The Desert Look

Jack Ross #2

by Bernard Schopen

Newswoman Miranda Santee lures former Reno private eye Jack Ross out of retirement with a thirty-year-old mystery--what happened to two Vegas show girls, one of whom is Ross's mother, who embezzled thousands of dollars from a mobster and disappeared

Genres: Mystery

261 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1990

About the author

Bernard Schopen received his degrees at the University of Washington and the University of Nevada, Reno. He held faculty positions at TMCC and at St. Anselm's College in New Hampshire before returning to Reno to write and to teach. Since 1995 he has taught Core Humanities courses, and he is now a full-time lecturer in the program. He has taught thousands of students in all three courses, and trained other teachers in the program as well. He designed, and continues to teach, the online versions of all three CH courses for Extended Studies. In Spring 2007 he received the prestigious Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award for the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Science. The prize augmented an earlier significant award: Schopen is an inductee into the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame, an honor recognizing his three Reno detective novels, The Big Silence, The Desert Look, and The Iris Deception, all now available from the University of Nevada Press. When not preparing his now award-winning lectures for Core Humanities, he is at work on another novel, this one set in London.

Reviews

[Melinda Thomas Dworzan]

This was a good book. There were great descriptions of the Nevada desert and cities. The plot was reminiscent of film noire. The plot was a little confusing in the beginning, but wrapped itself up in the end of the book.

[Eric B · Rating 4 out of 5]

First time I've read the author. An enjoyable read....I had a hard time following the development of some of the characters. If you weren't familiar with western Nevada, some of the places being described would mean much. A mixture of real and made up places.

[Dolina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two Las Vegas showgirls stole money skimmed from casinos by mobsters thirty years earlier and disappeared. Reno private eye Jack Ross is asked to find one of them who might be the grandmother of a TV news reporter. The other was Ross's mother, and he wants to learn who killed her. The book has a rather convoluted plot, but there are lyrical descriptions of the desert.

[Stephen Matlock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note that this is not my favorite genre, so my opinion might be biased.

This is a good piece of work about the revelation of a death some 30 years ago in the Nevada desert. A cast of disreputable sorts interacts with each other in the present as well as in the past, and ultimately the true murderer(s) is/are revealed.

I finished the book, but I had a hard time doing so, as the cast of characters was, to me, too great.

*** SPOILER ***

Several of the characters have several names and false pasts. I found it to be too much of a struggle to keep up and somewhere around the half-way mark I stopped trying to keep track of who was who.

I gamely continued but in the end I just couldn't really get into any of the characters. None of them were pleasant, even the protagonist.

There are some moments of lyric beauty in the descriptive text of the Nevada desert, but the text is jumpy and awkward and hard to follow. I found that I struggled to "enjoy" the writing.

This is not a badly written book, I must say. The author is competent in writing in and crafting a plot. I suspect my opinion is weighed more upon my unfamiliarity with the genre. It is highly rated by others, and has even won an award for its genre, so--take this all as my opinion.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: Reno PI Ross is asked by reporter Miranda Santee, Who are these showgirls from thirty years ago? The dead one was his mother.