Zig Zag Man

I always thought that Marvin H. Albert was one of the better detective novelists who wrote during the 80s and 90s, and this, his last-but-one Stone Angel novel, is a very very good book. It's not over-long (230 pages) and the author keeps the premise and the plot on track. There's no extraneous events occurring during the course of the book: instead, it's fun and entertaining detective novel stuff from page one on. Sawyer, Albert's main character here, is a rough-and-tumble private eye in France. He lives on the Riviera, but works also in Paris. He's half-French and half-American, and has a German partner. In this book, his girlfriend, a French lawyer, brings him a client. The young woman was kidnapped 8 years ago, and though she was ransomed back to her parents, it took the kidnappers cutting off two of her fingers before her father saw reason and actually paid the ransom. Now an adult, almost, the young woman who was once kidnapped saw and heard a man in a Paris hotel lobby who she swears is one of the kidnappers. She wants Sawyer to find the man, and make him pay for what he did to her. The rest of the plot is complex, involved, and absorbing. I would be doing you a disservice if I repeated any portion of it. Suffice to say it's entertaining and suspenseful, and the ending is amusing. I highly recommend this book. Frankly, as I said to start: I don't think Albert got the respect he deserved.