LILLIAN O’DONNELL – The Goddess Affair.

Fawcett Crest, paperback reprint; 1st printing, January 1998. Hardcover edition: Putnam, December 1996.

   Born in 1926, Lillian O’Donnell wrote 34 mystery novels between 1960 and 1998. Three different series detectives appeared in these books, all female: Norah Mulcahaney, a detective for the NYPD, beginning as a rookie cop (15 books); Gwenn Ramadge, a Manhattan-based PI (4 books, of which this is one); and Mici Anhalt, who works as an investigator for the New York City Crime Victim’s Compensation Board (3 books). The other 12 books all appear to be stand-alones.

   In The Goddess Affair Ms. Ramadge is hired by the owner of a cruise liner to find who’s been stealing jewelry from the passengers as the ship makes its way through the Caribbean, the Panama Canal and up the Central American coast.

   What she doesn’t count on is being asked to solve a murder mystery too, that of Minerva Aldrich, the only one of three half-sisters who has any wealth remaining several years after the unfortunate death of their mother, who was the head of Goddess Designs, and the creative force behind it.

   Are the two cases connected? It’s up to the intrepid heroine to find out – although as she admits on page 185, “She didn’t consider getting beat up or shot at as part of the job. She wasn’t that kind of private eye.”

   What she does do is ask a lot of questions, most of them quite personal, but being on ship is like being trapped in a mansion surrounded by banks of snow. There is no place the possible killers and/or thieves to go. The telling is readable enough but rather flat in tone, without a lot of excitement – even though exciting things are going on.

   If being realistic can be considered a fault in a detective story, that’s the underlying problem here. Gwenn Ramadge is no superheroine. It takes several calls to her backup assistant in New York City to come up with the facts that clinch the case, all offstage – that plus luck, and the timely intervention of Ray Dixon, her close friend on the NYPD, who flies down and helps wrap things up in the last three or four pages.

   Some personal matters between Ray and Gwenn are also quickly settled, and on the last page they exit stage left — and off into the sunset — this being their last recorded case together.

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   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all four:

               RAMADGE, GWEN     [Lillian O’Donnell]

       A Wreath for the Bride (n.) Putnam 1990

       Used to Kill (n.) Putnam 1993
       The Raggedy Man (n.) Putnam 1995

       The Goddess Affair (n.) Putnam 1997