GoodReads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.74 by 98 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: More!
The ten nations bordering the Baltic Sea come together to enhance shipping along its waters and create an international organisation – Baltic Area Development Agency (BADA) – to superintend those efforts by dredging harbours, widening channels, improving port machinery, enhancing computer technology, buying time on satellites. For these purposes BADA busies itself with fund raising. Enter the Sloan Guarantee Trust of New York in the person of the redoubtable and imperturbable John Putnam Thatcher in his twenty-fourth outing; the first was in 1961. Age has not wearied him.
As with all of the previous titles there is much office politics and BADA is a mare’s nest held together only by the iron will and rapier flexibility of its Swedish Director Annemarie Nordstrom and the technical wizardry of her number two, Stefan Zabriski of Poland. She has larger political ambitions and he loves the boy toys that BADA offers him. The Kiel Canal comes into the spotlight when on a windswept night of ice fog a collision involving several ships occurs and creates a Baltic traffic jam and crisis with a tailback from Kiel to Tallinn, while Thatcher just happened to be on hand in discussions of an infrastructure loan with his irascible off-sider Everett Gabler whose lust for spreadsheets is obscene.
Just when the traffic jam seems to be under control, a storm in a BADA tea cup spills over, and Zabriski is corpse number jeden. Who dun it? The Dane, the Swede, the Estonian, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, the Russian, the German, the Finn, the Norwegian, or …. all of the above? Then there are all the lobbyists and hangers-on that gather around BADA. And why? Had the deceased discovered something among his computer datasets? Did he himself do wrong?
Much atmosphere around Kiel and the BADA HQ in Gdansk are retailed. Many shenanigans in high finance occur. Zabriski (was that point named for him?) is by far the most interesting character. Too bad he left the scene so early. Also well drawn is his surviving (but not for long) assistant who knows more than she realises. The plot thickens, rather like my waist line.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing from a horse auction to a state funeral and rather little character development or unravelling of the plot. Lots of light and sound, but not much upon which to chew, but still fun. Gabler’s puritanical nature is put to the test when he sees how Poles do business. Much as he treasures the paper trail he also likes to see things for himself!
I thought I had read all of the John Thatcher mysteries and then I discovered I had not. Whoopee! I have sung the praises of the Lathen partnership in earlier posts and will not repeat that tune here. Click the link below for enlightenment.
Each of these Kindle reissues is accompanied by a long, self-indulgent, and tedious ego trip by Deaver Brown for reasons known only to him. It adds nothing and consumes about half the sample, serving as an example of how not to market a book. It is repeated in every one of the preceding re-printed twenty-four Lanthen titles.