Description:
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
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