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Wall of Glass Walter Satterthwait 9780312015305 Books

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Wall of Glass Walter Satterthwait 9780312015305 Books

Ever since visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico a couple of years ago, I've found myself wanting to read more mysteries set there. When I came across the first in the Joshua Croft series, Wall of Glass, I remembered enjoying a book he'd written about Lizzie Borden, so I had to give this book a try. I'm glad I did.

We don't learn much about Croft's backstory in this book. He's a private investigator working for the Mondragon Agency owned by wheelchair-bound Rita Mondragon. He's approached by a cowboy who wants Croft to fence a stolen necklace worth $100,000. Croft turns him down, and the cowboy is found dead the next day. The insurance company now wants the Mondragon Agency to find the necklace.

This involves Croft digging through the backgrounds of the dead cowboy, his associates, and the rich family from whom the necklace was stolen. Of course, he finds skeletons in every closet he pokes his nose into with the requisite danger heightening at every turn.

This is a strong mystery with plenty of misdirection, and I certainly did enjoy its New Mexico setting. I also liked Joshua Croft's voice and his sense of humor. I'll definitely be reading more of this series. Now would also be a good time to give a shout-out to Open Road Integrated Media for bringing back so many older, well-written books which certainly deserve a new lease on life.


Tags : Wall of Glass [Walter Satterthwait] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Joshua Croft, a Sante Fe, New Mexico, private detective, is hired by an insurance company to find a stolen necklace and finds himself embroiled in a deadly scheme that threatens his life,Walter Satterthwait,Wall of Glass,St. Martins Press,0312015305,Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled,Croft, Joshua (Fictitious character);Fiction.,Private investigators;New Mexico;Santa Fe;Fiction.,Santa Fe (N.M.);Fiction.,AMERICAN FIRST NOVELISTS,AMERICAN MYSTERY & SUSPENSE FICTION,Croft, Joshua (Fictitious character),FICTION Mystery & Detective Hard-Boiled,Fiction,Fiction-Mystery & Detective,GENERAL,General Adult,MysterySuspense,New Mexico,Private investigators,Santa Fe,United States,Croft, Joshua (Fictitious char

Wall of Glass Walter Satterthwait 9780312015305 Books Reviews

An excellent New Mexico mystery. Has everything. Suspence, great characters and accurate setting. Kept me interested all the way through.
Parts of this were good. But even I would know better than to do the stuff he did to set up the fights and car chases. Didn't ring true. No more for me. But for those who really love detailed fights, car chases etc this is for them.
Bad Word Warning Yes, this book contains Bad Words. `Nough said.

REVIEW

Unlike too many writers these days, Walter Satterthwait has never confined himself to a single series, a single set of characters. He has written two sets of mysteries around a team of male and female detectives (the Joshua Croft series and what he calls the "Phil and Jane" series, the titles in this second series all ending in "-ade," as in Escapade,Masquerade,Cavalcade (Pinkerton Det. Phil Beaumont &)). But he has also written a number of mysteries that stand on their own, such as Miss Lizzie,Dead Horse,Perfection, and the hilarious Wilde West, in which a serial killer seems to be following Oscar Wilde's trip across America and in which Mr. Satterthwait turns his hand to writing a few Wilde-isms himself. This lack of a twenty-six-book series involving a single character or set of characters may explain his lack of blockbuster popularity like any of about twenty authors currently residing on the bestseller lists. Which is really too bad, because Walter Satterthwait is a brilliant, clever, inventive, and deliciously witty writer who has produced a number of books that should be considered classics. "Wall of Glass" is the first book of his Joshua Croft series (for a complete list, see my listmania list). It's a marvelous story and deserves a wide readership.

As the first book in a series, "Wall of Glass" must not only stand as a mystery in itself, but it must also introduce a whole group of characters, as well as the world they inhabit, in this case generally based around Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here we first meet Joshua Croft, a man of usually few but pithy words, his partner in detecting the beautiful but crippled Rita Mondragón, a reputed-New Mexico crime lord and practicing Buddhist named Norman Montoya, and a number of supporting characters who will wander in and out of this and the subsequent stories in the series. Here, too, Satterthwait introduces the New Mexico territory his characters inhabit, and he does so in brilliant form, opening this book with one of my all-time favorite openings

"It was a Friday in mid-April, warm and clean and spectacularly sunny, and a blizzard was due by midnight. Weather like this happens every spring in the New Mexico mountains, and it produces one of our famous annual events, the Death of the Apple Blossoms. Tomorrow all the pink-white petals in the courtyard would be buried beneath a foot of snow. In another few days, the snow would be gone and the petals would be littering the ground in sodden drifts, like fans of debris left behind by a storm tide. And in another few months, when fall rolled around, there would be no apples on the trees. If the Garden of Eden had been planted here, Adam and Eve might still be working things out."

Where I live, in the foothills of California's Great Central Valley, we have the Death of All the Fruit Blossoms, not by snow (at least, not usually) but by a return of driving rain and howling winds just after the fruit trees have burst into glorious bloom, lulled into a false sense of complacency by the annual warm spring fake-out, which lasts for just about a week or two. So you can imagine that this passage might strike a chord for me. Actually, it had me cackling maniacally. Nor is it the only passage that did; Satterthwait writes with at least part of tongue planted firmly in cheek, and his thoughtful prose, heavy on the irony, is a delight to read.

But as to the story at hand. This story concerns the theft of a $100,000 diamond necklace and its possible reappearance. When Joshua and Rita agree with an insurance company to try to retrieve the necklace, which may or may not have resurfaced, they start down a path with more twists and turns than a New Mexico sidewinder or one of the state's treacherous mountain roads. As they run down each clue, all kinds of villains start crawling out of the woodwork, and they soon realize that, as in all good mysteries, things are not at all what they seem. Suddenly bodies start piling up on the fringes of a supposedly simple case of theft, and they both get a close look at the seamier side of Santa Fe's mad social whirl.

Like any good crime writer, Satterthwait uses the genre not only to entertain, but also to cast a slightly warped mirror on our times. And he is very good at what he does, nailing stupidity, pretension, and outright cruelty with an unerring wit. Take, for example, this description of a new character

"He wore dusty Western boots, faded jeans, a tight-fitting denim shirt, and a gray Stetson with the sides of its brim curled up. His face was sun-reddened and his eyes had the prairie squint. This being Santa Fe, he could've been exactly what he looked like. A real live cowboy. ...On the other hand, this being Santa Fe, he could've been a stockbroker."

Or his description of a doorbell in an expensive house that plays the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth "I don't want `ding dong,' Sammy, I want class."

Or a room in the same house "A stone fireplace, broad and round, sat in the center of the room beneath a cylindrical copper chimney with a wide conical mouth. Piñon logs were burning inside, presumably to counteract the chill put out by the air conditioner."

Or, one of the my favorites
"'Last week he gave the band a hundred bucks for playing what he wanted to hear.'
`What was that?'
`Silence.'
I smiled. `He's got better taste than I would've thought.' ...
'You've heard the band too, huh?'"

In other words, Mr. Satterthwait can quip along with the best of them. But he has his lyrical side, too, as in his description of the view through a wall of glass

"Gray clouds were moving down between the black stands of pine, slowly whirling and swirling, and then as they neared the silver ribbon of river at the valley bottom, slowly unraveling and fraying, wisping away like wood smoke. The view stretched on for miles, until both sides of the dark valley became lost in rolling white mist."

He also offers a meticulous description of how to create a lowrider, which he says took about two weeks to research. It was worth it.

Actually, my collection of favorite lines from "Wall of Glass" runs a good three or four pages, but I don't want to spoil your own discovery of favorite Satterthwait lines, so I'll stop now. Okay, just one more "Leighton is one of those people who manages to raise mediocrity to new middles.".

The point is that Walter Satterthwait is not only a fine mystery writer, but also a first-class stylist. His prose is clean, spare, and unfailingly precise. It's a real pleasure to read a writer with such a fine feel for the language.

If you like tough, noir-ish detectives, do yourself a favor and read Wall of Glass. I'm guessing you'll want to read a lot more Satterthwaits. I know I'm hooked.
If you like your detective fiction hard-boiled, you might want to stick to McDonald, Hammett, Chandler and Cain, but if you’re willing to take a step into the world of medium-boiled detectives, than you’ll probably like Wall of Glass, the first of the Joshua Croft series by Walter Satterthwait.

Joshua Croft is an associate of the Mondragon Detective Agency, run by Rita Mondragon. In what is a shift from the more macho hard-boiled detective fiction is that in this novel, the brain of the operation is a woman a very savvy, smart woman. Sadly, we don’t get to see much of Rita in this first installment. The story, in traditional detective style, is told in first person, through the eyes of Joshua Croft, the brawn to Rita’s brain. He’s the one who runs all over Santa Fe, New Mexico tracking down suspects, getting shot at, beaten up, and has his Subaru chased down a slick, muddy mountain road. Rita is there to offer advice, and, in the end, is the one who actually solves the crime – one of them, any way.

The story revolves around a couple of different crimes a jewelry theft, a murder, another murder, possible insurance fraud, selling cocaine, and one final murder. As the story moves quickly along, Joshua and Rita work to unravel the traditional tangled web, and to determine if all the crimes are connected (and if they were carried out by the same person).

Joshua Croft is the typical detective flawed yet endearing, charming but sarcastic, brave but still slightly foolish. He’s presumably handsome as the women flirt with him, though in contrast to many of the early hard-boiled detective novels, the women in Satterthwait’s book aren’t all bikini-clad seductresses. While there is a subplot involving some rather kinky sex (none of which is described in great detail), and one of the main female characters does try to seduce Joshua, the female characters are strong and not relegated to sexual objects. In fact, most of the characters in the story are quite realistically fleshed out. Even the minor players are given some dimension rather than just being cardboard cutouts standing at the bar.

Interestingly, the book, which was written in 1987 doesn’t feel dated. With the exception of mention of calling from a payphone and leaving messages on answering machines (and a few pop culture references), the story could just as easily be taking place now.

I don’t want to call the story predictable, because it isn’t. Yet, it’s also nothing new. It’s a timeless tale of love, murder, revenge, theft. But, Satterthwait’s characters and Croft’s voice keep the story from being “just another mystery.” It remains compelling throughout, and, while the ending isn’t a great surprise, it wasn’t completely obvious either.

For me, the test of a book is does it feel like a chore to be reading it? and, does it make me want to read another book by the author. This book was not a chore to read – it read quickly, and didn’t get bogged down at any point. And, after reading this, I’ll definitely read the next book in the series.
Ever since visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico a couple of years ago, I've found myself wanting to read more mysteries set there. When I came across the first in the Joshua Croft series, Wall of Glass, I remembered enjoying a book he'd written about Lizzie Borden, so I had to give this book a try. I'm glad I did.

We don't learn much about Croft's backstory in this book. He's a private investigator working for the Mondragon Agency owned by wheelchair-bound Rita Mondragon. He's approached by a cowboy who wants Croft to fence a stolen necklace worth $100,000. Croft turns him down, and the cowboy is found dead the next day. The insurance company now wants the Mondragon Agency to find the necklace.

This involves Croft digging through the backgrounds of the dead cowboy, his associates, and the rich family from whom the necklace was stolen. Of course, he finds skeletons in every closet he pokes his nose into with the requisite danger heightening at every turn.

This is a strong mystery with plenty of misdirection, and I certainly did enjoy its New Mexico setting. I also liked Joshua Croft's voice and his sense of humor. I'll definitely be reading more of this series. Now would also be a good time to give a shout-out to Open Road Integrated Media for bringing back so many older, well-written books which certainly deserve a new lease on life.