Gumshoe on the Loose

February 12, 2018
Leininger burlesques the gumshoe subgenre in his uneven third outing for 42-year-old Reno, Nev., PI-in-training Mort Angel (after 2017’s Gumshoe for Two). Mort is flattered when a beautiful woman, who identifies herself only as Danya, approaches him in a bar and says she’s looking for a maverick PI. She leaves before she can explain what she wants of him, but promises to be in touch. The next day, Danya phones and asks Mort to check out an intruder at her house. There Mort finds journalist snoop Vincent Ignacio from the scandal sheet Celebrity News sneaking around. Ignacio admits to stalking Shanna Hayes, yet another beautiful woman, who’s married to Danya. Complications arise after Mort discovers the body of missing rapper Jonnie “Jo-X” Xenon hanging in Danya and Shanna’s garage, and Danya turns out to be the daughter of his Reno police nemesis, Russell Fairchild. Leininger’s mix of humor and the hard-boiled will strike some readers as awkward. Still, Mickey Spillane fans who can make do with a cut-rate version of Mike Hammer may be satisfied.

February 1, 2018
After leaving the IRS, a Reno private eye-in-training lands a high-profile case, loses it, lands it again, and finally puts it, and several other parties, to bed.Maude "Ma" Clary, who runs Clary Investigations, aims to keep a tight leash on Mortimer Angel while he's working for her. As if. When dazzling Danya Fuller, encountering Mort at a bar, recognizes him from his high-mortality last case (Gumshoe for Two, 2017) and asks him to phone her the next morning, Mort ignores Ma's warnings about her, and before he can say "my bad," he's discovered the body of missing rapper Jonnie Xenon, aka Jo-X, hanged and shot in the garage of the place Danya shares with Shanna Hayes. Danya runs from Mort as if he had a social disease, but he soon has an unlikely new client: his old frenemy Detective Russell Fairchild, of the Reno Police Department, who turns out to be Danya's father. A badly spelled note demanding $1 million from Danya and Shanna as the price for hauling away Jo-X's corpse indicates further complications. But Mort's adventures don't kick into high gear until Lucy K. Landry, an underage small-town waitress who claims to be 31, latches onto him, begging him to take her on as his assistant, and leads him into a fevered Las Vegas fantasy of topless car rides, high-stakes roulette, and wild living in a comped suite. Mort's determination to avoid his scolding boss and his cheerfully sexist obsession with tight-bodied females, all of whom seem to find him irresistible, consistently upstage the question of who killed Jo-X, though fans may be surprised at just how casual and disappointing the mystery is.A high-spirited pipe dream of nonstop wisecracks, female pulchritude, and physical combat most likely to appeal to readers who still miss the men's magazines of the 1950s.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2018
Mort Angel, ex-IRS agent and PI-in-training, is asked by a friend's daughter to look into strange goings-on on her property. What he finds is the body of gangsta rapper Jo-X, whom Mort speaks of as an opportunistic, foulmouthed piece of shinola. Still, he can't turn down a commission from his friend to find the rapper's killer. For the first 96 pages, we're in standard hard-boiled land, with a bloodsucking reporter, a sarcastic cop, and an exasperated PI boss, all told in a postmodern, serious-but-not-really style. But then, speaking of postmodern, we?and Mort?meet Lucy, a type becoming a fixture in modern crime novels. She's smart, she's funny, she's good-looking, she's 31 but looks like a teenybopper; and so delightful are their scenes together that we're sorry the two have to get to work. They hunt the rapper's killer, uncover a date-rape scheme, and accidentally stumble on a pair of mass-murderers, all in a high-speed, easy-reading narrative that ultimately answers our most important question: Will Lucy be back in the sequel?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)