Killing the Goose

I've gotten myself onto a little Lockridge reading jag. As I said in the previous review...these are great for those dreary fall days when all you want to do is curl up with a nice little cozy, madcap murder. Killing the Goose has Pam and Jerry North smack in the middle of another killing spree. First, we have a simple file clerk killed in a diner. It looks pretty cut and dried and Lt. Weigand and Sgt. Mullins are all set to close the case with the boyfriend as the killer....when Pam gets set on the clue of the baked-apple. That's makes it just a little uneasy. Then another woman is killed...this time on the other end of the social spectrum--a wealthy socialite. But then clues starting building up that seem to connect the two murders. It ends with Pam insisting, as only Pam can, that someone has stolen a famous voice from the radio. As Mullins would say, now it's just plain screwy.

This one is an exciting chain of events from the dramatic scene in the diner to the socialite's missing money to the unexpected happenings in the telephone booth to a grand finale in a radio broadcasting studio. Frances & Richard Lockridge keep the excitement high and action tense in this latest madcap mystery. It's possible that I'm getting the hang of Pam North's logic (which may be a scary thing given the way her mind leaps)--but I figured out who did it...I just couldn't figure out how. And it is scary to find oneself thinking like Pam. As we find in the book: "It startled Jerry, somewhat, to discover that Pam's thought processes had, in fact, coincided with those of Sergeant Mullins. For some reason this made him reel internally; it suggest that the whole world was about to come apart." But the world doesn't come apart. Things come together in the end and once again Pam & Jerry help Lt. Weigand get his man.

I absolutely love the Lockridge mysteries. They are light and breezy..but always satisfying. Four stars out of five.