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Frank Clemons #2
Flesh and Blood
The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl.
Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.
Hannah's employer hires Clemons to find the victim's next of kin so the police can release the body for burial, but as he learns about the dead woman's past, which stretches back to the Lower East Side sweatshops of the 1930s, Clemons becomes obsessed with unearthing the decades-old secret that led to her death.
Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.
Hannah's employer hires Clemons to find the victim's next of kin so the police can release the body for burial, but as he learns about the dead woman's past, which stretches back to the Lower East Side sweatshops of the 1930s, Clemons becomes obsessed with unearthing the decades-old secret that led to her death.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1989
About the author
Thomas H. Cook
100 books361 followersThere is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
Thomas H. Cook has been praised by critics for his attention to psychology and the lyrical nature of his prose. He is the author of more than 30 critically-acclaimed fiction books, including works of true crime. Cook published his first novel, Blood Innocents, in 1980. Cook published steadily through the 1980s, penning such works as the Frank Clemons trilogy, a series of mysteries starring a jaded cop.
He found breakout success with The Chatham School Affair (1996), which won an Edgar Award for best novel. Besides mysteries, Cook has written two true-crime books including the Edgar-nominated Blood Echoes (1993). He lives and works in New York City.
Awards
Edgar Allan Poe – Best Novel – The Chatham School Affair
Barry Award – Best Novel – Red Leaves
Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection – The Chatham School Affair
Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection – Red Leaves
Herodotus Prize – Fatherhood
Thomas H. Cook has been praised by critics for his attention to psychology and the lyrical nature of his prose. He is the author of more than 30 critically-acclaimed fiction books, including works of true crime. Cook published his first novel, Blood Innocents, in 1980. Cook published steadily through the 1980s, penning such works as the Frank Clemons trilogy, a series of mysteries starring a jaded cop.
He found breakout success with The Chatham School Affair (1996), which won an Edgar Award for best novel. Besides mysteries, Cook has written two true-crime books including the Edgar-nominated Blood Echoes (1993). He lives and works in New York City.
Awards
Edgar Allan Poe – Best Novel – The Chatham School Affair
Barry Award – Best Novel – Red Leaves
Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection – The Chatham School Affair
Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection – Red Leaves
Herodotus Prize – Fatherhood
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 24, 2020
This was not Thomas Cook's greatest book, but it was fun to listen to while I was working. I think the first Frank Clemons was better.
September 24, 2019
I just read Blood Innocents, was pretty good ....one of his earliest ones ....this one is so bad.... I can't believe how much soap opera there is, paragraph after paragraph.... One can only guess a publisher said : you have to punch it up, and hired a ghostwriter or two to insert a ridiculous amount of soap opera... "You look sad" she said...>>> "it reminded him of how terrible it was with his ex-wife and his estranged daughter and how dark the sky was and it was raining and he looked out the window and the window was dark and reflected his own dark feelings within his soul....he tried to bite down on the bile in his throat but he successfully kept it down and then reflected on how dark the window was and how dark the weather was outside the window" ... "
No, I'm fine " he said.
(I am not exaggerating)
i gave up halfway through the first chapter
No, I'm fine " he said.
(I am not exaggerating)
i gave up halfway through the first chapter
June 28, 2017
Frank Clemons, Private Investigator
Frank Clemons is now a private investigator in New York City, in a strained relationship with Karen Devereaux. He is approached with a request to find the next-of-kin of a murdered woman.
Frank begins his lengthy investigation by trying to learn more about the woman's background, and each small discovery leads to another. He learns that Hannah and her sisters, after being orphaned, worked in the sweatshops of the garment industry.
19
Frank Clemons is now a private investigator in New York City, in a strained relationship with Karen Devereaux. He is approached with a request to find the next-of-kin of a murdered woman.
Frank begins his lengthy investigation by trying to learn more about the woman's background, and each small discovery leads to another. He learns that Hannah and her sisters, after being orphaned, worked in the sweatshops of the garment industry.
19
July 29, 2019
Book 2 of the Frank Clemons mystery series...good read, more murder & mayhem in NYC...Homicide cop Clemons follows his mega-rich girl-friend from Atlanta up north and becomes a P.I. to take up his free time...he is soon investigating the murder of a clothes designer and ties stretch back to the 1930's. Pretty good tough-guy stuff! 3.25 outta 5.0!
February 21, 2020
Former policeman Frank Clemons, a private investigator, is hired by famous dress designer Imalia Covallo to find a relative of her slain employee so the police will release the body for burial. This second book in the series lives up to Cook's high standards of psychological drama combined with an ingenious mystery plot.
January 4, 2020
First book I read from this author and I really liked it (although I am slightly disappointed by the ten last pages). The fact that the story takes place in the late 80’s is quite refreshing (no IPhone, no social media...), I will definitely read more books from this author.
January 18, 2020
Livre lu en Français,
Récit et tramme narrative assez linéaire sans grand rebondissement ou retournement/intrigue comme l’auteur nous y a habitué.
Je suis donc déçu de cet ouvrage qui ne vaut pas certains autres du même auteur.
Récit et tramme narrative assez linéaire sans grand rebondissement ou retournement/intrigue comme l’auteur nous y a habitué.
Je suis donc déçu de cet ouvrage qui ne vaut pas certains autres du même auteur.
February 27, 2022
Slow-moving, sometimes tedious. not recommended.
May 18, 2026
Mr. Cook has a way of revealing each character as they develop throughout the plot. It's a rare gift to write so well.
The story was good, too.
The story was good, too.
February 12, 2017
Thomas H. Cook is the author of over 25 novels, mainly in the mystery and crime genre. Flesh and Blood (1989) is a sequel to Sacrificial Ground, which I haven’t read.
After the events in Sacrificial Ground, PI Frank Clemons is living with Karen, a survivor from his last case. They’ve moved to New York, but Frank finds it hard to settle, and often slips out in the early hours to imbibe whiskey.
A garment designer called Hannah is slain and her hand is severed and is missing. While the police investigate the killing, Frank is hired by Hannah’s rich employer, Imalia, to locate any living relatives of the dead woman, so they can claim the body after the police have finished with it. Frank is helped in his quest by the mysterious Farouk, who proves useful with many contacts; they make a good world-weary team.
Hannah had two sisters (don’t tell Woody Allen), but they’re hard to find. Frank starts to dig, from Hannah’s childhood with her rabbi father, fresh from Poland, in the 1920s. Slowly, a picture of Hannah begins to emerge. After their father’s death, Hannah cared for her younger sisters and found work in a garment sweat-shop. She joined a union and became a visionary, instituting a strike for better conditions in the 1930s.
‘For a long time, Frank stared silently at the photograph. He could almost feel the cold winter wind which lifted her scar and held it fluttering in the air, hear the roar of the crowd as they cheered her, feel the triumph of her hand in the crisp biting air, sense the sheer driving power of her voice as it pealed over them, crying out the words (of inspiration)’ (p117)
This is one of those detective novels American authors do so well, unpeeling the past, and in the process illuminating the working and living conditions suffered by the deceased protagonists. The fashion industry of the time is laid bare: the final revelations are troubling, even shocking, in several ways, but it would be unkind to reveal why; suffice it to say that the conclusion was satisfactory and provided a closure of sorts for Frank.
In many instances, Cook’s writing tends to rise above the standard PI novel. Frank exhibits great empathy for the victims: ‘Whatever small hope still remained for Hannah Karlsberg had died in that moment, and a few terrible seconds later, she had died as well.’ (p35)
Throughout, there’s the shadow of Hannah and her brutal death, hovering, and as Frank’s investigation brings him close to a solution, the foreboding becomes fact: ‘Frank turned and looked at the room, and as he did so, a chill swept over him, haunting and inexplicable, a sense that the world had suddenly shifted in its flight, edged itself a little deeper into the engulfing darkness.’ (p245)
Recommended.
After the events in Sacrificial Ground, PI Frank Clemons is living with Karen, a survivor from his last case. They’ve moved to New York, but Frank finds it hard to settle, and often slips out in the early hours to imbibe whiskey.
A garment designer called Hannah is slain and her hand is severed and is missing. While the police investigate the killing, Frank is hired by Hannah’s rich employer, Imalia, to locate any living relatives of the dead woman, so they can claim the body after the police have finished with it. Frank is helped in his quest by the mysterious Farouk, who proves useful with many contacts; they make a good world-weary team.
Hannah had two sisters (don’t tell Woody Allen), but they’re hard to find. Frank starts to dig, from Hannah’s childhood with her rabbi father, fresh from Poland, in the 1920s. Slowly, a picture of Hannah begins to emerge. After their father’s death, Hannah cared for her younger sisters and found work in a garment sweat-shop. She joined a union and became a visionary, instituting a strike for better conditions in the 1930s.
‘For a long time, Frank stared silently at the photograph. He could almost feel the cold winter wind which lifted her scar and held it fluttering in the air, hear the roar of the crowd as they cheered her, feel the triumph of her hand in the crisp biting air, sense the sheer driving power of her voice as it pealed over them, crying out the words (of inspiration)’ (p117)
This is one of those detective novels American authors do so well, unpeeling the past, and in the process illuminating the working and living conditions suffered by the deceased protagonists. The fashion industry of the time is laid bare: the final revelations are troubling, even shocking, in several ways, but it would be unkind to reveal why; suffice it to say that the conclusion was satisfactory and provided a closure of sorts for Frank.
In many instances, Cook’s writing tends to rise above the standard PI novel. Frank exhibits great empathy for the victims: ‘Whatever small hope still remained for Hannah Karlsberg had died in that moment, and a few terrible seconds later, she had died as well.’ (p35)
Throughout, there’s the shadow of Hannah and her brutal death, hovering, and as Frank’s investigation brings him close to a solution, the foreboding becomes fact: ‘Frank turned and looked at the room, and as he did so, a chill swept over him, haunting and inexplicable, a sense that the world had suddenly shifted in its flight, edged itself a little deeper into the engulfing darkness.’ (p245)
Recommended.
Read
May 29, 2014Flesh and Blood, by Thomas H. Cook, b-plus, Narrated by Ray Chase, Produced by High Bridge Company, downloaded from audible.com.
Here we have the 2nd book in the Frank Clemons series. At the end of the first book, Clemons leaves Atlanta to follow Karen, the sister of the murder victim in the first book, to New York City where they are quite happy together for a while. But it soon becomes obvious that they have very different goals and like very different life styles. Karen is quite wealthy, is ambitious for success in the art world, is making a name for herself also with the gallery she co-owns, and she likes luxurious living. Frank is still basically a country boy from Georgia who finds most of the New York glitz extremely uncomfortable and artificial. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who was brutally murdered. Hannah's employer
hires Clemons to find the victim's next of kin so the police can release the body for burial, but as he learns about the dead woman's past, which stretches
back to the Lower East Side sweatshops of the 1930s, Clemons becomes obsessed with unearthing the decades-old secret that led to her death. This book has the same problem I cited in the first book regarding his adverbial phrases in interview dialogues. Both this narrator and the narrator of the last book portray Frank as a very depressed individual who only responds in a lower voice without emotion to anything asked of him. It’s somewhat hard to reconcile this behavior with being a cop or a private eye. Despite all of that, I would still say this book is very good, and I will read the next one.
Here we have the 2nd book in the Frank Clemons series. At the end of the first book, Clemons leaves Atlanta to follow Karen, the sister of the murder victim in the first book, to New York City where they are quite happy together for a while. But it soon becomes obvious that they have very different goals and like very different life styles. Karen is quite wealthy, is ambitious for success in the art world, is making a name for herself also with the gallery she co-owns, and she likes luxurious living. Frank is still basically a country boy from Georgia who finds most of the New York glitz extremely uncomfortable and artificial. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who was brutally murdered. Hannah's employer
hires Clemons to find the victim's next of kin so the police can release the body for burial, but as he learns about the dead woman's past, which stretches
back to the Lower East Side sweatshops of the 1930s, Clemons becomes obsessed with unearthing the decades-old secret that led to her death. This book has the same problem I cited in the first book regarding his adverbial phrases in interview dialogues. Both this narrator and the narrator of the last book portray Frank as a very depressed individual who only responds in a lower voice without emotion to anything asked of him. It’s somewhat hard to reconcile this behavior with being a cop or a private eye. Despite all of that, I would still say this book is very good, and I will read the next one.
September 10, 2013
HB used thank u Amazon. 2.8 rating. it is old and not fast paced. I liked it because the book looked at the rag trade in NYC. my mother was in the seamstress union for decades. she would come with sore hot hands. she worked on Viking with 9 or more needled and seldom broke one. I have pieces she made 40 and 50 yrs ago. I can feel her hands in the clothe. it would be nice to fit in the sz 8. I ordered all his books and look forward to the slow read.
June 18, 2008
My 2nd book by this guy this week. First was Red Leaves which I liked more, but this one also had a complex plotline and the added interest from the history of the labor movement in the garment industry. Throw in a little smuggling from South America, and voila! A one-night stand for sure.
good quick read.
good quick read.
April 18, 2008
i enjoyed reading this book. TO be honost i couldnt put it down, the story itself was fasinating, the story kept getting more and more intensce, its the type of book that you want to know what happens
March 10, 2012
I'm pretty bored with this series already and it's only book 2. I don't find frank to be very likable and with this particular book, I seriously barely skimmed the last 40 pages because I just didn't care all that much.
September 21, 2013
Very disappointing and not up to Mr. Cook's usual standards. I found myself not liking a single character and counting the times the adverb "dully" was used to describe how someone spoke.
March 21, 2011
Another great read by Cook
May 19, 2011
great mystery!
March 12, 2013
Second in a 3 books series.
Not my favorite work by Thomas H. Cook by far, but I still wanted to find out what was coming next...
Not my favorite work by Thomas H. Cook by far, but I still wanted to find out what was coming next...
November 2, 2013
Cassettes from the Vancover Library.
August 23, 2015
Very good story and character development, but a very dry mystery - no action scenes or shoot 'em up drama.
April 16, 2017
Romanzo del 1989 ma moderno.Buona la trama e ben costruiti i personaggi.Messaggio di denuncia sociale e rimpianto per la perdita della “fede” negli ideali di gioventù.Molto buono.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews