Monday, October 19, 2009

The Great California Game



# 14 The Great California Game (©1991)

Genre: Mystery
Location: California, USA
The Great California Game (1991), a result of Gash's visit to the United States, is one of the author's weaker efforts, mainly because his treatment of American lingo and social interaction rings false. What works well in a contained environment goes out of control as Lovejoy tackles an international antiques conspiracy. Lovejoy, fleeing Hong Kong, tends bar in a Manhattan eatery, until an opportunity to wait tables at an expensive dinner party gives him a chance to reveal his expertise: recognition of a guest's diamonds as fake and of an abused old table as a valuable antique. The party hosts entangle him in extortion and cons that result in the death of a fellow bartender. Joining forces with a streetwise eight-year-old boy and his down-and-out mother, a prostitute, Lovejoy heads for Malibu in hopes of raising sufficient backing to participate in a grand-scale gambling tournament with monumental stakes. He finds himself disturbed at the idea of antiques treated as commodities, however, and paves the way for a huge explosion that does in the game and its more-sinister players. Though federal agents engaged in a sting operation try to further involve him in exposing other antiques scams, Lovejoy, mother, and child flee to Kansas. Far from the soil that nurtures his personality and the class differences that compel his behavior, even Lovejoy's narration rings hollow in this novel.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 276: British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1960. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Gina Macdonald, Nicholls State University. Gale Group, 2003. pp. 160-174.

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