MANSLAUGHTER

“Life usually dorks me,” complains personal-injury sleuth Stanley Hastings with some justification. Still, he’s reveled in it over the course of 15 dorky novels (Cozy, 2001, etc.). So when Joe Balfour visits Stanley’s office with a fat wad of greenbacks to trade for a no-brainer errand, you know he’s going to rue the day. Claiming that he’s being blackmailed, Joe asks Stanley to sub for him in a rendezvous with the blackmailer and find out what for. Even Stanley realizes there’s something off-kilter here, but dorklike as ever, he agrees, and then compounds the fecklessness by deciding it’s a good idea to rope in still another ringer who’s instantly identified as such and smacked in the chops for his pains. He who gets slapped is NYPD Sergeant MacAullif, that long-suffering friend of Stanley’s who never learns. She who slaps is, of all things, Jenny Balfour—not the blackmail victim but the victim’s sexy daughter. Now Stanley’s confused, of course, but it gets worse. Poppa Joe has acknowledged that some years back he was sent up for manslaughter. When Stanley checks up, however, he discovers that Joe’s conviction is the purest fiction. Does the sudden demise of Phillip T. Grackle, blackmailer extraordinaire, mean Stanley’s client is out of the woods? Only briefly—only, that is, until in the fullness of time Stanley manages to get him indicted for murder.

Dying is easy, it’s been pointed out, comedy is hard. And Stanley just isn’t as funny as he once was.