MAXINE O’CALLAGHAN – Set-Up Delilah Wesr #4. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1991. Worldwide, paperback, 1994.

   Delilah West’s write-up on the Thrilling Detective website begins thusly:

    “Orange County, California is the stomping ground of street-smart private eye DELILAH WEST, who’s been around longer than even Sharon, Kinsey or V.I. She made her first appearance in a short story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine way back in 1974, predating all of them.”

   
   On the basis of Set-Up, this the fourth novel in the series, it’s clear that an injustice has been done. It is as good as any of those featuring those other PI’s above, but neither the author or Delilah West herself ever caught the eye of readers in meaningful way that I know of.

   After successfully closing the case on a secretary whom she has found embezzling funds from her boss, Delilah’s next case concerns a bomb threat a environmental activist has received. In one of those coincidences that really do happen in the real world as well as fiction, the two cases ar connected, and her new client is suspect number one in the death of the woman convicted in Chapter One.

   It’s quite a complicated case, with suspects and entangled relationships all over the place, but O’Callghan’s smooth and easy prose make the whole affair go down smooth and easy. There is, I warn male readers, a hint of coziness when Delilah ruminates a notch too often about the men in her life, most of whom are carry-overs from the earlier books (and can easily be ignored, if you are so inclined), but the case itself carries on in fine old PI fashion, whether male or female. (And the bomb threat is quite real throughout the book.)
   

      The Delilah West novels —

Death Is Forever (1981)
Run From the Nightmare (1982)
Hit and Run (1989)
Set-Up (1991)
Trade-Off (1996)
Down For the Count (1997)

   â€“ plus seven scattered short stories.