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THE BRUSH-OFF
by Laura Bradley
Pocket Books, May 2004
368 pages
$6.50
ISBN: 0743471113


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I didn't expect to like THE BRUSH-OFF. I didn't think a mystery featuring a hair-dresser would have enough oomph in it to keep my interest. Wrong. Laura Bradley not only kept me reading, she also kept me laughing.

Reyn Sawyer is just trying to keep her own beauty salon going, get enough steady paying customers to justify hiring her own accountant. Her good friend and mentor, Ricardo, the man who gave her a start when she first moved to San Antonio from Dime Box, stops one night to borrow one of her hair brushes. Then he calls her in the middle of that same night, seemingly drunk and in the throes of passion, saying things that make no sense to Reyn.

The next morning, she is awakened by Detective Jackson Scythe on the telephone, wanting to know what Ricardo said to her in the middle of the night. She is stunned to find out that Ricardo wasn't drunk when he called, but dying.

Scythe has Reyn at the top of his suspect list, for reasons which (to a cop, as opposed to your average mystery reader) make a lot of sense: Ricardo was killed with Reyn's brush, he called her in the middle of the night that he was killed, and she is the only beneficiary of his rather large estate, including his chain of salons.

Scythe also thinks that Reyn might be either jealous of Ricardo's other women, or fed up with Ricardo hitting on her when she isn't interested. Scythe is very attractive, and knows it. He finds Reyn to be both irritating and desirable, which annoys him. Bradley's experience as a romance writer is put to good use in THE BRUSH-OFF, as we watch Reyn and Scythe do their version of this traditional dance.

In the process of investigating Ricardo's murder, Reyn finds herself dealing with some of his former clients, including a transvestite working at a drag club, a former 1960s radical who is still scared of 'the fuzz', some San Antonio socialites, and one of the area's major political families.

While the plot is actually fairly pedestrian, and the writing quality a little uneven, what saved this book for me was the characterization and the humor. Her description of Reyn's receptionist, Sherlyn Rocca, which begins on page 70 and is continued over the next several pages, is almost worth the price of the book. At one point, Bradley says that: "Cats copulating came to mind when Sherlyn opened her mouth." I roared.

Reyn's best friend Trudy is a bible-thumping interior designer married to a mensch named Mario, which is "like finding Nicole Kidman married to Danny DeVito. No, that wasn't it either, because Danny DeVito was funny. Mario didn't even have a wicked sense of humor going for him." Trudy has a fashion sense which enables her to wear the most unlikely color combinations and pull them off, where the rest of us would look like a (ethnic slur of your choice) wedding/funeral.

Reyn's family, whom we only meet through Reyn's descriptions, sounds like the hippie family from hell -- especially when Reyn describes herself as the white sheep among a family of black ones. Reyn's sisters, for example, are named Charade and Pecan. Her "great-grandma gave every heir one plastic flamingo from her front yard, a pie plate, and a hundred bucks . . . except for her favorite grandson, who actually got her most prized possession . . . a pair of ornamental yard deer that Jackie Dean from two streets down had welded into the, uh, breeding position."

Reyn's only major vice seems to be her collection of 47 pairs of boots, which are her exclusive footwear unless she's walking her three dogs, who are all named after kinds of wine.

If you are looking for a funny, light, amusing mystery, The BRUSH-OFF will suit you just fine. This is the first book in a projected series; the second book is SPRAYED STIFF. The first chapter is included at the end of THE BRUSH-OFF.

Reviewed by P. J. Coldren, May 2004

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