West Coast's Dark Side
“I’m very interested in what’s below the surface,” says Tim Maleeny, whose latest thriller, Beating the Babushka, takes on the collision of seemingly opposing worlds: San Francisco’s film industry and the Russian mafia.
“There’s usually the tourist side of a city and the way it looks to inhabitants, and then there’s the way it transforms at night,” says Maleeny. “What happens in the back alleys and hidden neighborhoods? Where does crime take place?”
In this case, a movie producer takes a fatal plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge. The death looks like suicide until you add two million dollars to the picture. A colleague thinks it’s murder. The police aren't impressed and ignore her story. The colleague turns to private detective Cape Weathers, who listens. Sort of.
But he’s all ears when two Russian gangsters show up at his door and suggest he drop the case or die.
As Weathers, who works with a trained assassin, pursues the case one Russian gangster provides a key to the investigation by the story he tells about his grandmother or Babushka. The Babushka story symbolizes the crook’s philosophy and how he approaches life, says Maleeny.
“There are colorful, quirky people in the industry,” Maleeny says. “Lots of money and loose accounting practices are a good set up for crime.”
Tim Maleeny graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in computer science, then worked in advertising before he started writing thrillers. Beating the Babushka is the second book in his Cape Weathers series. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two daughters.
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