C.A.W. Parker's The Girl for the Gold introduces us to detective Rusty Macduff as he works to solve a blueblood kidnapping involving a missing girl and a missing ransom.
Macduff might be termed second-rate, but he's a bulldog who enjoys taking on cases no one wants.
"I specialized in the shameful, the embarrassing, and the peculiar, with lucrative sidelines in the awkward and disgusting." - Rusty Macduff.
He's perfect for the mystery of the missing daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Pirbright. The situation has already gone sideways since the kidnapping three weeks ago, and not much has been done to find the girl. The police have proved incompetent, but their failure has not prompted the family to hire a detective to investigate.
Rusty arrives on the scene, but he's tasked with guarding the gold for the ransom, not investigating the crime. He's not entirely comfortable with the arrangement, but he's been paid half his fee upfront, so he's tolerant of the situation. All he has to do is keep the gold safe for a couple of days until the exchange can be made with the kidnappers.
Rusty is installed with gold in a secure room and armed with pistols and other comforts. To quote Rusty: "No one was getting past me. This was going to be easy."
As one can guess, it's anything but easy. He falls into a deep sleep and is awakened the following day by a maid vacuuming in an adjacent room. Of course, the gold is gone.
This puts Rusty in a panic to find the gold before he has to admit he's botched the job. Worst of all, he knows the girl's life depends on the ransom.
He fails to locate the gold and is sent packing by the Pirbrights, who do some panicking by hiring several famous detectives to solve the mystery.
For example, there's the Great Dame, a former headmistress at a girls' school. Rusty says that more than 25 years of working with the most spoiled children in the British Empire have "given her exceptional insights into the workings of the criminal mind."
Despite that pedigree, her primary weapon of deduction is gossiping with witnesses and suspects. She throws out outrageous tidbits like "The duke's dog found a severed hand in the fish pond" to grease conversations and elicit clues. However, no one--living or dead--turns up with a missing hand. The Great Dame and her counterparts don't do much crime-solving but are excellent comic foils for Rusty.
After sizing them up, Rusty tries covert and not-so-covert ways to find the girl and the gold. At one point, he disguises himself as a celebrity detective. Calling himself Circus Maximus, he claims to commune with plants, insects, and animals to ferret out clues. Amazingly, the ruse allows him to gain access to the estate and possible suspects.
In his stubborn, blue-collar way, Rusty grinds to a solution. And a bonus bit of detective work puts a cherry on top of the case.
Parker is to be commended for creating a memorable character in Rusty Macduff. Although the detective/private eye genre is crowded, the author dials up a human, hilarious, and heroic sleuth. Rusty doesn't get it right often, but he's a loveable loser who wants justice served. And the name Rusty Macduff is a gem.
I rate the book four stars. This is a minor note, but it was sometimes a struggle to visualize the terrain and track the action in some sequences, especially near the end.
Readers who love a good mystery will enjoy this book. Parker does a good job of disguising the ending, leaving his audience with a plausible explanation that is simple and unadorned, much like Rusty himself. I look forward to what the future holds for Rusty Macduff.
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