Where is Bianca

here is Bianca? (1966)

Is the lovely young heiress hiding somewhere among the shiny steel towers of Manhattan? Or is she the horribly mutilated corpse hauled up from the sewers of the city? Captain Timothy Corrigan, the cool cop with the eye-patch sets out to solve the puzzle - and finds himself playing a fantastic game of hide-and-seek in a glittering world where everything is make-believe, except sudden, shocking death.

She could be in St. Moritz for skiing or off on a jet-set lark to the Greek Islands.

She could be in Reno or in one of those little Mexican towns where divorces flow like tequila.

She could be walking through the streets of Portofino in a blonde wig and very dark glasses in the company of a too-handsome young man.

But she could also be in the police morgue mutilated past recognition.

Bianca could be almost everywhere, doing almost anything - she could be very much alive or very, very dead. Bianca loved to shock her friends, you see, but perhaps just once, she made a very deadly mistake and shocked a most murderous enemy.

Where is Bianca? - cover pocket book edition, Popular Library N° 50-447, 1966

Where is Bianca? - cover Four Square 1st paperback edition, 1966

Where is Bianca? - cover audiobook Blackstone Audio, Inc., read by Traber Burns, June 1. 2015

Where is Bianca? - cover MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, September 29, 2015

Book ghost-written by Talmage Powell in which a woman’s body is found in a New York sewer with the face eaten away by rats and three different people make conflicting identifications of the corpse. The hunt for her identity and killer leads Corrigan and Baer into the off-Broadway theatrical milieu, which Powell sees as the exclusive province of degenerates and phonies.

Nevins found this routinely readable item neither circumstantially convincing enough for a good police procedural nor intellectually involving enough for a good detective novel, but a deduction from the absence of andirons in a fireplace is almost worthy of Ellery himself.

Anthony Boucher (May 22, 1966) called it “a straightforward whodunit” with “good New York theater background, but flat writing and weak plotting.”

We get introduced to the main characters. Starting with Captain Tim Corrigan, the eye-patched cop driving in Car 40, NYPD. An unostentatious 5′10″ his build suggested he worked out. His features were all angles, their sharpness softened by an amiable expression. He lost one of his brown eyes in the Korean war and wearing an eye-patch certainly made him a very unusual police officer.
During their OSS (Office of Strategic Services) days Chuck Baer and him formed a team each owed his life to the other several times over. Whilst Corrigan returned to the department Baer opened a private detective agency. Built like a bull Baer was almost ugly. His skin was swarthy and thick, his nose was big, his lips were heavy and he had red hair. He looked like a heavy-footed, kindly old uncle.

Where is Bianca? Translations:
German: Who Steckt Bianca?
Greek: Που είναι η Μπιάνκα
Italian: Bianca come cadavere

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