But I Wouldn't Want to Die There (Jenny Cain Mysteries, No. 8) - Hardcover

Jenny Cain, the author's energetic, emotionally vulnerable heroine (Generous Death, etc.), ex-director of a charitable foundation in Port Frederick, Massachusetts, has lost her New York friend Carol Margolis, killed by a street mugger. Carol worked for the Hart Foundation, and now her boss wants Jenny to take over Carol's projects--an idea not happily received by Jenny's policeman husband Geof. Arriving in New York, Jenny stays in Carol's apartment, in a building full of aging eccentrics, run by Jed Goodman, 19-year-old son of the loony landlady. She meets Carol's separated husband Steve, an unprosperous musician whose Brooklyn in-laws are certain he arranged Carol's demise. Steve wants Jenny to plead his innocence to them, but that's only the start of her problems. Carol had left behind a series of unresolved Foundation tangles--heavy donor Malcolm Lloyd, threatening to sue for return of his money; a theater group waiting penniless for their inexplicably overdue grant check; and an illiteracy program run by overwrought Frenchman Andrei Bolen in the dankest of slums. Jenny takes it all on--alternating between fear of the city and its weirdos and exhilaration at its vibrant pace and inexhaustible wonders--until Carol's murderer is unmasked and other matters are resolved, including her own future career. Robust, funny, touching, and engrossing all the way: Pickard peaks here. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the eighth Jenny Cain mystery, Anthony and Agatha Awards-winner Pickard ( I.O.U. ) takes the former charitable foundation director from her home and husband in Port Frederick, Mass., to her beloved Big Apple. Unfortunately, the trip is precipitated by the stabbing death of Jenny's friend Carol Margolis and a plea for help from the foundation Carol worked for that desperately needs an interim director. As assuredly depicted by Pickard, Jenny remains both canny and innocent while confronting such urban realities as a wildly diverse series of cab drivers, a theater company with a surprising approach to Shakespeare and her friend's nasty landlady. Jenny listens to Carol's parents who, in an eloquent passage of gently articulated grief, blame their daughter's death on her deadbeat musician husband. At the foundation, she deals with a couple of angry philanthropists, a woman who runs a halfway house for felons and a suave Frenchman with a direct and novel way of getting inner-city kids to read. All the well-placed clues are eventually drawn together, but not before Jenny has braved the subway, sampled her first Cambodian food and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge under her own steam. A pleasure from start to finish.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.