Cruising for cl

Blood Vessel. Paul Grescoe.
Douglas & Mcintyre. 214 pp,
Hardcover,

Barbara Black
BOOK REVIEW

== HE BUMBLING Pi of
puns, Dan Rudnicki, is
back in another

mystery venture, this time

aboard a luxury cruise ship.

After last year’s success with
Flesh Wound, Vancouver author
Paul Grescoe launches his gum-
shoe schmuck into more crimes
and mysteries, leading readers
through the treacherous waters of
Japanese big business.

The book reads like a corny B
movie, riddled with cliches and
asides. But once you get used to it,
you can settle in for a good
mystery story.

Rudnicki is hired as a lecturer for
the Japanese cruise ship the Sea
Jewel, scheduled to sail up the
coast to Alaska on its inaugural
run,

He takes his two adolescent
daughters in tow for what is sup-
posed to be a holiday on the sea.
Naturally, they are met with an
ocean of mishaps.

(Get used to this style...)

Rudnicki’s holiday goes awry
when a zealous environmentalist
(is that redundant?) stages a
dockside protest slamming the
Japanese driftnet fishery.

It seems the ship’s owner is also
owner of a large fishing fleet
which sucks up excess creatures
from the seas in its nets.

Qur hapless hero is off and run-
ning, sniffing out clues on the ship
before it’s barely sailed out of
Vancouver's harbor.

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Nasty events snowball on the
mammoth ship, but all the
suspects are held captive, giving
Rudnicki time to exercise his in-
vestigative museles.

Faced with a series of deaths on
board, he looks 10 his tried and
true Ukrainian proverbs fur
wisdom, such as “Caution is no
cowardice — even fleas are arm-
ed.”

The ship's owner, Takemi Sato,
collapses and dies after consuming
the infamous Japanese puffer fish
— a trace of one milligram of its
toxic poison can kill.

Soon after, the chef, Mitsuru Doi
(who, it turns out, is related to a
central character) apparently kills
himself, hari-kiri style in a guts-
and-entrails ritual suicide.

Even Rudnicki is swept into the
intrigue ~ literally — when one of
the suspects, a Japanese mafia-

man, conveniently “bumps” into
him near the edge of a glacier
crevasse.

Rudnicki plummets down toa
harrowing near-death,

He comments wryly, “it was
an elevator to hell, And | was
stopping at every floor.”

Rudnicki is just barely back on
this scraped sea legs, when Sato’s
punk daughter goes missing and is
later kidnapped by the thug who
elbowed our hero into the
crevasse.

One of the challenges tw the
mystery weiter is to slip in tidbits of
technical information and charac-
ter trails in a way that goes un-
noticed by the reader.

Grescoe does not have this tal-
ent. ,

Some passages have that
“here-is-some-essential-informa-
tion-for-later’”’ feel to them and do

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ues with a schmuck gum-shoe

44 /t was an elevator to hell. And I

was stopping at every floor. 99

not come off as authentic dialogue
or commentary.

But strangely, that flaw of in-
genuousness is in keeping with the
tone of the book and its narrator,
the intrepid Rudnicki. .

Characters in Blood Vessel are
larger than fife, interesting, but still
hovering in the B realm.

Sato's wife, for instance, speaks
Jane Austen English, while Rud-.
nicki’s stunt-man friend hurls
westernisms like lassos.

The most realistic characters are

Rudnicki’s two adolescent daugh-
ters, Esther and Larissa, whom
Rudnicki has raised since the
death of his wife.

A bonus: you get a running
description of cruising life and its
rampant luxuries, as well as an
armchair tour up the B.C, coast to
Alaska. :

It's no surprise that Grescoe and
his wife are working on a cruise-
lover's guide to Alaska, due out
early next year.

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