This one is all very literary - more poets, of course - but everyone has hold of a Gatsby analogy for the crime and much of the dialog involves casting and recasting the various characters in the various roles. It actually works, but it certainly helped to have read The Great Gatsby, maybe Smith figures that most people will have at least seen one of the movies. I did like the part where tough Italian PI, Eddie, sits on a dock waiting for a suspect to return from a fishing trip and reads the book. Never did find out if the book was in his pocket when he got dunked.
In the first one, we knew who the child molester/murderer was almost from the beginning. This time we switch from one suspect to another down to the last couple of chapters. A much more conventional approach to the genre.
Again, families and perversions of families run through everything. We discover that Talba has a half- sister, and that half-sister is central to the plot. Talba is also required to do a lot of "decoding" of the poetry of one of the players. And she throws in an extemporaneous performance to defuse the final crisis.
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