#32 Blood Money (31st Anniversary Review)

[tomswift2002]

Blood Money
Published: October 1989
Author: Unknown as of May 2020

Plot: Frank and Joe are investigating a series of gangland killings. Crime kingpin Josh Moran is dead and buried, but his murderous legacy lives on. In his will, he left $10 million to be divided among his enemies. The catch is that the money will be paid in three months -- to those who survive!

The Hardys find themselves in a deadly race against time, for one of the beneficiaries of Moran's blood money is a former detective for the NYPD -- their own father, Fenton Hardy. Frank and Joe must unmask the trigger man before the dead man's hit list reaches into their own family!

Review:  So this book is basically about an old enemy that Fenton Hardy brought to justice 20 years before the book opens (however, due to judicial issues, Josh Moran did not start serving jail time until 10 years before the book starts).  But Fenton also had help in bringing Josh Moran down from Samual Peterson, who is now the Chief of Police for New York City, and Hugh Nolan, a retired police officer who was forced to retire early because he was accused of taking bribes, and has a grudge against Peterson because Peterson wouldn't help him when the charges were laid 20 years earlier. 

You know, this was a story thread that was dropped, or else the author was hoping to maybe get another book to write as a sequel, because this story thread kind of went unresolved.  Yes, it tied into the reason why Hugh's son was one of the criminals in the book, but it was never fleshed out.  There were times when I thought that the Hardy's would be trying to find out what was going on, but then Fenton would appear and tell the boys to leave it alone.  And Hugh Nolan's connection to Josh Moran and his crime family, Fenton Hardy and Samuel Peterson, aside from the fact that he was a police officer at the time, was never explained.  By the end of the book, I was still confused as to why Josh Moran had put Nolan in his will (since he was giving the $10 million dollars to his enemies, so why was Nolan Moran's enemy?  I've got no idea), when it appeared that Nolan had nothing to do with Moran's arrest (the author kept pointing out that Moran was arrested by Hardy and Peterson, who were partners on the force at the time).  So most of the plot about the inheritance made no sense. 

The other plot had the Hardy's helping to bring down the Johnny Carew crime family.  And really, this felt like it was stuck in at the end.  For the first 2.5 chapters, the author has us at the reading of the will, and introducing the different characters.  One of the beneficiaries of the will is Crime Boss, Johnny Carew, who Josh Moran had worked for before leaving and creating his own crime family, and Moran considered an enemy.  The plot was essentially dropped until about 3/4 of the way through the book (which took place 1.5 months after the reading of the will), when all of a sudden it was picked up and finished by having the Hardy's go on  an undercover operation for the police in which Joe is wearing a microphone and gets Johnny Carew on tape telling how he will kill the Hardy's.  As it was written, that plot kind of came out of nowhere, as nothing earlier in the book was mentioned about the police wanting to take down Carew (yes I realize that they would want to take down the crime family, earlier in the book the police were more or less letting the family have it's way, since they were behaving and doing very little illegal wise, and they couldn't do anything to arrest the family.)

Rating: 4.0/10

[MacGyver]

Nice review! I haven't read this book in forever so I don't have much to comment. I will say though that Blood Money seems to me to have a fairly interesting premise though. It's true that stories about wills with the main characters as unexpected beneficiaries upon completion of unusual stipulations have been done before but this one gave it an interesting twist with a criminal seeking revenge on his enemies even from beyond the grave.

[tomswift2002]

Even though there is that revenge part, there didn't seem to be any connection between it and the main plot. 

With "Blood Money", I wonder if the author turned in a manuscript that was too long, and then through editing all these different threads were left loose, and the author actually had them connected more in an earlier manuscript.  Since the story felt like it could've been bigger, but had to be collapsed into the 150-160 page length of a Casefile.  I wonder if the original manuscript was closer to the 200+ page length for a SuperMystery'88 book.

Also of interest, for continuity it's mentioned that Frank and Joe had not seen Sam Peterson since "Edge of Destruction".  Some might wonder about Peterson's cameo in "Street Spies", but in that book Peterson was never seen, just heard over a police car radio and Joe was only talking to him.  But "Blood Money" tries to say that "Edge of Destruction" was only a few months before, however, "Street Spies" clearly says that over a year-and-a-half had passed between it and EOD. 

[NZone]

My favorite part of the book is the part where Joe thinks the football player from USC couldn't be a murderer because he won the Heisman. The book was published 5 years before Nicole Simpson was murdered.