Plot or Premise

An Army buddy of McGee’s asks for help looking into the death of his sister’s fiancé, Howard Plummer. While Plummer looks to have been the victim of a simple mugging, the sister isn’t so sure that her pure, sweet Howard wasn’t somehow into something shady involving extra cash. McGee wants to help the buddy, but he also wants to know about piles of cash.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

There are really four parts to the story, and I confess I don’t like them equally. The first part is the fiancé, the sister and the Army buddy. They may be the clients and written sympathetically, but they’re not particularly interesting.

The second segment is the crooks who have their hooks into a wealthy man who lives a bit of an isolated life from his ex-wife and two kids. While there’s a femme fatale running around, there’s not enough substance to her to make her truly menacing or truly attractive.

The third segment involves some badly written noir involving an involuntary stay at a psych hospital, overuse of some bad drugs, and the fear of lobotomies mixed with brainwashing. It’s just all way over the top.

However, there is some fifth business in the mix. One of the tertiary characters that McGee goes to talk to is an aging well-to-do woman who McGee knows from back in the day, and they work well together. She is the most interesting person in the story, albeit a bit shallowly developed. I’d love to see a story just about her life, to be honest.

The mystery is decent, the plot / grift has some spark for the time, but the roller-coaster reads as way too farfetched even for the period. A little too pulpy, even for McGee stories.

The Bottom Line

Too much psychobabble, not enough mystery