Vixen -- Bill Pronzini

Vixen is billed (no pun intended) as a "Nameless Detective Novel," but we fans of the series know that Nameless has had a name ever since Twospot.  Not that it matters.  We'll just call him Nameless.

Nameless tells us in a brief prologue that before the case he's about to relate, he'd never run into a genuine femme fatale, one of those "whose brand of evil would be like nothing I could ever have imagined."  This time, though, he does.

Cory Beckett is her name, and the case starts off simply enough.  She wants Nameless and his agency to find her brother, who's jumped bail in a the case of a stolen necklace.  She doesn't want anyone to speak to her brother, though, when he's found.  She just wants to be informed of his location.   Things don't work out that way.  To say that complications ensue would be understating the case, and the story gets darker as it goes along, all the way to the end, which is very dark, indeed.

At the same time we read the story about Cory Beckett, we also get other stories about Nameless's family, about Jake Runyon, about a man named Frank Chaleen.  Pronzini brings all this in with his usual style and skill, and the stories add a deceptive depth to the proceedings, which, by the way, are concluded in about the same length as a Gold Medal novel from the 1950s.  It's a pleasure to read a book that's not padded out to doorstop size yet which has enough plot to satisfy anybody.  The Nameless series is one of the best private-eye series ever written, and Vixen is a fine addition to the canon.