Review: "Death of an Ex" by Delia Pitts

Death of an Ex by Delia Pitts Minotaur Books, 2025     Death of an Ex, which is Delia Pitts’s second Vandy Myrick mystery, is a thoughtful, deliberately paced private eye novel with a rich New Jersey setting and a heaping of emotional healing. A former Rutgers University cop, the middle-aged Vandy moved back to her small hometown of Queenstown and took a job as a lawyer’s “pet private investigator.” Her boss, Elissa Adesanya, is also Vandy’s best friend and the work tends to be low market rackets like divorce, insurance fraud, and process serving. Vandy is thrown into the deep end of the investigative pool after attending a glitzy event at the high-end Rome School—a private boarding school in Queenstown—where her young friend, Ingrid Ramirez, is receiving an award. Vandy’s ex-husband, Philip Bolden, which is a great surname for any character, is at the reception and even after twenty years he still makes Vandy’s pulse rise and her knees weak. A few days later Vandy takes Philip to her bed and for a moment she doesn’t mind being the other woman. That changes when Philip is gunned down a few blocks from Vandy’s apartment and Vandy is left to figure out who did it and why. All while traversing the mine field of Philip’s personal life—he was married with a teenage son and his wandering libido caused nothing but trouble. While also hoping to keep her and Philip’s indiscretion a secret. Death of an Ex, while rightfully a private eye tale, has the atmosphere of an amateur sleuth in a particularly well-done cozy. Vandy’s investigative style is circular and primarily based on emotion rather than the linear style most often used in detective tales. She bumps around the primary suspects, as sneakily as an English Village sleuth, looking for motive and opportunity. A wobbly tactic because of its use of repetition—a repetition of Vandy’s emotions and a repetition of questioning the same suspects over and over—to deepen the mystery, but one that ultimately works since it reveals the illogic and tragedy of murder. But the true charm of Death of an Ex is Vandy’s own struggle with the death of her only child and Pitts’s vivid rendering of a predominately Black New Jersey town.

Check out Death of an Ex on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

 

Review: "Them Bones" by David Housewright

 

Them Bones by David Housewright Minotaur Books, 2025   David Housewright’s Them Bones—which is the twenty-second Rushmore McKenzie mystery—is a tale of… well, two tales of the same story. Okay, not really two tales, but rather a single story told in two different styles. The McKenzie books are written in first person from the perspective of McKenzie—an unlicensed private eye in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, that spends his time doing favors for friends. But Them Bones is distinct from its predecessors because the crime is detailed in third person from the perspective of the client, Angela Bjork. We last saw Angela as a girl saving McKenzie’s life in The Taking of Libbie, SD (2010), but now she is all grown up and working on her Ph.D. in paleontology at the University of Minnesota. Angela discovered a nearly intact fossil of an Ankylosaurus while working a dinosaur dig in Montana. It was a profound find because it is the most complete of its kind, but before the bones can be transported to the Twin Cities, the skull was stolen. Angela tells McKenzie, and the reader, about the discovery (in May) and the heist (in August) and everything that happened in-between. In this unofficial prologue, Angela introduces the suspects—professors, students, and other miscellany—that were present at the dig site when the heist occurred. The paleontology stuff was interesting, including how the dig was done, the problems they encountered and personalities involved; however, it took so long, about a quarter of the narrative, that I had begun thinking McKenzie had the week off. But once McKenzie agrees to help Angela recover the Ankylosaurus, and he takes charge of the narrative things really pick up. In fact, Them Bones, suddenly becomes a McKenzie novel. With his subtle and not-so-subtle wit, his penchant for finding trouble and breaking the rules, and his always gallant search for justice, McKenzie does an admirable job of flushing out the villains. The action moves from college campuses (there are two), to a museum, to high class neighborhoods, and from Minnesota to Montana to Canada and back again. And it is a good bit of fun. But that opening prologue made the entire enterprise a little wobbly. Its length almost made me give up before the good stuff started, which I’ve never encountered with David Housewright’s writing. It felt like Housewright was setting-up a traditional whodunit, which is cool, but (for me at least) it never quite worked that way. What I did like about Them Bones is far more than what I disliked. As usual, the setting—the Twin Cities, Montana, and even rural Canada—was vivid and melded perfectly with the story. The actual mystery, who was the Inside Man that helped the thieves steal the skull, is compelling and McKenzie’s self-deprecating style and often flippant attitude is fun. There is a good deal of subterfuge and the final reveal is both surprising and perfectly right. But a few hours spent with McKenzie, even in a flawed tale like Them Bones, is always a chore to look forward to.

Find Them Bones on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "Playback" by Raymond Chandler

 

Playback by Raymond Chandler Houghton Mifflin, 1958 Reviewed by Mike Baker Playback is the last book Raymond Chandler published in his lifetime and, while I haven’t read everything he wrote, I can say categorically this is the weakest entry to date. The novel opens and closes with Clyde Umney, a lawyer representing some nebulous East Coast concern, stogeying Marlowe into taking a job tailing a young woman for reasons he refuses to explain—but he pays well enough, and that’s apparently enough for Marlowe. So our detective heads down to Central Station in L.A., where the woman is supposed to arrive, and brings along a grip full of clothes, cash, and a gun. There, we meet the story’s villain, Larry Mitchell. He’s well-connected but broke, seedy, and clinging to charm like it might still work. Mitchell meets with the young woman—who wants nothing to do with him—and then vanishes. Marlowe follows her to some small southern California town, and the job should be simple: observe, report, collect. But it isn’t. Mitchell complicates things. Marlowe can’t stand a bully, and Mitchell fits the part too well. The woman complicates things more. Marlowe still carries the instincts of a knight, even if the armor’s corroded and the lance is blunt. He delays calling Umney, digging instead into what Mitchell might have had on her. Then Mitchell turns up dead—or doesn’t. There’s no body. In true Chandler fashion, the mystery becomes metaphysical as much as procedural. Maybe there was a murder. Maybe there wasn’t. But Marlowe, ever the stubborn moralist, is now in it, tangled up with a woman he barely knows and a story that doesn’t want to be told. And here’s where Playback loses itself. What begins with promise descends into a slow unraveling: a string of aimless NPCs saying things, doing little, contributing less. A fog of narrative confusion settles in. There are murky shenanigans, unresolved threads, and long stretches of pontificating—much of it Chandler, or Marlowe, or some hybrid of the two, meditating on life and death and what it all means. It took me until page 119 to feel even a flicker of investment. Chandler can still craft a surgical sentence—his style is as crisp as ever—but he no longer seems interested in building anything with them. Reading Playback is like calling a friend while cleaning the kitchen: they’re rambling about a trip to the library, and you’re only half-listening, more focused on the stubborn stain you’ve been scrubbing for fifteen minutes. There are, as always, moments of delight—those sharp quips that cut air and page alike—but they’re fewer and farther between. In between, we’re left with a kind of exhausted melancholy. Chandler, who once lit noir on fire with his wit and moral clarity, now seems lost in the haze. There’s no irony in his musings, just the raw blurting of worn-down truisms. Mortality isn’t just a theme here—it’s the undercurrent pulling everything under. What’s striking is the fear behind it. Chandler, the ultimate stylist, seems overwhelmed by the vision he’s spent his life perfecting. The white knight has become a disenchanted ghost, mumbling at the hollow praise still echoing around him. He’s no longer getting it right, and he knows it. Playback isn’t just a detective story. It’s a last letter, written to no one in particular. A man staring into the final dark, trying to summon meaning from the habits of a lifetime. In the end, there’s no great twist, no satisfying conclusion. Just a tired hero and the man who created him, both running out the clock. And maybe that’s the most honest ending Chandler could have written. Not with a bang, not even with a whisper—but with the slow, sinking realization that the world doesn’t need saving, and the knight doesn’t need to ride again*. *               *               * *  There’s a single chapter near the end where Marlowe is searching for a waiter and tracks him to the tiny shack he calls home—only to find him hanging in the outhouse. The story is so messy by this point that I wasn’t sure whether it was suicide or murder. Either way, Marlowe is gob-smacked by the horror of it, and maybe even shaken by the thought that he played some part in the man’s death. It’s a moment that feels like Chandler reckoning with something personal. Maybe even entertaining the idea of doing himself in. But history would prove he didn’t have the heart to go out that way. Instead, he chose the long, slow exit: alcohol and maudlin self-indulgence. Still, the chapter is striking—arguably the best in the book. The thing is, I love to read well-written books, but even the writers I admire most stumble sometimes. This might be one of those moments. But if you love Chandler, it’s like blues harp—you play all the notes between where you are and where you’re headed. And Playback, for all its flaws, is one of those notes. If you want to understand Chandler, really understand him, this is part of the journey.

Check out Playback at Amazon—click here for the paperback.

Review: "Galway's Edge" by Ken Bruen

 

Galway’s Edge by Ken Bruen Mysterious Press, 2025   Galway’s Edge (scheduled for release Mar. 4) is a wild-eyed and far-ranging crime novel written as only Ken Bruen can: a splash of poetry; a dash of morality, or the absence of morality, perhaps; a pinch of madness; and a dollop of justice. This is the eighteenth book featuring Galway, located on the western shore of Ireland, private eye Jack Taylor. Jack is hired by the rotund Father Richard, a papal troubleshooter from Rome, to clean up a local vigilante group called Edge. Edge is comprised of five of Galway’s leading citizens, including the Church’s own Father Kevin Whelan. Father Richard’s masters in the Vatican are concerned about the potential for bad press if Whelan’s involvement becomes widely known. But before Taylor can do anything about Whelan, the priest is found in his own backyard dangling from a rope. Soon after, another member of Edge is stabbed to death, and it becomes obvious Edge’s leading citizens are being targeted by a multi-millionaire with a grudge against the group. As Taylor investigates Edge and the millionaire, he does side jobs for a nun hoping to retrieve a stolen crucifix, a battered wife looking for breathing room from her husband, and a terminally ill man hoping Jack will kill him. Happily, one or two of the subplots tie-in nicely with Edge, the millionaire, and Father Richard. Galway’s Edge is a sparkling examination of the steaming rot of humanity’s underbelly—a rot that, as you read, you realize affects us all. The tale spans parts of eight months, November 2022 to June 2023, and many of the chapters are introduced with real life events. A cover-up of an Irish cervical cancer test that gave false negatives. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trump’s avoidance of consequences in the United States…and so and so on. These real-world events underscore the absurdity of our shared morality—is it any more or less moral for Taylor to kill a man dying of cancer than it is for a government to wage war, a criminal to be elected as the president of the U.S.? Which gives Galway’s Edge a dour expression, but Bruen’s sly wit rescues it from utter darkness. And while Taylor is a hard man with his own distinct sense of morality, which usually conflicts with society’s expectations, his reasoning is never abstract and always understandable. Galway’s Edge is, as is Ken Bruen, the real deal—interesting, thought-provoking, and in equal parts ugly and redemptive.

Check out Galway’s Edge at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Review: "Battered Spouse" by Jeremiah Healy

“Battered Spouse” by Jeremiah Healy from The Concise Cuddy, Crippen & Landru, 1998   “Battered Spouse”—which was originally published in the Fall 1990 issue of Armchair Detective—is Jeremiah Healy’s fifth published John Frances Cuddy short story. Mona Gage’s husband, Kyle, was killed in a hit-and-run accident while jogging six days earlier on a quiet country road. Three men witnessed the accident but none were able to identify the car beyond the general make and model. The police investigation has gone cold and Mona wants Cuddy to revive it with some private sleuthing. Cuddy does what Cuddy does and he interviews everyone involved—the witnesses, Kyle’s boss, and a few others the police missed—and discovers a thread that ultimately leads him to the killer. “Battered Spouse” is a solid whodunit that should have been easier to solve than it was (for this reader, at least) because the clues were well-placed and the situation, after reading the conclusion, should have made it obvious. But that’s what makes any whodunit good—the reader kicking himself for not seeing the culprit before they’re revealed on the page. Healy’s matter-of-fact style and Cuddy’s likable mannerisms make the narrative easy-to-read. The climactic ending had a perfectly ironic twist that was one part funny and two parts surprising. “Battered Spouse” is easily the best of the four or five Cuddy shorts I’ve read so far. “Battered Spouse” was nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s 1991 Shamus Award for best short story, but it lost out to Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone tale, “Final Resting Place.”

Check out The Concise Cuddy here at Amazon.

 

Review: "Madman on a Drum" by David Housewright

 

Madman on a Drum by David Housewright Minotaur Books, 2008     David Housewright’s fifth Rushmore McKenzie mystery, Madman on a Drum, is a hardboiled tour-de-force private eye novel about justice and revenge. In the Acknowledgements, Housewright recognizes Carrol John Daly and Mickey Spillane’s influence on Madman on a Drum, which is easy to see. It has the same violence and anger—an anger at an out-of-control world—coupled with the desire for an old-school, almost Old Testament-style, dark vengeance. McKenzie’s world crumbles when he is called to his lifelong buddy, Bobby Dunston’s house, and told Bobby’s preteen daughter, Victoria, was kidnapped on her way home from school: “They kidnapped Bobby Dunston’s daughter in the middle of a bright September afternoon off a city street I had traveled safely maybe a thousand times when I was a kid.” When McKenzie arrives, the F.B.I. is already on scene and Bobby, a St. Paul, Minnesota, homicide detective, has a steely mask of professional self-control. A mask McKenzie hopes his friend can keep in place until Victoria is recovered. In short order, the kidnappers demand $1,000,000 of McKenzie’s money in exchange for the girl’s life. An amount McKenzie is glad to provide, but his plans don’t include letting the kidnappers slip away into the night. And it has nothing to do with getting his money back. Madman on a Drum received a starred review from Publishers Weekly—“Hate, revenge and old-fashioned greed propel… Housewright’s stellar fifth mystery”—which parallels my own thoughts about the tale. It is damn good. The St. Paul setting is rich and vibrant; from outlaw biker bars to McKenzie’s reminiscences about the old St. Paul: “The city was originally called Pig’s Eye Landing after its founder, Pierre ‘Pig’s Eye’ Parrant, a notorious and thoroughly likable fur trader turned moonshiner, until a French priest came along and decided it wasn’t PC enough.” McKenzie’s humorous commentary is muted in this one, although it is still there in smaller doses, and replaced by a seething anger. In a way, Madman on a Drum is a morality play with McKenzie dangling as both witness and defendant in a shadowy tribunal. The plotting is concise, twisty—in all the right ways—and surprising in a perfectly sensible manner. Madman on a Drum is the best of McKenzie’s early tales and it announces both McKenzie and Housewright as serious players in the mystery and private eye genres.

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

Review: “Death and the Dancing Shadows” by James Reasoner

 

“Death and the  Dancing Shadows” by James Reasoner in The Black Lizard  Anthology of Crime Fiction, 1987   “Death and the Dancing Shadows”—which was originally published in the March 1980 issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (MSMM)—is an atmospheric and clever novelette featuring West Hollywood private eye, Markham. Retired B-Western movie star, Eliot “Lucky” Tremaine, summons Markham to help him with a “delicate” matter. When Markham arrives at Lucky’s sprawling ranch house, he finds the old actor screening one of his own films. It feels like Norma Desmond drowning herself in her own past in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard, but (as Tremaine explains) it’s not about vanity but rather a desire to see Hollywood, and by extension the world, the way it once was: “Good, clean, excitin’ stories with a hero and without all this trashy stuff they put in today.” And for all that, Tremaine seems well adjusted, if perhaps too nostalgic for his glory days and maybe a little too keen about his sense of honor and morality, and so Markham readily agrees to help him. We’ll keep Tremaine’s problem on the QT so it will be a surprise when you read the story. What Markham’s investigation uncovers will test Tremaine’s sense of morality in a close and personal way. It will test Markham’s, too… “Death and the Dancing Shadows” is a nifty hardboiled tale with a Raymond Chandler vibe—sharp dialogue, twisty plotting, and heaps of irony—that is as easy to read as it is appealing. And the ending is pitch perfect with an almost noir reflection broken only by Markham’s stolid refusal to succumb to his baser instincts. Maybe not quite as good as Reasoner’s Cody stories, but still pretty damn good.

Go here for the Kindle version of “Death and the Dancing Shadows” at Amazon.

Five Markham stories were published between 1979 and 1982: “All the Way Home” [April 1979, MSMM) “Death and the Dancing Shadows” [March 1980, MSMM] “The Man in the Moon” [April 1980, MSMM] “The Double Edge” [Summer 1981, Skullduggery] “War Games” [April 1982, MSMM] Three, including “Death and the Dancing Shadows,” have been released in Kindle, which you can see here.

Review: "Tin City" by David Housewright

 Tin City
by David Housewright
Minotaur Books, 2005

 

Tin City is David Housewright’s excellent second mystery featuring unlicensed private eye Rushmore McKenzie. When asked, McKenzie readily agrees to help his late-father’s best friend, the beekeeper Mr. Mosley, investigate what is killing his bees. It seems like a simple favor, but McKenzie quickly changes his mind when the doctoral student he hired to collect and analyze samples around Mosely’s property, looking for bee-killing toxins, is shot at by Mosely’s new neighbor, Frank Crosetti. And things turn uglier when an execution-style murder upends McKenzie’s simple favor.
     It seems obvious Crosetti is the villain, but before McKenzie can confront him, Crosetti disappears. In a hurry, McKenzie discovers Frank Crosetti is a man without a past. In fact, his name is borrowed from a former New York Yankees shortstop. A hovering FBI agent and, as McKenzie keeps investigating, a warrant for his, McKenzie’s, arrest makes it appear Crosetti is being protected by the feds. To keep out of jail and in the hunt, McKenzie goes into hiding and follows the clues to a quiet suburban trailer park where the investigation heats up.
     Publishers Weekly said David Housewright, in Tin City, “[channels] Raymond Chandler with tongue-in-cheek humor,” which is an apt comparison because McKenzie is a sharp and witty observer with a wicked, smart-alecky tongue. His observations, which are more numerous in Tin City than the other books I’ve read so far, are brief and fit nicely into the story. My favorite of the lot, probably because I agree with it so much, is about libraries:     

“I’ve always loved libraries, the very idea of them. They’re citadels of peace and quiet and intellectual freedom and civilization—commodities that are becoming increasingly difficult to come by. They are, in a word, the most ‘democratic’ places on earth, although they’ve been finding it harder to remain that way.”

But Tin City isn’t a dry, preachy tome. There is plenty of action, fisticuffs and gunplay both. A solid mystery that is sensible and with enough surprises to keep it interesting. The Twin Cities, Minnesota, setting is a major player in the narrative and McKenzie makes certain it is known he is from St. Paul rather than Minneapolis. The plotting is concise and McKenzie, flaws, ego, and all, is a damn likable character. The sort of guy we—all of us juvenile-minded males—wish we could be.

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

Review: "The Devil May Care" by David Housewright

 

The Devil May Care

by David Housewright

Minotaur Books, 2014

 

 

David Housewright’s eleventh Rushmore McKenzie mystery, The Devil May Care, is a thinking man’s thriller with a bit of humor—in the form of McKenzie’s first-person commentary and snappy rapport with everyone in the story—and a complex, but nicely compact plot. McKenzie resigned from the St. Paul, Minnesota, police department to collect a multi-million-dollar reward in a fraud investigation and now he does whatever he wants, including doing favors for friends as an unlicensed P.I.
     When McKenzie is approached by twenty-something Riley Brodin, the granddaughter of one of Minnesota’s wealthiest men, Walter Muehlenhaus, wanting his help to find her missing fiancé, Juan Carlos Navarre, McKenzie’s instinct is to walk away. He and Muehlenhaus butted heads during another investigation, and the aggravation of working for the family isn’t appealing to McKenzie. But Riley shows real concern for Navarre and ultimately charms McKenzie by sharing her grandfather’s nickname for him: “f**king McKenzie”; but truthfully, the moniker losses its luster the more McKenzie hears it. The missing persons case gets on his nerves, too, since Navarre doesn’t seem to exist. And when a defunct street gang begins following McKenzie around and people start dying violently, all he can do is follow the clues where they take him. And hope no one he likes gets hurt.
     Publishers Weekly called The Devil May Care “exceptional” and gave it a starred review. A sentiment I share because everything in this detective thriller works. The characters have enough realism to make them relatable. The plot, which is wonderfully twisty and surprising, has an easy-going attitude and every inch of it gets McKenzie in deeper trouble. St. Paul and environs is drawn to perfection, from the people to the landscape (including all those fabulous lakes). But it is McKenzie that makes everything sizzle with his ironic first-person commentary, his low-wattage Knight-errant syndrome, and his ability to mix and mash with anyone from poverty row to country clubs. The Devil May Care is my first experience with Housewright’s writing, but there will be many more since finishing that last page made me a little sad.

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

"Janssen Tries Again": Harry O's Second Pilot

 

This morning I realized I needed some Harry O love. I found this marvelous little article published in the January 20, 1974, issue of TV Week, included in the Salt Lake Tribune. While Harry O was—and still is—a critically acclaimed private eye series it made it a scant two seasons. It was broadcast on ABC. [Click the image for a larger view]

Review: "Texas Wind" by James Reasoner

Texas Wind
by James Reasoner
The Book Place, 2010

James Reasoner’s first novel, Texas Wind, is a great hardboiled private eye tale set in Fort Worth, Texas in the late-1970s. It was originally published by the stingy and unethical Manor Books in 1980; “stingy and unethical” because most writers had to threaten the editor’s life or hire a lawyer to get paid. The writer and critic, Ed Gorman, called Texas Wind, “one of the finest private eye novels I’ve ever read…” and its narrative simplicity, its powerful and laconic and apt social commentary, and the vividly realized North Texas setting give his statement credibility.
     Cody is an everyman. The kind of guy you see in the grocery store, at the bar, washing his car on the weekend. When the wealthy Gloria Traft approaches Cody to find her missing college age step-daughter, Mandy, Cody reluctantly agrees to take the job. His hesitance is simple: most adult runaways want to disappear, or they reappear within a few days no worse off than when they left. The clues quickly lead Cody to think Mandy fell in love and ran off with a boy, but Gloria talks him into locating Mandy to ensure she is safe. But things turn sideways when another interested player shows himself.
     Texas Wind is a marvelous slice of what life must have been like in the Texas of the 1970s. Reasoner’s simple and powerful descriptive passages breathe life into the city—Fort Camp Bowie Blvd, Trinity Park, the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art all make appearances—and Cody’s careful observations about the people inhabiting this world, which is a proxy for our own, adds flavor and a little meaning. The story is slam-bang from the first page to the last, too. My regret for this book—and it is a significant regret—is that I waited so long to read it.

Go here for the Kindle version and here for the paperback edition at Amazon.

THE TENTH VIRGIN by Gary Stewart

The Tenth Virgin, by Gary Stewart (St. Martin’s Press, 1983), is the best mystery novel set in Utah I have read. It is a private eye novel starring Gabe Utley. Gabe was raised on the east-side of Salt Lake City. He is a big city private eye, New York City, back in Utah as a favor to his high school sweetheart, Linda Peterson. Linda’s teenage daughter ran away, leaving a note that she joined a violent polygamist sect. Gabe is doubtful he can track the girl down, but his sense of obligation keeps him on her trail. The investigation takes Gabe into the wealthy and powerful Mormon hierarchy in Salt Lake City and then into the depths of the poverty-ridden polygamist clans of Southern Utah.

The Salt Lake City setting details a town that no longer exists—it is so much bigger now, less homogeneous—but it is done with a vivid and accurate hand. The narrative is crisp. The characters, from newspaper reporters to mean-spirited bigamist husbands, are nicely drawn with enough depth to make them familiar to the reader. The plot is nicely executed and the cultural examination of Mormonism (the culture, and not the religious doctrines) is spot-on. 

The Tenth Virgin is truly something special.  

SOME DIE HARD by Stephen Mertz

Some Die Hard is Stephen Mertz’s first published novel. It appeared as a paperback original in 1979 from the low-rent New York publisher Manor Books, as by Stephen Brett. A pseudonym, at least the surname—according to an informative and interesting Afterword in the recent Rough Edges Press edition—that was a hat-tip to Brett Halliday. The same Brett Halliday behind the fictional private eye Michael Shayne.

Rock Dugan, a former stuntman who gave up Hollywood for private detective work and Denver, is returning home—after tying up an employee theft investigation—from the fictional Langdon Springs, Colorado. Sitting next to Dugan on the bus ride home is a nervous man who, once they arrive at the depot, panics and bolts, stumbling into Dugan before dashing into traffic where he’s hit and killed by a taxi. The police think the man’s death is an accident, an opinion Dugan doesn’t share because the man expertly passed an envelope to him in the confusion. The envelope’s contents are for Susan Court who, with a dying millionaire father changing his will at the last minute and a no-good brother, hired the nervous man, also a P.I., to uncover a few secrets.

Some Die Hard is a hardboiled locked-room murder mystery—those impossible crimes where the whodunit is less important than the howdunit (and I’m not even going to tell you who the victim is). Its prose is smooth, although not as crystal as Stephen Mertz’s latest work, and the story is enjoyable and easy. Easy to read, rather than easy to guess. Dugan is likable and hardboiled. He is big-fisted, clever and carries that sacred Private Eye code. A knight-errand more concerned with justice than law.