The book opens with a minor legal problem for Mason. Roger Caddo is the slimy owner of Lonely Hearts are Calling, a mail-order catalog with personalized ads. Recently he’s been getting great business from a particular ad he’s been running. The writer claims to be a heiress on the hunt for a “personable young man.” Needless to say she’s been getting mail by the boxful, but Caddo’s competitors have accused him of writing the ad himself. And the woman in question is hard to get a hold of, going to great lengths to keep Caddo from finding out who she is, even as she rejects multiple letters from eligible bachelors.
Mason goes to work and is able to track the woman down. She’s Marilyn Marlow, and she is indeed a heiress. Caddo is satisfied but Mason’s good work doesn’t stop him from ratting Mason’s man out to Marlow so he can get at that money. Mason is inclined to write the whole thing off as a bust when Marlow tracks him down herself. She also wants legal help.
You see, Marlow inherited her money from her recently-deceased mother, a hospital nurse who took care of George P. Endicott in his final days. Endicott was a rich man and left her a fair bit of his estate in his will. Needless to say, his siblings don’t like this and are challenging the will in court. They claim that Marlow’s mother pressured or tricked their brother into signing the will. There were two witnesses to the will, but one of them, Rose Keeling, has been showing signs of swaying in her testimony. Here we learn what Marlow wanted those men for, which I will leave to the interested reader to find out.
Mason is again interested, but the situation escalates. First is that Caddo’s angry wife finds out what her husband is up to and goes on the warpath. Mason is recovering from that when Marlow rings him from Rose’s apartment. The other woman has been stabbed with a knife, shortly after Marilyn received a letter where Rose said she was going to testify that her original story about the will was a lie…
*Lonely Heiress is an entertaining yarn. It takes a while for the body to hit the floor, but Gardner keeps the reader hooked with Caddo’s initial problem, which is honestly very interesting, and gets a few jabs off at romantic writing in the process (albeit with tongue in cheek, as Mason himself plays Cupid at the end). There is a dull period early on, where Mason spends a bit too much time insisting that what Marlow and Caddo are planning isn’t his problem, but once Marlow contacts him the pace picks up again. Unlike Counterfeit Eye, where Mason was in full control, here he’s struggling to keep up, even getting outplayed by the police and suspects a couple of times. Being Mason however, he just grins and dives back in harder. Based on other reviews I’ve read, that’s the main appeal of this series. Gardner pulls no punches demonstrating just how stacked the deck is against defendants, with Marilyn put through a psychologically brutal third-degree that Mason barely manages gets her out of. We’re rooting for Mason to thumb his nose at the machine that’s trying to grind Marlow down, so we overlook some of the shadier things he does in pursuit of his client’s best interest. There’s less of Mason’s game-playing than in Counterfeit Eye, but what’s there is more impactful as we see how far Mason will stretch legal ethics.
But what about the book as a mystery, I hear you ask. Well, there we’re on shakier ground. There are a couple of good moments. There’s a neat reversal of a seemingly trivial point that everyone has taken for granted that could have been pulled right out of Ace Attorney, giving Mason and Della real hope for their client. There’s also a very clever ploy from the culprit that stuck in my mind after the book was finished. But the mystery is overall nothing special. Well-worked out and with substance, but also not the reason I’d recommend the book. Some of the evidence is based on things that either the average person nowadays wouldn’t be familiar with (the stuff about the pens) or on evidence that we don’t get to see as the characters do; instead, it’s merely described for us.
But make no mistake, this was a good read overall. Mason is an appealing protagonist, and while he doesn’t pull off the same pyrotechnic display of legal fireworks I saw in Counterfeit Eye, he’s still firing on all cylinders fighting a seemingly hopeless battle for the sake of his client. And that’s what most people read this series for. I know I’ll be coming back. I’d appreciate hearing about any of your favorites. Recommended.
Other Reviews: James Reasoner.
No comments:
Post a Comment