Susan Kandel, Not A Girl Detective

Susan Kandel, Not A Girl Detective - Cece Caruso has made a career writing biographies of dead mystery writers and while researching her last book (I DREAMED I MARRIED PERRY MASON) she solved a homicide. An obsessive Nancy Drew fan, she is now writing about the pseudonymous Carolyn Keane who was really a succession of ghost writers contracted to write under that name. Her focuses is the picture of Nancy Drew, the model Grace Horton.

She meets fellow Nancy Drew collector Eagar Edwards who shows her a picture of a natural Grace Horton painted by Russell H. Tandy. The two hit it off so well that Edgar offers to let her and her friends stay at his Palm Springs home while she give a talk to the Nancy Drew Chums at their annual convention. Shortly after she arrives there, she finds his body with a bullet in his head. Somebody searches her home and her car looking for something, making Cece determined to find out who that person is and why he killed Edgar, even if it means placing her own life in danger.

Readers will be reminded of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum when they read Susan Kandel's Cece Caruso capers as both are funny, plagued by romantic problems and once on the scent of a killer, keep tracking like obsessed bloodhounds. There are many suspects who could have killed Edgar but what really keeps the reader interested is the urge to know what the killer is looking for. This is a very special amateur sleuth tale that will be a hit with readers who love a good puzzle to solve.

Morrow, May 2005, $23.95, 294 pp.

ISBN 0060581077

Harriet Klausner