Linda Barnes: Hardware

Linda Barnes

Hardware

Christina says:

Carlotta Carlyle is a private investigator, but to put food on the table she also drives a cab. Her two jobs mingle when Gloria, the boss of the cab company she works for, hires Carlotta to find out who beats up her cabbies, among them her brother Marvin. Carlotta’s first guess is a fight between big and small cab companies about the sought after medallions, but can’t dig up much on that. She is obviously stepping on somebodies toes, though. And then there is the mysterious ‘Frank’, a friend of her ex-lover Sam Gianelli, who provides her with a computer of unknown origin and doesn’t think twice about breaking into her house.

The most distiguishing feature of HARDWARE is that you never quite know what is going on. This would be perfect for a mystery if used to create suspense. Barnes directs the reader’s attention here and there and I was wondering all the time whether she just can’t create a convincing red herring or had no idea where she wanted to take her own story. Anyway, the mob, the war of the Boston cab companies and a psychotic computer wizard were simply too much of a good thing. The thing to be said in her favor was that although this is a book from the middle of her series and the reader learns about long term developements it doesn’t spoil the book.

What did spoil part of the story for me was the ease with which Carlotta and her friend Roz manipulated the computer and gathered all kind of confidential information from who knows where. The modern PI does it all with a couple of keystrokes, and no previous knowledge was mentioned. But that’s probably just the jealousy of the sourpuss who after a short introduction was not able to perform miracles on the information superhighway.

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Christina Gross

Last changes: 27/04/03