

The article went on to list the acts of charity with which Rosella anointed the less fortunate on every major holiday.  She furnished three different parks in Billings with play equipment, set up several different scholarships for promising but indigent high school students through the years, and refused to give interviews.  Mother Dahl eventually died of natural causes and moved permanently out of the house.

I moved on to the next file.  Staring up at me, captured for an eternity in an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo, was Ellen Dahl Maitland.  It took me off guard.  Her lackluster eyes focused on mine.  She was hauntingly plain, with features that were unremarkable in every sense of the word.  Her straight, obviously dark, long hair framed her face.  Her bangs were cut straight across and hung low enough to conceal her eyebrows.  She wasn't homely, she wasn't pretty.  She just was.  She wasn't smiling, nor was she frowning.  She just was.  It was the look of the vanquished, the look of someone who long ago bowed before life and said, "Do with me what you will," and life had taken her up on it.

Now she wasn't.  But she had me.  It may have been the only time she had anyone.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Ellen Dahl Maitland's battered body was found in a hot-sheet motel, it created a minor scandal, the kind that Dahl money and power helped quiet quickly. A suspect was arrested: he skipped bond and was never heard from again. And there were those who thought Ellen's less-than-loving husband, Robert Maitland, might have had something to do with the murder, but nothing was ever proven. Still, the rumors were more than a petty annoyance, especially now that Maitland has decided to make his run for the governor's mansion. As he's done in the past Maitland sees an opportunity to make political hay out of Ellen's death and that's when he turns to Phoebe Siegel.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

She's feisty, independent and aggressive, and in her third appearance (after By Evil Means) Phoebe Siegel, a Billings, Mont., PI, is the driving force in a mystery that never lets up. Potential gubernatorial candidate Bob Maitland has asked Phoebe to look into the 25-year-old unsolved murder of his wife, heiress Ellen Dahl Maitland. Phoebe, often uncannily prescient, correctly assumes that the glib and opportunistic pol has another agenda and, instead, agrees to help an impoverished parolee, Frank Chillman, whose sister, a prostitute, had been bludgeoned to death 24 hours after Ellen was murdered. Frank is convinced that the two killings are connected. Unfortunately, he's murdered before he can speak further with Phoebe. But Phoebe, with grit and considerable courage (she barely escapes several murder attempts), pieces together a string of pungent interviews that suggest a long-lived and sinister conspiracy. Her wide circle of friends (Maggie, an earthy lawyer; deputy sheriff Kyle Old Wolf, an intriguing romantic prospect; Dougie, a repellent but valuable snitch) are energetic and vividly portrayed. Her fractious but caring Catholic-Jewish family fills her with just the right amount of guilt. This mystery, nicely balanced between wit and terror, owes much to its outspoken heroine, whose motto, "Investigations with an Attitude," says it all. Mystery Guild featured alternate; author tour. (July)

Library Journal

Approached by a well-known gubernatorial candidate-to-be, series sleuth Phoebe Siegel, last seen in The Killing of Mandy Brown (LJ 4/1/94), considers investigating the years-old unsolved murder of the man's errant heiress wife. She soon uncovers ties to another murder. Sudden violence follows each discovery, especially when Phoebe pursues the political angle. Well-written prose, surprising complications, and a tough heroine in tough terrain. Highly recommended.

BookList - Wes Lukowsky