Review:
BEATING THE BABUSHKA by Tim Maleeny
Review by Angie Johnson-Schmit
In Tim Maleeny’s second novel, the action kicks off with a movie producer taking a header off the Golden Gate Bridge. P.I. Cape Weathers gets involved when the producer’s co-worker and former lover, Grace Calloway, hires him to prove the death was no suicide. Although skeptical, Cape takes on the job. The deeper he digs into the case, the more Cape gets dragged into a budding drug war between a Triad gang and an Italian mafia crew that seems to be connected to the producer’s death. As he tries to connect the dots, he ends up the target of some Russian mobsters who really, really, want him to stop asking questions.
There are plenty of twists and turns in BEATING THE BABUSHKA, not to mention enough fights, assassination attempts and explosions to keep action fans satisfied. It takes a while for the threads to start pulling together in this novel, making for a sometimes disconcerting, hard to follow narrative. During the “summing up” part, I had to flip back to refresh my memory about some of the players and their relationships.
Maleeny also gives a little more backstory with this book, but weaves it into the narrative nicely, fleshing out Cape’s character and Cape’s relationships with some of the regular players. While many readers may enjoy the snappy wit of the dialogue, it was ultimately too much of a good thing for this reader. At times it was hard to keep the “voices” separate because they were almost uniformly smart-assed and very, very smart. Hey, I like smart (and smart-mouthed) characters, but in this case it ended up being more of a distraction than a pleasure.
Final verdict? BEATING THE BABUSHKA has great action sequences and a complex story arc, but was a little slow to come together and could have used a more naturalistic dialog style.
About the Reviewer
Angie Johnson-Schmit writes crime fiction tending to the dark, does some editing and reviewing for Spinetingler magazine, is a voice actress with Coyote Radio Theater, and is the host of In for Questioning, a weekly podcast about the underworld of crime fiction. Despite her best efforts, she has never been arrested. Angie currently lives in Arizona with her husband, two dogs and a turtle.