Kinsmen

    Allison Shay was traveling home from the University of

Oregon with her new boyfriend, Rob Compton, when their car broke down near the

tiny rural town of Creekside, California. Soon after, Allison and Rob went

missing without a trace.

    Whatever happened, it felt like something bad to the

Nameless Detective. Five days without a whisper of contact with the outside

world. Long past the inconsiderate-kids stage; long past the silly and the

harmless.

    Kinsmen takes Bill Pronzini's classic private

investigator to California's northeast backwoods, where an isolated community is

determined to keep a deep, dark secret: why Allison Shay and Rob Compton really

vanished.

    The real question facing the Nameless Detective: are they

still alive?

    Cemetery Dance, 2013. Hardcover, 185 pp.

    

***

    

    From Kirkus Reviews (on Sentinels

(1996))

    Though the publisher maintains a demure silence on the

point, this short novel is a lightly revised expansion of Pronzini's novella

"Kinsmen", first published, together with long stories by Marcia Muller and Ed

Gorman, in Criminal Intent 1 (1993). Here as there, the Nameless

Detective (Hardcase, 1995, etc.) is on the trail of a missing University

of Oregon student who vanished, together with the boyfriend she planned to bring

home to her mother outside Oakland, shortly after their car broke down in that

slice of God's country designated Creekside, Calif., pop. 112. Even readers new

to the material should be able to guess what happened to Allison McDowell and

her lover by the halfway point. Those with memories of "Kinsmen" will find more

words here, but not much else that's new.