Red Rosa: #13 in the Edgar Award-winning Dan Fortune mystery series

A lot of years ago I read a science fiction story that sucked me in with the sweeping and very real like history the author (who for the life of me I can't remember) painted of a planet that had been colonized by humans and the struggle the beings that lived there had to go through to finally gain equality with their human occupiers. The reason the planet's history and the struggle for equality seemed so real is because it was. The author had taken the Kenyan Mau Mau Rebellion, changed the names to protect the innocent and moved the local to another solar system. At first I thought what a cheeky, cheating so and so. Of course unless you'd read Robert Rurak, were a history buff or a Kenyan, how would you know? Then after I thought about it a bit, I reread the book, gaining more and more admiration for what the author had done with every page. Could it be that there was more than just a simple scifi story going on? Was he perhaps trying to subtly tell his readers a few simple truths about oppressors and the oppressed? Of course he was. But what has that go to do with a story about Dan Fortune, Private Eye, that takes place on good old planet Earth? Not much, except that Michael Collins has used the same device here to tell more than a story, to deliver a message. At least that's the way I see it. Although the book starts out to be about Red Rosa, an eighty-eight-year-old commie bag lady who lives in a seedy hotel in New York and who harangues and annoys any and all who will listen to her diatribe, it moves on to be about Isaiah "the Wind" Monroe, a promising black athlete with radical views, who is framed for a murder he didn't commit by the cops in Patterson, New Jersey. There is even a singer trying to raise public's awareness about his plight, though she's a girl and not Bob Dylan. The "Wind" can only be a thinly disguised version of Reuben "Hurricane" Carter, the boxer who was framed by the real Patterson cops and immortalized in Mr. Dylan's song "Hurricane." Collins even likens another black man, who was the subject of another of Dylan's songs, to Isaiah Monroe, George Jackson, the unfortunate man who was gunned down during what many of us to believe was a phony jail break. Like that unknown scifi book I mentioned above, RED ROSA is more than just a story. It's impossible to read it and not come away with a sense of shame about how some of us in the family of man have treated others, are still treating others. In my opinion if ever a P.I. book deserved five stars, this is the one.

Rosa Gruenfeld is a just a short rung or two in life above being a homeless bag lady. She lives at the Oneida Hotel which houses a motley crew of misfits, most like Rosa, barely getting by. She is well know in her New York neighborhood, because she's an ardent communist who is always handing out pamphlets, preaching to any who will listen. She is eighty-eight and a harmless oddball. And she's been shot for no apparent reason. Rosa's granddaughter, Arlene called Lenny, hires Dan Fortune, one-armed private eye to find out who did it.Fortune calls on Rosa's son, Lenny's father. He loathes his mother, loathes what she stands for and loathed the three husbands she's out lived, but Fortune doesn't believe he shot his mother. In fact Fortune draws a blank at every turn, but he doggedly pursues those that knew Rosa and he digs into her past.Meanwhile an attempt is made on her life in the hospital and the police officer guarding her is killed. Then there is still another attempt. What could this old and incapacitated woman possibly have done to cause someone to want her dead so badly? Had she seen something she shouldn't have? Does she know something about her former communist associates? Or does it have something to do with the convicted killer, a black radical, that her granddaughter is trying to get out of prison? And why do the men who seem to be following Fortune look an awful lot like cops? And why does the FBI care? A lot of questions and as Fortune finds the answers to each one, he comes closer and closer to being a target himself, until finally the killer or killers want Fortune dead just as badly as they seem to want to eliminate Red Rosa.This is still another Dan Fortune mystery that I couldn't put down. Sometimes I find myself gritting my teeth at the situations Fortune finds himself in. Sometimes I want to shout at him and oftentimes I feel like slapping myself up side the head when he seizes on a scrap of information that I missed. Collins just keeps confounding me as I follow along with his very likable, sometimes annoying P.I. Five stars for this one from me.Reviewed by Vesta Irene