GETTING OLD WILL HAUNT YOU

Gladdy Gold and her fellow Golden Agers (Getting Old Can Hurt You, 2018, etc.) hit the road for Key West on a case that’s both more and less mysterious than they expected.

Even though their home, Gray Lady, is falling into decay, retired travel agents Sadie and Louie Wassinger are attached to it for several reasons. They’re both over 90 and have no great desire to move. They don’t like getting pushed around by the likes of Strand, Smythe, and Love, the law firm that’s recently inherited the domicile upon the death of partner Robert Strand. They’re convinced that instead of being speared by a marlin he was landing, Strand was actually murdered. And they’ve got a witness who saw the whole thing. The trouble is that their witness can’t testify because he’s even deader than the lawyer who’d promised to get Gray Lady listed with the Historic Society before his untimely death tossed the property to his partners. It’s Papa, the ghost of Ernest Hemingway, who’s long shared space in Gray Lady with the Wassingers. Small wonder that Sgt. Barbara Ella Robbson, of the Key West Police, has so little patience with Sadie and Louie—and even less with Gladdy, her sister, Evvie Markowitz, and their friends Sophie Myerbeer and Bella Fox. Don’t worry about Ida Franz, the operative who got left behind because she was too ill to make the trip from Fort Lauderdale: She’s recovered sufficiently to be up to her dentures in a search for Hy Binder, the neighborhood curmudgeon who vanished soon after posting a very unflattering photo of Gladdy and her buds.

Daffy sleuths butt heads with characters who often seem even more pixilated than them. The only ingredients missing are a laugh track and anything more than rudimentary detection.