Jennifer Marsh is back with her reporter boyfriend. This time, her elder friend Emmie Walker is in trouble: Jennifer finds her standing next to the dead body of Edgar Walker, with the murder weapon in her hand.
What I Liked
The rambling around by all of the characters is great. As usual, Jennifer’s writing group throw themselves in to help her investigate all the goings-on at Edgar’s Down Home Grill, complete with a special sauce that may be to-die-for.
What I Didn’t Like
The storyline jumps around a bit in time at the start. It might have read a lot better in normal linear fashion rather than the resulting stilted jumping. It’s only the first few chapters though, so it doesn’t overly hurt the story.
Disclosure
I am not personal friends with the author, but I have interacted with them briefly on social media.
Easy Rawlins lives in L.A., 1948. He’s a black war veteran who just lost his job for mouthing off to the boss. Then a man comes along with an easy proposition: find a girl who was hanging out with the blacks at the jazz bars. While Easy needs the money to keep the little house he bought, he wants to know why the guy wants the girl found. Then he finds out others are looking too. Bodies pile up, having been worked over first, and the girl turns out to be connected to politics. While Easy finds the girl, it comes along with a lot of trouble from crooks, politicos, and cops who think he’s good for one of the murders.
What I Liked
The story moves, the characters are interesting, and the descriptions of the settings are well-written enough to give the reader the feel of each place in the story.
What I Didn’t Like
The characters may be interesting but are not well-developed. This story definitely has the feel of the pulp mystery fiction of the 50s and 60s, with lots of action, but no depth to the main characters. I never particularly cared about Easy, although I like the parameters of the character.
Misty Patterson has problems: an abusive domineering husband and amnesia from her childhood. And now she has a new problem: her husband gets abusive again and she conks him with an Eskimo statue, hard enough seemingly to hurt but not to kill. Then she blacks out. He’s found dead a few days later after having been hit a second time with the same statue and dumped in the lake. And Misty doesn’t know what happened. Enter her lawyer, Nina Reilly, who is newly separated from her husband, newly separated from her neat legal firm, and new to the Lake Tahoe area. And her idea of a perfect introduction to the area is NOT a high-stakes murder case where everyone thinks Misty did it. Maybe even Misty herself.
What I Liked
The Lake Tahoe community comes alive as do some of the characters — Nina, herself; Misty; and Nina’s assistant. Lots of interesting facts about the area and the impact of the lake on a dead body. Well-written, all the characters are real, and adequately developed for the story. In fact, it’s an impressive array: Nina’s ex-husband on the peripheries along with her brother, sister-in-law, and Nina’s son; Paul, her investigator who’s warm for her form; a string of Misty’s lovers and their very jealous wives and girlfriends; Misty’s parents; and a couple of doctors who are trying to help Misty remember her past. A few loose threads are left for the next story in the “series”, if it does indeed become a series. And, on the legal side, the solution is handled in an interesting courtroom finale that is not like simple Perry Mason reruns. A good beginning for “Perry O’Shaughnessy”, which is a pseudonym for two sisters: Pamela (a lawyer) and Mary O’Shaughnessy (a writer).
What I Didn’t Like
The point-of-view switches from Misty to Nina to Paul in various chapters, and the switch does not really develop Misty’s or Paul’s character enough to justify the switch. Unfortunately, I figured out the three key elements of the “mystery” before the end of the story. Didn’t expect the ending, at least not exactly, but I did expect the “baddie”. There are a couple of places where it is a little heavy on the “legal” side, interpreting case law, which is a likely result of one of the two authors being a lawyer.
Private Investigator Jeri Howard is back and she’s lost a client. Rob Lawter comes to Jeri and retains her services, tells her that he’ll brief her later, but then takes a header out of his apartment window — suicide, accident or murder? Jeri investigates and takes a job as a legal secretary (her previous employment) at the company where Rob worked as a paralegal. All she has is a determination to help her now-dead client and an anonymous threatening note he received warning him about “blowing the whistle”. Lots of people enter stage left, and most of them stick around for the duration making it hard for Jeri to pin them down. Was it one of the lawyers? Was it the corporate bigwigs who took over the company in a hostile takeover and are they going to take the company apart piece-by-piece? Was it the plant managers conspiring to hide some terrible secret? Was it the brother-in-law who is trying to convince everyone that Rob committed suicide? And what do Rob’s neighbours know about what happened that night?
What I Liked
There are no super-human powers of deduction shown here by Jeri. She is a plodder — one piece of the puzzle at a time, turning it around and around to see if it fits anywhere. And a lot of the time, she doesn’t know what to do with the pieces and doesn’t try to make them fit anywhere. The writing is up to Dawson’s normal first-rate level and it is particularly interesting to see how Jeri goes about her non-investigating tasks around the office. The office, and the office politics, are made real by describing Jeri’s experiences — all of them, including the rules for working the photocopier. They set the tone for the workplace and most writers would have left them out. Dawson includes them, and the story is better for having them.
What I Didn’t Like
Jeri can be a bit of a dunce at times. Several “clues” leap off the page at the reader, but Jeri misses them, or rather, completely misses their significance — at the time. There are a couple like that, so the reader knows where the story is going when Jeri apparently doesn’t, and it is only to the credit of Dawson’s writing that you don’t say “Hurry up and get there already.” However, at the end, Dawson doesn’t play fair — there are two “clues” that turn everything around for Jeri, the final pieces of the puzzle, and the reader doesn’t get to see them until the solution is revealed. “Foul!”, I cry.
It was ADVERTISED as a combination of a cookbook with stories about Dr. Kay Scarpetta, and in that light, it fails on all counts. There IS no story, and nothing happening in the non-story — and worse still, none of the characters act like they do in the novels. The recipes are interesting, but far from revolutionary. This book seems to have been issued for one reason and one reason only — to milk some money out of the fans and to give them almost nothing in return.
