GREEN-EYED LADY

A California senatorial candidate’s tumble into a honey trap is only the beginning of attorney Jack MacTaggart’s brightly daffy second case.

Former LA mayor Warren Burkett calls it a setup. The newspapers call it the Goldilocks Affair. Everyone agrees that when the LAPD arrived at a vacationing cardiac surgeon’s house, they found Burkett lying naked in bed after he’d broken in—just helping a green-eyed lady whose purse and keys had been snatched, he maintained, a lady who wanted to thank him for letting him into what turned out to not be her house. Oh, and a Berthe Morisot painting has vanished. With three weeks left till the election and his opponent, mega-developer Larry Archer, moving in for the kill, Burkett hires Jack to find the lady who set the trap and promises a bonus if Jack can get her indicted before election day. Unfortunately, someone’s determined to make Jack’s job even harder, and the first time Jack meets green-eyed Jordan Mardian is after someone’s thrown her off the Colorado Street Bridge. Detectives Mike Madden and Chico Alvarez, assuming that someone was Jordan herself, lose interest in the case. But once he’s learned that Santa Barbara art dealer Jordan was once working girl Joan Marsden, linked to graffiti artist Ricky Rio and, through him, Angela G. Archer, the opposition candidate’s wife, Jack won’t be thrown off the scent, not even when Burkett cuts him loose. From here on in things get a little murky. Puzzle fans will watch closely as Jack, prompted by a clue delivered by Etch-a-Sketch, searches for Jordan’s safe-deposit box, while keeping in mind that he may find nothing worth his trouble, which is considerable.

Greaves (Hush Money, 2012) plots far more waggishly than real life could hope to imitate. Not one reader in a thousand will guess the ending.