Amazon.com Review
Literary agent Charlie Greene can't afford to live in Beverly Hills and dine with the Spago and Ivy crowd, so she commutes to her office every day from a quaint little Long Beach cottage in a compound where people live in each other's pockets and seem to spend most of their time ferreting out their neighbors' secrets. When one of the residents is brutally murdered, the local cops target Charlie as the killer, with absolutely no evidence beyond her propensity for getting involved in situations that tend to feature a dead body or two (
Nobody Dies in a Casino,
Murder in a Hot Flash). Jeremy Fiedler was everybody's favorite, a charming, helpful man who seems to have lived (and died) without a trace--neither Charlie, the police, or Charlie's wacky neighbors can find a public record of his existence. But Jeremy had a secret treasure someone was willing to kill for, and since Charlie's on vacation as well as under suspicion, it behooves her to find it first.
Reading this quirky little cozy is like dropping into a Cheers-like local tavern where everybody knows everyone else's name except the reader. Millhiser is long on wackiness but short on any substantive character development, and the plot meanders without ever really getting to the point. The eccentricities of the dramatis personae are sketched rather than drawn, but Millhiser's hysterical description of how to put your pantyhose on while navigating a high-speed freeway almost makes up for the lack of a coherent narrative and absence of dramatic tension. --Jane Adams
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The winning series (Death of the Office Witch, etc.) featuring California literary agent Charlie Greene continues with Charlie's discovery of her neighbor's corpse. Since they live in a gated community, all the residents are stunned and dismayed. Events follow thick and fast with the discovery that the deceased, Jeremy Fiedler, has no police, credit or other records that might point to a motive for his murderAor for a later bombing at the gated community. Whoever did him in, isn't done yet. When Charlie realizes that she's at the top of the suspect list, she decides to try to find Jeremy's killerAand uncover Jeremy's true identity. Another bombing leaves her with intermittent hearing loss. Meanwhile, she does her best to maintain her cool and chat with New York publishers during the killer commute from Long Beach to Beverly Hills. She's about to pull off the biggest deal in her professional career and place the best screenplay ever to come out of Folsom prison, if only she doesn't end up there first. An old friend, retired from the Beverly Hills detective squad, suggests she pay a little more attention to psychic powers that Charlie isn't even sure she has. Millhiser occasionally lapses into heavy-handed dialogue, and the police in this case strain credibility by being awfully rude, but the clever and original plotting as well as the likable heroine and cast of eccentric supporting characters far outweigh these minor drawbacks.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
