Blood Money by Thomas Perry

 

(pb; 1999: fifth book in the Jane Whitefield series)

From the back cover

“Even before she heard the teenager’s story, Jane Whitefield’s Native American intuition whispered danger. For a year, Rita Shelford kept house for an old man in Florida. When he disappeared, other men came and tried to kill her. That was before she knew that her employer was the Mafia’s brilliant moneyman, recently reported murdred. Now the mob suspects Rita of stealing the only record of a shady investment worth billions. Unless Jane, Rita’s last hope, can spirit Rita into a new identity, she’s a dead woman. As the mafioso army converges on airports and hotels, highways and city streets, there seems to be no exit—except form life itself.”

 

Review

Caveat: (possible) element and multi-series tie-in (not plot) spoilers in this review.

Another instant favorite of mine in the Jane Whitefield series, Blood sports a bigger cast, some of them returning characters: George Hawkes, who turned Richard Dahlman onto Jane in The Face Changers, 1998; Zinni, a Mafia soldier/airport watcher in the employ of Richard Delfina, originally seen in an earlier book featuring Nancy Carmody—I forget which one; and Martha McCutcheon, Native American/Oklahoma clan mother who helped Mary Perkins (another Whitefield client) after Perkins was “repeatedly beaten, raped and starved” in Shadow Woman (1997).

Blood’s original characters are just as interesting: Bernie “the Elephant” Lupus, a Mafia moneyman whose memory of their hidden financial accounts and amounts was slipping prior to his death; and Tony Saachi, a retiree who still might be one of the sharpest Mafia dons.

Blood has all the action-oriented, tactical, Native American elements (including meaningful dreams) and character-based thrills of previous Whitefield books, with more of an ensemble cast—many of them of particularly delightful, nasty or both—making this even more engaging and (sometimes) humorous.

I’m not sure about this, but some of Tony Saachi’s dialogue on page 162 of Blood feels like a (possible) reference to Thomas Perry’s Butcher’s Boy quadrilogy: “You should’ve been with us in ’87 when the Castiglione thing broke. Nearly two hundred guys went, just like that, in one night.” Again, not sure about that, but I’d like to think so.

Anyhow, Blood Money is worth owning, another high mark in Perry’s consistently charming and often dark series. Followed by Runner.