Inches (A Yellowthread Street Mystery Novel) - Hardcover

Three bizarre and riveting investigations comprise this dazzling addition (after Out of Nowhere ) to Marshall's literate Yellowthread Street series set in the fictional Hong Bay section of Hong Kong. Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer, called to a sealed bank office where nine employees lie dead from poison, discovers that the books are in apparent good order and that the tea cups from which the fatal draught was drunk have been washed and carefully put away. At the same time, Senior Inspector Christopher O'Yee mulls over possible reasons for his undercover assignment while, as instructed, he walks the Hong Bay streets dressed as a bum, carrying a coat hanger and drawing the word "eternity" on city sidewalks. Not too far away, Inspectors Auden and Spencer, one cerebral and one physical, find themselves on a narrow catwalk outside the 18th-floor windows of a virtual reality clinic where customers are threatening to leap to their deaths after a session of intense interactive role-playing. Feiffer homes in on a bank client, a doctor with a struggling research institution, a hefty overdraft and a gambling problem. That he may be the killer also occurs to a guard at the bank, a retired cop and psychopath in his own right, whose actions leave Feiffer with no suspect and only a scrupulous auditor's suggestion that bank records might not be pristine. With perfect timing and trenchant humor, Marshall braids the three cases, staying well ahead of readers who are repeatedly led to believe they know more than the coppers, only to be brought up short. A surefire nominee for best mystery of the year.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first of Marshall's antic Yellowthread Street novels since Out of Nowhere (1988) hits the ground running when the rapid- response team that breaks into the Hong Kong Bay office of the Asia-America Hong Kong Bank finds all nine employees dead, poisoned by cyanide without a mark of struggle or protest. Whodunit, and how? Inspector Harry Feiffer focuses on two suspects--gambling toxicologist Dr. Edward Tolliver and shopping-mall security chief George Shoemaker--but before the case lurches into the first of its manic twists, there are the even more farcical interludes of Inspector Christopher Kwan O'Yee, disguised as a lunatic street person for reasons he himself can't imagine, and Inspectors Bill Spencer and Phil Auden, summoned to the Institute of Wu to figure out why patients of the Wu brand of therapeutic psychodrama keep throwing themselves out the 18th-floor window--or, if they can't figure it out, to catch them in mid-leap. Nobody rivals Marshall's ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk. It's great to see him still crazy after all these years. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.