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After a too long hiatus, P. I. Carlotta Carlyle is back, this time working undercover on the biggest urban construction project in history, Boston's Big Dig, to try and find examples of corruption on the enterprise. Her third assignment is as a secretary for one of the smaller contractors, Horgan Construction. Life is not all fun and games on a large dangerous building site, and even a small part of trying to build an underground 10 lane highway beneath an old city, while not interrupting the life of the city or the utilities, is difficult and dangerous. One of the workers asks to see Liz Horgan, the owner of the business, but her husband puts him off While Carlotta tries to find evidence, Dana Endicott, a Boston grande dame comes to her and asks her to try and find her tenant, Veronica James, who has apparently disappeared, along with one of Dana's automobiles, but leaving her beloved dog behind. Carlotta figures that there is no reason why she cannot take on the Endicott case as well as continuing her job on the construction site. Arriving on the site early one morning, Carlotta finds that the blue eyed construction worker who had tried to see Liz had fallen to his death. Carlotta intercepts a puzzling phone call on Liz's cell phone and work at the Horgan site is held up for the investigation, and Carlotta continues to try and find VeeJay, but Endicott keeps making excuses and preventing Carlotta from seeing Victoria's apartment. Rumor had it that this book was held up because it was an expose of the project. On the contrary, I think that Barnes was extremely kind to the biggest boondoggle in the history of the US. She half-heartedly blames the politicians, but it isn't the politicians who have caused the $2 billion estimate for the cost of building a very few miles of tunnel, a couple of bridges and some access roads to balloon to $14 billion and counting, and to be running so far behind schedule. As one who has to drive through it every day, I can tell you that it isn't only the politicians who are at fault. For example, most of Boston is built on fill. At one point, several of the tunnels started to floodwith water, which pushed the completion date further behind and increased the cost. Hadn't anyone looked at a geological map of the area to see where the historical shoreline was or looked at a map and seen the street names (Beach Street, Margin Street) or just looked out the window, and seen how close the shoreline still is? Carlotta was supposedly working in that area but she never mentions the problems caused by incompetent contractors, nor does she mention the documented rapes and other crimes perpetrated by the employes of some of the subcontractors. It's good to see Carlotta Carlyle back, but I wish Barnes had chosen a framework other than The Big Dig
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, November 2002
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