Doan, the chubby private eye with a fondness for weak women and strong drink, and Carstairs, his enormous Great Dane sidekick, have been hired by 54-year-old but still glamorous beauty maven Heloise of Hollywood to make sure that no young lovely tries to steal her 26-year-old hunk of a husband, Eric Trent. Shortly thereafter, Trent, a meteorologist at a local college (and known in the magazines as “Handsome Lover Boy”), steals the office of young anthropologist Melissa Gregory, shots are fired, Carstairs runs wild in a beauty salon, and bodies start falling. This 1946 entertainment is the final volume in the Carstairs and Doan trilogy, a series heralded by critics as one of the funniest in the annals of private eye fiction.

Reviews

“He touches the hardboiled markers but manages to run amok in a genre know for confinement… this book is just plain funny.”
—Ed Lin, Forbes.com

“A lot of fun… You’ll wish there was more, just as you’ll wish Davis’ death hadn’t eliminated the possibility of more books featuring this original odd couple. But the trio of farces we’re left with is almost perfect. To paraphrase Spencer Tracy’s classic line from Pat and Mike, there may not be much meat on ‘em, but what there is is cherce.”
—Ted Fitzgerald, The Drood Review.

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