deaths in a small town reveal planned bank robbery and old jealousy

'It was one of those jobs you take on when things are very lean. You want to turn it down- it's an old story, and a sordid one, and a sad one- but you know you can't afford to. The rent falls due in a few days and the savings account is all but depleted; you haven't worked in almost three weeks, and the boredom and the emptiness are beginning to take their toll. So you look into tear-filmed gray eyes, and you sigh, and you say yes...'
So begins another adventure for our lonely hero; a seemingly straightforward case of a suspicious wife and a wayward husband with mysterious weekend business trips. Nameless follows the husband all the way to Monteray and then it gets complicated. To be honest, although I love nameless, the plot to this one is an outright dud and too much of a stretch even for forgiving imaginations. It's also not helped by nameless falling into line with the local police chief, a guy called Quartermain. It transforms the format from the lone wolf P.I. into a straightforward police procedural with Nameless taking on the role of defacto Detective Sergeant.
There are good things still to be enjoyed from the writing. Dodgy plot aside I had a lot of fun trying to place Pronzini's little make-believe hamlet Cypress Bay but it's cleverly hidden away among a rash of equally make believe locations with interchangeable usages of the words Cypress, Grove, Ocean etc, with the occasional vague reference to a real location. And then there is the introduction of recurring character, and thoroughly fictional pulp hack, Russell Dancer. He's got a lot of interesting things to say about the publishing industry and the scenes with him alone with nameless are fascinating. Pronzini's prose is good too, dragging every last bit of loneliness from those views of the ocean and those wind shaped Cypress trees. ( )

The Nameless detective is hired by a young wife to find out whether her husband has been having an affair. He trails the husband to a motel of cabins in a small village, sees him meet with a bald man and then return to his cabin. Hours later, Nameless realizes the cabin may have a backdoor; he investigates and finds the husband has been murdered!