Cold Smoked - Hardcover

Besides the Workplace Mysteries, K. K. Beck is the author of a biography, a short-story collection, 2 YA mysteries, a 3-book series (Iris Cooper), a 4-book series (Jane da Silva), and 6 standalone mysteries. Her stories have been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards. She also writes under her full name, Kathrine Beck.

As readers familiar with her first three appearances know, Seattle's Jane da Silva (A Hopeless Case) is the beneficiary of a loopy trust: she gets money from her uncle's estate as long as she solves crimes for people who can't afford to hire a PI. Once through the slow opening chapters, readers will hook onto a sharp-witted puzzler with an abundance of red herrings (and salmon and cod) that will keep them guessing to the last page. Having taken a gig as a lounge singer in a tacky local hotel, Jane is entertaining a group from the salmon industry, in town for the international seafood show, when the earnest young reporter for Seafood Now bursts into the room screaming that there's a dead woman in her bathtub. Jane's subsequent investigation takes her to Norway and the Shetland Islands. Throughout, Jane remains good-natured while enjoying the absurdity around her as Beck offers a worldly tour of the fishing industry and environmental shenanigans before concluding this solid work with an unexpected, gleefully cynical climax.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.