MOVING FROM LEEDS TO Toronto in 1974, Peter Robinson earned a Ph.D. in English literature and then fled academia to chronicle his Yorkshire roots in a series of police procedurals featuring Inspector Alan Banks, now well know to consumers of crime fiction. Robinson's patient, sympathetic evocation of an English countryside setting, his growing skill in the building of credible characters plagued by contemporary problems, and his conservative adherence to the puzzles embraced by the British mystery novel tradition have won him much praise.
In his latest work, No Cure for Love, Robinson makes an 180 degree turn away from Inspector Banks' society of proprieties adhered to and sinned against, to the smogmurky, drug-elated, violence-addicted fantasy world of Los Angeles. In so shifting his view and stretching his skills, Robinson no doubt seeks to win a new audience, those readers who prefer the darker, crazier, more tattered avenging spirit of the American gumshoe than the virtuous, if quirky, upholders of jurisprudence that are the English constabulary. Robinson is only partly successful in this sea change.
Arvo Hughes and Mafia Hernandez, two police officers with the Threat Management Unit of the LAPD (an abbreviation one hardly needs to spell out in the 90s), are alerted by Hollywood agent Stuart Kleigman that Sarah Broughton, a TV soap star, has been receiving bizarre, intimidating notes from an anonymous stalker. When the dismembered body of a young male prostitute turns up on the beach outside Broughton's Pacific Palisades home, Hughes and Hernandez accelerate their search for the identity of the star's demented admirer. Complicating the investigation -- and in some ways of greater interest to the reader than the hunt for the stalker -- is the cryptic background of Sarah Brought on herself. A rock-band groupie in the 60s who slept around as readily as she toked up, Broughton is now a rather chilly model of rectitude who cannot, or will not, confess to a past that obviously holds the key to the identity of her current nemesis.
In for a quick evening's page-turner, the reader will find enough here to satisfy: adroit plotting that moves swiftly along in 47, snack-size chapters, well-described if not overly imaginative props and locales ("Soft elevator music permeated the smoky air like a whore's caress"), a mounting sense of menace stalled only occasionally by dramatic padding, believable minor characters, and a violent climax simultaneously predictable and slightly preposterous. A short section in the novel in which Sarah Broughton returns briefly to her family back in Yorkshire seems to offer Robinson some respite from his earnest desire to transcribe from his travel notes evidence of the L.A. scene.
