THE TELLTALE TATTOO

Stanford coed Iris Cooper has a knack for solving mysteries. Right from the title story, in which she helps her aunt Hermione’s lawyer, Mr. Musselwhite, identify Edna Spencer’s rightful heir, she focuses instinctively on the single clue that reveals all. That’s how she manages to solve the murder of starlet Blanche Talbot in “Hollywood Homicide” and the theft of Ursula Destinoy-Pinchot’s pearls in “A Romance in the Rockies.” But “Peril Under the Palms,” a novella originally published separately in 1989, comprises two-thirds of this volume of reprints and offers a trickier kind of case. At first it seems as if spinster Viola Blodgett has simply been conked by a coconut while sitting under a palm tree on vacation in Hawaii. But Iris, who’d heard Miss Blodgett warn of the dangers lurking beneath palms only the day before, suspects foul play. Poking around, she discovers a slew of suspects: handsome Kimo Kawena, the gigolo who was teaching Miss Blodgett to surf; her paid companion, Miss Pomfret, who felt threatened by Kimo’s attentions; even Iris’s schoolmate Antoinette Caulfield’s grandmother, who had felt the lash of Miss Blodgett’s acid tongue over the bridge table. But when shady Mrs. Montesquieu, who’s been stalking Antoinette, also turns up dead, it takes all of Iris’s ingenuity—and the legwork of her boyfriend, newshound Jack Clancy—to unmask a fiendish killer.

Skip the skimpy appetizers and head straight for the main course. Even at novella length, Beck (The Revenge of Kali-Ra, 1999, etc.) is as funny and ingenious as anyone out there.