 |
If you include the sex, which Flood does liberally, both physical and mental gymnastics abound in this English potboiler. The pace is swift. The crimes are gruesome. Plus all the genre’s stock characters are on hand. There’s the rumpled policeman with the wife who berates him for spending too much time at work. There’s a bevy of babes—some tough, some tame, some true, some tricky—but of course they’re all cute and curvy. To be sure, there’s a demented villain as evil as he is vile. To top it all off, the author does an admirable job of keeping readers guessing as to who the ultimate bad guy really is.
In fact, it’s the plot itself that makes this yarn a page-turner. A woman avenges her sister’s assault and in so doing gets herself in trouble with the law. To ameliorate the situation, she offers to go under cover to help the cops nab a murderer. As the body count mounts, so do the couplings. Individual agendas collide and tension builds as the race to find the randy killer hits high gear. There’s a high probability you won’t see how it could possibly be resolved until it is.
In a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s famous walk-ons, where he would actually appear in a scene of the movie he was directing, author Flood makes himself a minor character that also pops up along the way. While his writing style is not the equal of his storytelling, if you like your crime yarns cheeky, chances are you’ll have a good time with this one.
Triple Tease has been recommended by best-selling crime writers Peter James and Tamara McKinley, actor Brian Capron, and actor-directors Patric Kearns and Alan Baker.