Peter Guttridge, No Laughing Matter

No Laughing Matter

Peter Guttridge

Speck Press, Nov 2004, $13.00, 277 pp.

ISBN: 0972577645

Bridget, Frank and Nick fly from England to Montreal to cover the Just for Laughs Festival for different newspapers. While Nick is tied up in a yoga position, he sees a young woman flash past his hotel room window. He concludes she is a jumper who he later learns was Cissy Parker, a movie starlet. The police rule it an accidental death due to drugs, but Nick has doubts when Frank mentions he heard a man screaming at a woman on the eighteenth floor.

A reporter, Julie, informs Nick that she took pictures at a celebrity bash that Cissy attended. The starlet offered her a lot of money to buy the negatives, but Julie refused. One of the photos shows Cissy with an unidentified man. When Nick learns the victim was pregnant he concludes she was pushed. Not realizing the danger he causes to himself, his friends and others associated with Cissy on both sides of the ocean, Nick keeps digging as more homicides occurs.

In between murder, beatings, chases, air travel, NO LAUGHING MATTER contains amusing comical scenes, but the prime storyline is the protagonist is drawn into a homicide investigation that he prefers to avoid. Once he begins making inquiries, he continues to the bitter end, which he realizes could be his death, in an effort to learn the identity of the mastermind behind the killings and the beatings he suffered. Talented Peter Guttridge provides a journalistic, investigative mystery that stars a fine cast worthy of sequels.

Harriet Klausner