The Bottom Line: You may think Lisa Scottoline has a new protagonist, at least until you've read a few chapters of Devil's Corner... Can you say "DiNunzio"?
scmrak's Full Review: Lisa Scottoline - Devil's Corner
It's always interesting to watch the author of an established character-driven mystery series attempting to break out of the box to create another protagonist. Sometimes it works - Jonathan Kellerman's shift from Alex Delaware to Petra Connor, J. A. Jance's dual career with J. P. Beaumont and Joanna Brady come to mind. Sometimes it doesn't: Billy Bob Holland, for instance, is just James Lee Burke's moody Dave Robicheaux moved to an arid climate, and Janet Evanovich merely gave Stephanie Plum a dye job and longer legs before bestowing upon her the alias "Barney Barnaby" for Metro Girl. Now comes Linda Scottoline, whose Rosato and Associates series already rotates among protagonists. So for Devil's Corner, can she break out of the mold and create a new character who's not Carrier, DiNunzio, Rosato, or Murphy? We shall see...
Rookie AUSA (Assistant United States Attorney) Vicki Allegretti just had one heckuva bad day. What should've been a routine interview with a confidential informant on a slam-dunk weapons case turned into a triple murder right before her eyes, as not only her hugely pregnant CI died in a hail of bullets, but so did her ATF partner Morty. And since a brick of almost pure cocaine dropped at her feet during the robbery, it's a good bet that everything's drug-related, which introduces all manner of unsavory characters. Yup, a bad day indeed. Luckily she has her "good friend" Dan Malloy - the fellow AUSA with whom she is madly in love, except for the small problem that he's married - to comfort her.
Disappointed with jurisdictional wrangling in the cop-killing, Alegretti decides to investigate "her" case on her own. She starts with the defendant against whom her CI was supposed to testify; a real hard case with no discernible connection to the dead woman or to the drug dealer Vicki's certain knocked her up. Things go from bad to worse as Alegretti's unauthorized investigation finds her in the disintegrating neighborhood known as Devil's Corner and ends up with her as a suspect in the murder of that same defendant's crack-addicted mother.
Allegretti perseveres, however, and the lily-white suburban child of privilege befriends a streetwise black chick from the Hood. Together the two form an ad hoc neighborhood watch to root out a crack dealer, who - will wonders never cease - is the same character Allegretti believes to have impregnated her CI. Meanwhile, the stone killer who actually murdered her new friend's mother is still on the loose and looking for the two women. Ooops, gotta go now - there's a hit man breathing down my neck...
Readers familiar with Scottoline's Rosato & Associates series will quite likely immediately recognize Vicki Allegretti as a retread of that series' Mary DiNunzio. They are undergoing the same desperate search for a mate, both have overwhelming (though, admittedly, quite different) parents to whom they are still babies, and both have the same apparent complete disregard for personal safety (or perhaps just the same lack of common sense). If you like Mary, for sure you'll like Vicki.
Even though she's introduced a new protagonist, Scottoline does not desert her beloved Philadelphia - the action takes place almost entirely in west Philly, where Reheema Bristow coincidentally lives in the same block where Vicki's father grew up a generation ago. It's a neighborhood that could go either way as crack dealers are just making their first inroads. Scottoline's obvious intent is to show that 1) drug dealers are inhuman and 2) a vigilant, cohesive neighborhood is its own best defense against moral decay. OK, so she's a little preachy and perhaps more than a little naïve.
Structurally, Devil's Corner follows a tried-and-true pattern: girl sees crime, girl investigates crime, girl solves crime and criminals are safely tucked into jail. Girl's lovelife also takes a turn for the better and girl makes a new bosom buddy, too. But wait - there seem to be at least 100 pages of text left after the arrests of the villains... And thus we suspect that Scottoline will now drag out some tired, shopworn extended plot twist to introduce a chestnut like corruption or a lover with a double life or some other pseudo-shocker - which is exactly what she does.
Devil's Corner is vintage Lisa Scottoline: her protagonist (a callow version of Scottoline herself) skips through the streets of Philadelphia, blithely placing herself in harm's way at every turn and escaping only through the intervention of a series of deus ex machina moments. And all the while, Scottoline continues her wisecracking background monologue. In short, it's a chick-lit murder mystery, just like all the rest of Scottoline's work. That's not a particularly bad thing, but neither is it a particularly good thing, hence my assignment to the "average" category.
There's really not much new here except for some of the names. I predict that Vicki Allegretti will eventually schlep over to the other side of the courtroom and get a job with Rosato and Associates. But how will they ever tell her apart from DiNunzio?
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