Ah, Treachery -- Ross Thomas

I've expressed my admiration for Ross Thomas so often that there's no need doing it again. But I will, anyway. He's one of my favorite writers of "thrillers" or whatever it is that he wrote. He did it as well as anybody ever did, or will, at least for me. Sadly, Ah, Treachery was the last book that Thomas ever wrote. Which leads me to this digression.

I long ago discovered that my idiosyncratic reading tastes weren't always shared by others. All I do here on the blog is tell you how I feel about things. You might disagree. Don't go out and spend your hard-earned dough for a book just because I liked it. You might find yourself thinking that I owe you, and we wouldn't want that.

Now back to our regularly scheduled review. Edd (Twodees) Partain assaulted a fellow officer in El Salvador, where they were part of an illegal operation that a couple of bad guys want to be completely forgotten. And where Partain's Salvadoran wife is "disappeared." Partain is working as a sort of bodyguard for Millicent Altford, who's discovered that $1.2 million in under-the-table campaign money has gone missing from her safe. The plot gets complicated after that. There's murder and conniving and, of course, treachery. Lots of treachery. Not to mention genuine wit and plenty of irony. Partain manages to figure everything out in the end, the way Thomas's heroes do, but there's never really a happy ending in a Thomas novel. An air of sadness hangs over everything, or it seems that way to me. I don't think I'll ever stop re-reading Thomas's books. I just wish he'd hung around longer and written a lot more of them.