The Vanishing Smile - Hardcover

The eighth fast-paced, witty mystery starring Seattle sleuth Thomas Black finds Black at the angry center of a ring of ex-cons, prostitutes, other detectives, and a mysterious assailant with a baseball bat, all linked by an evil thread. By the author of The Portland Laugher.

, author of The Portland Laugher and other novels featuring Seattle private eye Thomas Black, has been hailed by Aaron Elkins as "a writer's writer--a master of witty dialogue; clever, complex plotting; and lucid, meaty prose in the best tradition of American crime fiction." Now, in The Vanishing Smile, a fateful, fatal encounter on a rain-swept highway throws Black into a deadly investigation.
Marian Wright is an amateur sleuth in the employ of two attractive young women eager to catch up with their no-account ex-lovers. Spry and seventyish, Marian has all the resourcefulness of a professional gumshoe, and the relentlessness of a woman with a score of her own to settle. When Marian's investigation ends abruptly and ferociously--with Thomas Black and his estranged friend Kathy Birchfield as eyewitnesses--Thomas has a new case on his hands.
Picking up the pieces of Marian Wright's search for her clients' rogue boyfriends, Thomas encounters a network of people--from ex-cons to pros