LEANN SWEENEY – Shoot from the Lip

Signet, paperback original, January 2007.

   There are a few private detectives in the world of crime fiction that Kevin Burton Smith doesn’t (yet) know about, he of the Thrilling Detective website, which attempts to list ALL of them, and in all honesty, he pretty well succeeds. Case in point, though: He’s missing Houston-based Abby Rose, who’s in this book, her fourth case overall, the previous three being:

   Pick Your Poison. Signet, pbo, May 2004. Abby inherits her late father’s home and computer business along with her twin sister, Kate. When she investigates the murder of their gardener, she learns some truths about their true birth parents.

   A Wedding to Die For. Signet, pbo, January 2005. Independently wealthy, Abby has started her own business as a private investigator finding birth parents for adoptees. Her client is a bride-to-be who hires Abby to find her biological mother so she can be at her wedding, but a murder occurs at the reception instead.

   Dead Giveaway. Signet, pbo, November 2005. After Abby is hired by a 19 year old basketball star looking for his birth family, the woman who found him on her doorstep as an infant is murdered.

    In spite of all of the murders and the fact that Abby is a fully licensed PI, these are all “cozy” type mysteries, and so is the book in hand, Shoot from the Lip. Yellow Rose Investigations is the name on her business card. Her twin sister Kate, a psychiatrist, does the psychological assessments on any prospective clients, and with money in the bank, she can easily afford to turn down clients whose cases she doesn’t wish to take.

   Her client this time around is young Emmy Lopez, who’s been responsible for her three younger siblings ever since their mother died. An upcoming appearance on a TV reality show brings out the possibility that there was a fourth child Emmy never knew about and who may have been put up for adoption, either legally or (more likely) illegally.

   The story’s told in raw-boned but light-hearted Texas style, with lots of details of the two sisters’ various romances with their steady (and not so steady) boy friends, along with Abby’s continual references to her daddy, now gone but far from forgotten.

    Murders do occur in this book, which I have just realized that I have forgotten to mention, but unfortunately the detection involved is slim to none. Not only are Abby and her circle of family and friends relatively slow on the uptake when dangerous things begin to happen, but the killer makes the fatal flaw of simply hanging around too long. He or she is caught only by doing one evil deed after another, until eventually going too far, when at last the truth is revealed.

   Don’t get me completely wrong. For fans of low-keyed murder investigations, enhanced and enlivened by a crew of friendly folk who seem to come back book after book, they could do far worse than stay with Abby Rose, wherever her adventures may take her.