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Sammy Golden/Father Shanley Mysteries #3
Broken Doll
Million dollar heiress is kidnapped by an unusual pair—a blonde and aex-con—who demand ransom or they will make sure death strikes their victim! Electrifying, terrifying, spine-tingling, Red-hot mystery thriller by the incomparable Jack Webb, author of the best-selling mysteries The Big Sin , The Naked Angel , and The Damned Lovely .
Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 16, 2025
In “The Broken Doll,” Webb takes the title quite literally and it refers to a broken doll left behind when ten-year-old Teresa is kidnapped from right in front of her father’s home in Royal Heights (Webb’s version of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights). “Her skin was like the dusky Virgin’s at Tepeyac and she had eyes as softly dark as the glove-gray dove’s. Her name was Teresa Bienvenida, and she had been playing with three small dolls in the shade of a pepper tree before the one-story frame house of her father, Pablo, when the “snatch” was made.” Her widowed father Pablo Bienvenida recently came into a fortune when his estranged brother who he hadn’t spoken to in twenty years left him an oil field in Texas. Now, a band of three hardened kidnappers want to get their hands on a quarter million of that money in cold hard cash and they want Father Joseph Shanley as their go-between.
The kidnappers are Harry, Doll, and Frank Ortega. Frankie muses: “One thing was bad, though, and Harry should have known it. Harry’s woman. That tight sweater, those tight pants, the perfume on her. Couldn’t Harry smell trouble? She had been all right today. He had to admit that. But how would she be when the big clinch came? The pay-off. The touch-and-go time when everything had to click.” Harry has the brains and the go-to-hell attitude and he wouldn’t put up with anything. The thought was that Frankie could stand in for the girl’s father if anyone looked closely.
As coincidences go, Sergeant Sammy Golden nearly stumbled on the whole caper when he takes a walk on the beach and unknowingly walks right by the closed-up beach house where the girl was being kept and almost meets Harry and Doll: “As he plodded through the hot sand a couple came from between a derrick and a house facing on the beach. Even at fifty yards, you couldn’t miss the blonde, not if you had a taste for the overbuilt queens of the burlesque runway. Inside and outside of the taut black Lastex suit she walked like that, even in the sand on tilted wedges which scarcely could pass for beach sandals. She was past the age to have them chanting in the first ten rows, but she had kept her figure and knew what she had. There had been a time, Sammy thought, when that sort of thing had got through to him. Now it was past, but the stuff was there, coming toward him like part of an onstage routine, and he couldn’t help remembering. The man with her was something else again, lean and hard and alert rather like a dangerous watch dog. Maybe with a woman like this, you learned to be like that.”
Golden thinks he recognizes a guy on a nearby street and a brunette bathing in the beach calls him by name, but he has no idea who she is. Both will later figure prominently as Golden, investigating a suicide attempt, stumbles on this pair of old acquaintances right around the corner from the kidnapper’ hideaway.
Golden and Father Shanley are working their own separate paths in this novel with Shanley even refusing to see his best friend. We are told they had no been friends for four or five years. Of course, by the end, it takes the two of them working together to save the day.
The kidnappers are Harry, Doll, and Frank Ortega. Frankie muses: “One thing was bad, though, and Harry should have known it. Harry’s woman. That tight sweater, those tight pants, the perfume on her. Couldn’t Harry smell trouble? She had been all right today. He had to admit that. But how would she be when the big clinch came? The pay-off. The touch-and-go time when everything had to click.” Harry has the brains and the go-to-hell attitude and he wouldn’t put up with anything. The thought was that Frankie could stand in for the girl’s father if anyone looked closely.
As coincidences go, Sergeant Sammy Golden nearly stumbled on the whole caper when he takes a walk on the beach and unknowingly walks right by the closed-up beach house where the girl was being kept and almost meets Harry and Doll: “As he plodded through the hot sand a couple came from between a derrick and a house facing on the beach. Even at fifty yards, you couldn’t miss the blonde, not if you had a taste for the overbuilt queens of the burlesque runway. Inside and outside of the taut black Lastex suit she walked like that, even in the sand on tilted wedges which scarcely could pass for beach sandals. She was past the age to have them chanting in the first ten rows, but she had kept her figure and knew what she had. There had been a time, Sammy thought, when that sort of thing had got through to him. Now it was past, but the stuff was there, coming toward him like part of an onstage routine, and he couldn’t help remembering. The man with her was something else again, lean and hard and alert rather like a dangerous watch dog. Maybe with a woman like this, you learned to be like that.”
Golden thinks he recognizes a guy on a nearby street and a brunette bathing in the beach calls him by name, but he has no idea who she is. Both will later figure prominently as Golden, investigating a suicide attempt, stumbles on this pair of old acquaintances right around the corner from the kidnapper’ hideaway.
Golden and Father Shanley are working their own separate paths in this novel with Shanley even refusing to see his best friend. We are told they had no been friends for four or five years. Of course, by the end, it takes the two of them working together to save the day.
September 16, 2018
Fourth in the series, and no less entertaining for it. A few repetitious nods are made to previous entries, but the plot moves along quickly and to a satisfying conclusion, once again highlighting the unlikely pairing of a Catholic priest and a Jewish detective against the troubles of a Hispanic community in Los Angeles.
August 27, 2017
When an heiress is kidnapped by an unusual pair of kidnappers, looking for a ransom, everything is turned upside down. This book is an amazing look inside crime and written by the guy from Dragnet.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews