Oops!

You’re strutting along, maybe even enjoying tempting fate, and then oops! you slip on a banana peel. -Alo Nudger

It is impossible not to respond warmly and with affection to John Lutz’s rather hapless private investigator, Alo Nudger. In this, his tenth attempt to make order in the chaos of the world around him, he is coerced by a very young, fearless, feckless pixie of a colleague named Lacy Tumulty to take over a case that she’s too busy to handle. It’s an easy assignment, but Nudger’s agreement to help with the case is a reluctant one. Lacy, charming as she is, has a way of being followed by trouble.

The client is a man who wants to prove his daughter was murdered. The police won’t do it, so he has hired Lacy, who enlists Nudger. The daughter, alone in her locked house, tripped on the stairs, fell, fractured her skull, and died. Seems to Nudger it’s almost robbery to take the man’s money.

But all is not what it seems. Lacy is beaten by an unknown assailant and devilishly crippled by the severing of an Achilles tendon. Even the delightful Claudia Bettencourt, to whom Nudger is not married, but attached, becomes imperiled. But however much trouble this new adventure causes for Nudger and his friends, Lutz sees to it, as he has in his hero’s previous escapades, that we readers profit mightily from the enjoyment this likable detective brings us.