Lots of amusing stuff in this one. Muller gives us a San Francisco setting with excursions up the coast (Mendo, Garberville, Elk, et al) and out to Nevada and American Rust Pennsylvania. PI Sharon McCone makes a formidable opponent for the bad guys, being a smart, tough woman who can play hardball with anyone. Her romantic life is less believable, consisting mainly of an
attraction for an absentee lover named (of all things) Hy, who is always flying around without notice or explanation. He does put in a couple of fortuitous appearances to lend her a car when she needs one and to bounce ideas off of when she has no one else to talk to.
There are a lot scruples conflicts here, too, moral compromises, that make the reader, perhaps a bit uncomfortable. The copyright date is 1994, so no one has cell phones (she does have a car phone, which she has a hard time using.) which helps create communication complications that don’t exist now. Faxes come in on thermal paper and are all curly and blurry.
Anyhow, Till the Butchers Cut Him Down was an amusing excursion, and I’m off into something else.
