MARNE DAVIS KELLOGG – Tramp.

Bantam; paperback reprint, October 1998. Hardcover first edition: Doubleday, 1997.

   This is the third of what has turned out to be a five-book series, one in which Lilly Bennett in essence tells us some of her memoirs, the stories being told in first person, you see. Coming in at the middle may have caused me some confusion, but in her home town of Bennett’s Fort, Wyoming, Lilly is both a U.S. Marshal and a private eye.

   I think some of the confusion was due to the act that I never really had the feeling that she was doing either job very well. Entertaining, yes, but organized, she is not. Lilly is soon to be 50, rather outspoken, and a member of a very wealthy family with her own helicopter that takes her from ranch to town. She also wears designer clothes, at least when she’s forced to.

   Dead – or at least the first victim – is a millionaire letch named Cyrus Vaile, who collapses and dies at his 90th birthday party. What he’d asked Lilly to do when he’d hired her just before the party was to find the $20 million which had disappeared from the endowment he’d bestowed upon the local Roundup Repertory Company earlier that year.

   While it takes a while to sort through all of Lilly’s back story – her family, friends, employees, and friendly rivals – the members of the theatrical company are easy to identify. Most of Kellogg’s descriptions are right on target.

   And once you get to know them, the recurring players are sketched in equally well. Besides the mystery and the detective work that has to be done, a goodly portion of the story’s 320 pages are devoted to the upcoming wedding of Lilly’s goddaughter – and Lilly’s ongoing angst over her good friend Jack’s failure to pop the question himself, no matter how compatible they may happen to be.

   As I suggested earlier, Lilly’s detective work takes second place to all of the other events in her life – or it seems to. Lilly does not tell the reader all, which is annoying at least once when it is the most obvious, and awkwardly so. But it also turns out that there was a clue – or indeed two – well-hidden and cleverly done, in the fashionable clutter of the life of one of the more interesting private eyes who lives in Wyoming I have ever read about. (No, really.)

   Additional comment: Following the Lilly Bennett series was Insatiable, a stand-alone mystery coming out in 2001. Since then Ms. Kellogg has switched to relating the misadventures of Kick Kewswick, a high-class jewelry thief turned sleuth, specializing in – jewel thefts. There are now four books in this series, which I will be giving a try one of these days. Check back later and see if I don’t.