July 27, 2020
Jobs have been sparse lately for elderly L.A. PI Amos Parisman, the narrator of Weinberger’s appealing sequel to 2019’s An Old Man’s Game, until he receives a phone call from 75-year-old Pinky Bleistiff, the manager of a klezmer group called Dark Dreidel, whose members have been disappearing: first the drummer, then a violinist, and finally Risa Barsky, “the lady singer.” Amos soon discovers that the attractive 35-year-old Risa is much more to Pinky than just another songstress. Then, Pinky is murdered. His death is followed by that of Risa’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. Amos must discover the truth behind these crimes in a bid to keep an innocent person from going to prison. The tight plot is enriched with Amos’s wry observations (“Free is what you are when you don’t want to retire yet but nobody’s beating a path to your doorbell. It’s a terrible thing to be free like that”). Descriptions of Amos’s tender yet increasingly fragile feelings for his dementia-stricken wife add poignancy. Hopefully, Amos still has a long career ahead of him.