In Lynskey’s unremarkable fourth PI Frank Johnson mystery (after 2008’s Pelham Fell Here
), well-to-do Lois Mercedes asks Johnson to trace her missing husband, a businessman who vanished from his hotel in Ankara. Desperate for funds in the wake of an IRS audit, the investigator agrees to travel from the U.S. to Turkey, where he ends up in the middle of another mystery, the gunshot murder of an attractive hotel attendant. Formulaic plot points like the detective himself falling under suspicion, abductions, and betrayals follow, but Lynskey fails to bring his portrayal of Turkey to life. Nor does he fully develop the internal life of Johnson, a potentially interesting lead character who once almost had his ex whacked. Slang out of the pulp era (“She’d both looks and brains and these days she was a full-figured gal and that was jake by me”) will strike some as jarring in a book set in 2005. (Feb.)
