RICHARD HELMS – Brittle Karma. Eamon Gold #3. Black Arch Books, trade paperback original, 2020. A small portion of this book appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine as the short story “The King of Gonna,” May-June 2018. Winner of the Shamus award in 2021, for Best Original PI Paperback.

   It isn’t because he’s a lot more flush with cash than usual that San Francisco PI Eamon Gold turns down a would-be client at the beginning of Brittle Karma. It’s because he doesn’t want to get involved with  Abner Carlisle, a convict just released from prison after thirty years of nearly solitary confinement. Gold thinks that Carlisle wants him to find the latter’s former partner in crime – an armored car holdup that went wrong – and with thirteen million dollars that’s never been found, Carlisle’s intentions don’t need a lot of thinking to figure out.

   More than that, Eddie Rice disappeared with Carlisle’s daughter, and when I say disappeared, I mean without a trace.

   Having shoved Carlisle off toward another PI in town, Gold thinks that that’s the end of the matter, but when the man’s body turns up dead, the local police get very very interested, and Gold decides to start looking for Eddie Rice in earnest, first on his own, then on behalf of a paying client, the new husband of the former wife of Abner Carlisle.

   If all this sounds complicated, it is, and I hope I’ve explained it to you all correctly. On the other hand, Richard Helms is a pretty good writer, and he tells the tale crispy and cleanly.

   It takes a lot of legwork on Gold’s part to straighten everything out, hampered as he is throughout the book recovering from a stab wound in his leg (from a ballpoint pen) that happens early on (working another case). There are a couple good twists in the telling, and if you catch on to both before I did, maybe you ought to be a writer yourself.

   This is somewhat of a rare item these days, a PI novel with a protagonist who’s basic and solid, with no strange behavioral habits to make him stand out in a crowd. He has a girl friend named Heidi who’s there for him whenever he needs a little R&R, but other than that, she has no major role to play in the story.

   Gold is good for a quip every once in while, but those every once in while’s are just that, never coming close to overburdening the reader with them.

   Meat and potatoes, that’s all. I liked this one.