Sugar Skull by
Denise Hamilton hbk out September 04 Published by Orion at £17.99
Like Michael Connelly, Denise Hamilton has worked as a journalist on the LA
Times. She, for ten years. It was apparently there that she became interested in the
curious circumstances that might lead an unfortunate victim to stand out from the
large weekly toll of deaths in LA, especially when the mercury climbed into triple
digits.
So in Sugar Skull, we have young sassy reporter, Eve Diamond, working in
the LA Times office when Vincent Chevalier rushes in. He can't convince the police
to help him find his missing daughter, Isabel, so he enlists Eve's aid. He suspects
Isabel is in a squat with boyfriend Finch. Eve is suspicious of Chevalier, but follows
him and together they find the body of his daughter. It seems she is one of a group of
well-to-do girls who find excitement in consorting with the down-and-outs living in
squats. Paolo Dellaviglia Langdon, son of Venus and Carter Landon III, has also been
involved in this pursuit. When Venus is suddenly found dead in suspicious
circumstances, it catapults the sordid but unremarkable death of Isabel Chevalier into
the news. In the mean time, Eve, as part of her job as reporter, gets amorously
involved with Silvio Aguilar. He works in the Mexican music business along with his
father Felipe. Then another death - the apparent drive-by killing of Silvio's brother,
Ruben Aguilar - occurs. It seems unrelated, until Eve discovers that Ruben was due
to be working for Venus, and was maybe more involved with her than in a purely
business sense. Sugar Skull gives us an insight into the Mexican-American subculture, as Eve
Diamond delves into the twin worlds of the alien and the drop-out. We get maybe
more than we need to know about Mexican popular music as a background to the
story, and some overly-heavy observations on the social problems of awkward
teenagers and runaways. But all the usual characters are here: Jane Sims, bitchy boss
of Eve; Josh Brandywine, son of famous reporter, favoured over the hard-working
Eve; Luke Vinograd, close friend and confidant of Eve - safe for her to be around
because he is gay; Venus Langdon, beautiful Italian socialite with a dark ethnic
secret; Scout, troubled Hollywood street kid, who is taken in by Eve and who robs
from her. Sometimes the dialogue lumbers unrealistically as it is used to move the
details of the story on, but that is a minor distraction. The denouement is reward
enough for the reader who forgives the few faults, as it plays out to a background of
tacos, a tamarindo and Mexican rocanrol.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
