THE CURSE OF THE HOLY PAIL

Plus-size paralegal Odelia Grey (Too Big to Miss, not reviewed) gets more than she bargained for when she accepts an unusual gift from a favorite client.

During Odelia’s visit to notarize some papers at Sterling Homes, property-developer Sterling Price shows her his prized collection of lunchboxes, including the famed “Holy Pail”—a metal prototype for the first licensed lunchbox ever made, bearing the likeness of TV cowboy Chappy Wheeler. Later that day, Price sends Odelia a gift: the Zorro lunchbox she’d always wanted as a child. But after Price’s suspicious death, the Holy Pail disappears. The lunchbox bandit might be Price’s grasping fiancée, Stella Hughes, or one of his scheming children, Karla and Kyle, or Karla’s philandering husband, Jackson Blake, or even Lester Miles, Chappy Wheeler’s TV sidekick. But someone thinks Odelia’s got the costly collectible, as her ransacked office and apartment attest. Though she’s distracted by her boyfriend Greg Stevens’s proposal, Odelia must take up the more urgent issue of discovering just who that someone is before more than her legal files end up in the shredder.

Jaffarian plays the formula with finesse, keeping love problems firmly in the background while giving her heroine room to use her ample wit and grit.