CATHERINE DAIN – Bet Against the House. Freddie O’Neal #5. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1995.

   In the wake of such trailblazers as Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller and (of course) Sue Grafton, all with well-known, successful female PI characters, there came a small flood of other authors and female PI creations, few of which turned out to be either well-known or terribly successful as the ones previously cited.

   But Catherine Dain’s series if Reno-based female PI Freddie O’Neal novels lasted for seven, and as they say, that ain’t nothing. Freddie is more in the Kinsey Millhone mold, which if you’re going to be in the mold of someone, you can’t do much better than that.  She’s independent, not presently attached, and with a bit of sass to her.

   In this one she’s hired to dig up dirt on her client’s mother, who’s inherited all her father’s holdings in a computer chip company, to the dismay of the client and her two brothers who put a lot of effort in making the company what it is today: very very profitable.

   Freddie’s problem is that once she meets the mother, who agreed is a little flaky, she likes her. The bigger problem is that when the mother is killed, she finds herself investigating her death, in spite of her usual avoidance of cases where the police are involved.

   Dain has a good way with words, which helps the reader immensely in following a case in which the number of possible suspects is really very limited, with the weakest part of the Freddie O’Neal’s investigation being the ending. Oops, you might say, but the fun in this one is in getting there. This one wasn’t a bestseller, but as far as lesser known detective novels with female PI’s go, this one’s one of the better ones.

      The Freddie O’Neal series –

1. Lay It on the Line (1992)
2. Sing a Song of Death (1993)
3. Walk a Crooked Mile (1994)
4. Lament For a Dead Cowboy (1994)
5. Bet Against the House (1995)
6. The Luck of the Draw (1996)
7. Dead Man’s Hand (1997)