Reviews for Mean streets

The average rating for Mean streets based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-18 00:00:00 Andrew Woodward McCone and Friends by Marcia Muller is book 19.5 of the Sharon McCone mystery series set in late 20th-century San Francisco. The short stories feature Sharon's colleagues at All Souls legal cooperative. While focused on solving a crime, each story also reveals the investigator's personality. All Souls was clearly a supportive, nurturing workplace. When an employee hits a dead end or questions the need for surveillance (as Mickey Savage does), Sharon is an excellent mentor. She listens to case details and suggests lines of inquiry, rather than taking over and doing the job; thereby helping her employees to grow their skills. Rae Kelleher starts out merely trying to identify a young deaf mute boy, to return him to his family. To her horror, she uncovers a sweatshop slavery racket. Plenty of suspenseful action as Rae and her boyfriend take huge risks to rescue the victims. Sharon solves a fraud case by clever intuition, after flying with the suspects in a small airplane. Rae solves a missing-person case by repeatedly returning to the teenager's bedroom and studying the wall. Rae comes to identify with the girl through the seemingly random eclectic decorations which actually describe a personal crisis and desperate action. Rae reveals much of herself in the story, too. Hy relates how Sharon's intuition solves a case at the dump, where she recognizes the murder weapon used to kill a reclusive sculptor who was known to have hidden a treasure. Sharon and her brother John together work a missing person case. At first very simple: a college student out of touch with his parent. Once they uncover his extravagant lifestyle, it becomes a dangerous dive into a world of high-stakes scams and violent gangsters. Hy relates his concerns to Sharon over a promising pilot student, who unexpectedly crash-landed on his first solo. To alleviate Hy's anguish, Sharon investigates the days leading up to the crash. Her background check explains what happened and why: not just a sad event, but a double crime. Sharon's business manager collects antiques. In search of a rare jukebox, they travel to an historic inn, where they meet the embittered partners. Sharon's curiosity compels her to research the events that led to good friends dividing their co-owned building down the middle. She digs into past archives, solves a decades-old murder, and ends the feud.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-02 00:00:00 Luigi Carchia If I were Marcia Muller, I'd have pulled this out of print long since. It's one of the worst publishing jobs I've ever seen. Every story is marred with multiple misprints. Wrong words. Words left out. Extra words that make no sense. It's infuriating that I actually paid money for this. I suspect it was converted, perhaps from a spoken word file, into an ebook and nobody cared enough to actually proofread the damn thing. That trick never works.