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DEATH WAS THE OTHER WOMAN
by Linda L. Richards
St Martin's Minotaur, January 2008
272 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312377703


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Katherine (Kitty) Pangborn had been the daughter of a wealthy man, that is until the Depression hit and her father committed suicide after losing his money. Through dumb luck she found a job as the secretary to PI Dexter Theroux.

Dexter tends to be a rather morose man whose history in the First World War haunts him still. Work is scarce due to hard times and Dex also tends to lose himself inside a bottle of booze most days. Kitty has taken to protecting Dex and the business as best she can.

Katherine likes being a secretary to a PI most days. She gets to meet people very different from the ones she knew while growing up. When beauty Rita Heppelwaite hires Dex to follow her boyfriend Harrison Dempsey, Dex is only too happy to take the money and the case.

But when it's time to go on the job he's a bit too drunk to drive so Kitty takes the wheel. Parked for surveillance, they both fall asleep. When Kitty wakes hours later, she isn't sure what to do, but not wanting to wake Dex she decides to see if Harrison has left the building. She also needs to find a bathroom, even though there are no lights and no people in the house.

Once in the bathroom Kitty finds a body, dead, in the bathtub. Dex soon joins her and they both assume that it is the body of Harrison Dempsey. They hightail it out of there and Dex figures the job is over.

But Harrison Dempsey's wife says that he is alive and well. Kitty is alarmed that the man they were hired to follow was married and is shaken to think that the that the dead body might not have been their man.

Then days later, Dex appears and drags her to her first morgue. There is their dead body; the worse for wear after sharks had been nibbling on it. Is this then finally the dead murdered body of two-timing, bigwig mobster Harrison Dempsey?

Who killed him is the big question, but also why was the corpse stolen only to have it turn up a few days later? And why are people shooting guns at Dex and his pals?

Nicely set in the early days of the stories of private eyes and their gal Fridays, DEATH WAS THE OTHER WOMAN is a try at writing a hard-boiled PI story from the viewpoint of the secretary. Here Kitty is different because her background is that of a privileged young woman who is learning about her new companions at every step, having had no experience with such people or of making her own living at all. So the readers learn all about the time period and the place from someone who is also new to everything.

Unfortunately, there's just too little tension in the story. Since Katherine doesn't know enough to be afraid of her surroundings, the reader isn't either. She also doesn't have any ideas about how to get any information, so she blindly stumbles about and seems to learn everything a few steps behind everyone else.

Since she wasn't brought up on the mean streets, Kitty hasn't a clue about how to handle the tough talking characters that surround her. As a fish out of water, she's the one with the perfect grammar when everyone else is right out of central casting. It's a good idea, but Kitty simply doesn't engage the reader's emotions.

An interesting location and idea, DEATH WAS THE OTHER WOMAN falls short as a period piece. Maybe author Linda L. Richards should do a little more research into the genre before the next in the series comes out.

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, April 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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