A WALK THROUGH THE FIRE

Marketing strategy for Sharon McCone’s San Francisco investigative agency seems confined to waiting around for friends or relatives to get in trouble. Not to worry, they never fail her. This time out, in Sharon’s 18th case (Both Ends of the Night, 1997, etc.), it’s Glenna Stanleigh calling. She’s in a state (Hawaii) because someone’s trying to stop her from filming her documentary. There have been accidents (rigged), stolen equipment, and finally a near-death experience. All warnings, Glenna feels certain. She wants Sharon to hire on as resident sleuth. As special inducement, she suggests that Sharon bring along hunkish Hy Ripinsky, Sharon’s long-time lover and make it “a vacation of sorts.” (Marlow, Spade, cover your ears.) Sharon, who is in the p.i. because helping people, she tells us, “makes me feel valuable,” finds the proposition irresistible. Glenna’s film is about Ellson Wellbright, an anthropologist of considerable renown. Wellright family members take a dimmer view: not much of a husband, low marks as a father, is the consensus, thus it’s there that Sharon first looks for Glenna’s nemesis. But her investigation soon widens to include a coterie of militant Hawaiian radicals and the inevitable gaggle of plot-thickening drug dealers. For a time, a charming and virile helicopter pilot has the detective in a whirl. Sharon, usually so locked into Ripinsky that thoughts of straying never enter her mind, entertains thoughts of, well, straying. There are murders, a sting, a chase, and a gasp-free surprise ending, during which the killer is unmasked. The plotting is heavy-handed, the pace heavy-footed, but McCone admirers will remain unshakeable.