One of those Malibu Nights (Elizabeth Adler)

EN Before any fact or analysis, I found the translation of the title of this book very peculiar. The original title "One of those Malibu Nights" translated in a non-literal way was very creative in Portuguese, but that in my opinion is only understood when you finish reading the whole book.

“One of Those Malibu Nights" is a book written by the British writer Elizabeth Adler, originally published in 2008, by the publisher Quinta Essência, which follows the story of Detective Mac Reilly, a private investigator of movie stars, who is very well known and has a television program. Mac Reilly and Sunny Alvarez are already well-known characters in the books of Elizabeth Adler. Little is known about the life of the writer because she prefers to keep her privacy. It is known that she debuted her novels in 1985 and has as a characteristic mark themes like travels because many titles of her books include several different cities or countries.

In this book, Adler tells us another episode of crime and mystery, with a hint of romance starring Mac Reilly, who on a night out walking by the seashore in Malibu, hears a scream from a woman and when he decides to find out where the scream is coming from, he ends up with a gun pointed at his face. Despite escaping the bullet, Mac is intrigued and later decides to look for the woman with the gun, but the woman disappears without a trace. In addition, movie star Allie Ray also disappears, and Mac Reilly begins to realize that there are interconnections between them that he needs to unfold. The only person who will help him discover these mysteries will be Sunny Alvarez, his romantic partner with whom he has been having a lot of troubles lately and needs to solve them. The truth is that in the whole story we will have persecutions, crimes, lies and novels that will also take them to several parts of the world. All this to discover a criminal, who later becomes a murderer, always one step ahead of this duo of “detectives”.

This was the second book I read from the author, and I admit that I liked the first book a little bit more than this one. The development of the characters was not so detailed, which makes us lose a little interest in their interactions. At times, I also felt a little irritated with their attitudes. I didn't think they were very real. In comparison, the writer's description of landscapes makes us imagine heavenly and dreamlike scenarios, a characteristic that won me over much more than any other detail in the book.

With this, I end by saying that the book serves for good entertainment and for a good afternoon of reading, but intellectually it does not add much except a little romance or mystery. Besides, the fact that the characters are recurring in the books probably causes an omission in their descriptions because it is already expected that this will be done in the first book in which they appear.

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