Product Description

A vengeful woman observes her typical ploy of abducting and robbing her victims in order to humiliate them, but when the latest target is also murdered, Detective Frank Janek must discover the source of the woman's wrath. Reprint. K. LJ. PW.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #912490 in Books
• Published on: 1995-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bayer hit the bestseller lists with the first Frank Janek story, Switch , an entertaining thriller with few pretenses. With luck and a hype tailwind, his third Janek novel ( Wallflower was the second) may sell despite some arty baggage. NYPD Lieutenant Janek is working on the murder of a businessman in a midtown hotel. The victim was slipped a mickey, his room ransacked and "you are a total jerk" was written in mirror-writing on his chest with indelible marker. He was also shot and robbed of a prototype computer chip. A woman named Gelsey duped and robbed the guy while in the grip of an obsession caused by childhood sexual abuse. But she's really a good kid--and a talented painter. After Janek locates her, he helps her acknowledge that her father abused her with her mother's complicity, a realization that her nice (now dead) old shrink was unable to effect. Janek's investigation also leads to an old sex-scandal murder involving a very tangled web of kinkiness, greed, police corruption and betrayal. There are dozens of colorful characters but most of them are 2-D and Bayer's psychobabble and overheated language really dampen any thrills: in a face-off against two nasties, Janek muses there "was a rigor to the design these players made that reminded him of paintings by De Chirico showing lonely figures on vast Italian squares . . . he felt the same strong ambience of ritual, inevitability and fate." Janek's final situation--back in uniform on the streets--is equally preposterous. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Lieut. Frank Janek, the hero of Bayer's best-selling novel Switch ( LJ 6/1/84), is working on two difficult cases. One involves the murder of a man in a hotel room and a ring of women who prey on men looking for one-night stands. The other is a nine-year-old headache that haunts the NYPD: Janek goes to Cuba to interview a witness who could turn around the conviction of a wealthy man in prison for the brutal murder of his wife. It all seems straightforward until Janek realizes that each fact is distorted, and each truth hides another. Winner of the Edgar Award for Peregrine (o.p.), Bayer uses the maze to symbolize the multifaceted reality of life in general and police work in particular. With each entry in the Janek series, the reader understands him better. In his latest, Janek is stripped of his psychological and social facade and left to survive in the world without protection. An outstanding novel for all collections.
- Jo - Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Bayer is known for taut, hard-edged psychological thrillers such as Switch (1984) and Peregrine (1981). Savvy NYPD detective Frank Janek is working two cases. The first involves a ring of "bad girls" who pick up men in bars, then drug and rob them. Janek figures the game's gone too far when one of the marks is found murdered. Then there's the never-solved, nine-year-old Mendoza case. Edith Mendoza, a beautiful socialite, was brutally murdered, and her husband was sent to prison for the crime. Something about the case didn't sit right, though, and plenty of heads rolled after Internal Affairs exposed the trumped-up evidence that convicted Mendoza. Now the Mendozas' maid, a possible eyewitness to the murder, has surfaced in Cuba, and the pot is boiling again. Bayer's got all the right ingredients here for a dynamite story. Unfortunately, it goes nowhere. That's all the more dissatisfying because it starts out with such promise--literate, sinister, and suspenseful. Overall, though, it rates just two stars. Emily Melton

Customer Reviews

Skip This Book!
Over the years I've been a fan of William Bayer's books and particularly his Janek mysteries. However, Mirror Maze is definitey a book to skip. The plot was much too disjointed, the characters (even Janek in thsi book) were mostly uninteresting and not very credible, and the action was too sporadic to make me care much about what was going to happen next. I felt like I was in a maze reading this book and all I wanted to do was get out of it so I can move on to my next book. Finally, I took the easy way out and gave up on the book about 2/3s of the way through it.

Welcome to the NYPD as it should be.
It is too bad the Janek novels are hard to find these days. In spite of their falts they are excellent reads. Janek is a pragmatice cop who doesn't loose sight of his humanity. He represents a lot of what todays cop should be like. You will enjoy this novel in spite of its rather somber seting.