SWEET AND LOWDOWN

Amos Haddam, owner of Kansas City’s Sugar Moon Investigations, and Dorie Lennox, his Person Friday, have now forged ahead in crime fiction’s celebrated Addlepated Peepers Handicap. Charged with protecting Thalia Hines, the blond, beautiful, batty, bratty daughter of their megabucks client, the two suddenly take a day off because “they were bored with Thalia’s antics.” Sure, she’s an overprivileged pain in the neck, but since when do you have to tell an underprivileged gumshoe that a gig’s a gig? Hitler’s armies are jackbooting all over Europe, but hard-shelled, soft-centered Dorie barely notices because she’s busy arguing with her parole officer over a certain switchblade. The knife is Dorie’s, and she wants it back. Uh-uh, says Officer Vunnell justifiably, since Dorie wielded it in the Assault and Battery for which she’s just done a stretch. In the meantime, the headline domestic conflict of 1940—the GOP’s Wendell Wilkie versus President Roosevelt—is being echoed in a minor key by the belligerent doings of such marginal parties as the Nazi-inspired Silver Shirts, an unlovely group mindless Thalia finds enthralling. And there’s a lot of other stuff going on as well. Ascetic Amos maybe be falling in love, big-time gamblers may be messing with that great Negro baseball team, the Kansas City Monarchs, Dorie may be about to give demon reporter Harvey Talbot another shot at complicating her life, and, oh yes, evildoers are plotting to kidnap Thalia. Hope they don’t try on Sugar Moon’s day off.

Swarming subplots, sketchy main plot—a trap McClendon (Blue Wolf, 2001, etc.) consistently springs on herself.