A Zebra Mystery Puzzler #21 - You'll Die Today

There is a question of whether this book was published prematurely.  While the cover of the book shows it is clearly book 21 in the Zebra Mystery Puzzler series, if you look at the inside front listing of titles for this series (which is the first book in this series to have a complete listing like this!), it shows book 21 is The Final Fair by Marcia Blair, and this book is actually book 22!  However, if you look at the number codes after the books, you will this book is listed as (475), while the Marcia Blair book is listed as (476), which gives credence to this book actually being book 21 and not 22.  Somewhere along the line, someone screwed up and listed the books in the wrong order - will be curious to see if that gets corrected in future volumes of this series.

 

You'll Die Today is Maxine Reynolds' fifth foray into the world of Zebra Mystery Puzzlers, and by far, this is the best one yet!  Martin Grove (under his pseudonym of Marjorie J. Grove) writes an superbly crafted mystery that was filled with plenty of misdirect, red herrings, and a great Agatha Christie-style reveal!  Our favorite investigative reporter finds herself sent to San Francisco to attend a movie premiere - but when Max has to fill-in on a radio talk show unexpectedly as their guest - the movie director- fails to appear, Max finds another murder dropped in her lap when a caller informs her the director is dead!  The caller even admits to being the killer and gives Max (and the listeners) a cryptic clue of where the body can be found.  It turns out the cover to this book reveals the location of the body, and, of course, Max is the one to find it.  The only clues are the pink match sticks and the colored candy wrappers left at the scene of the crime.

 

Max is determined to solve the crime (after all, solving the murder will give her an exclusive to yet another first-page story!), but she has to figure out not only who might have killed the man, but also why.  Was it the ex-wife, who claims to want nothing to do with him, yet who is still in love with him?  Or was it the angry actor who stormed off the set when the director refused to change some lines for him?  Or was it the head of the union who was furious the director was not using his union drivers for the film?  As Max begins to look into each of the suspects, she starts to find that each of them had means, motive, and opportunity!  And just when you think she might be able to figure it out, WHAM!  Another body turns up - a local columnist who met with the director on the night of his death and may very well have been the last one to see him alive.  Did he unwittingly know something about the murder, and so he had to be silenced?  Otherwise, what connection could he possibly have had with the director?

 

Grove manages to keep you guessing right up to the end - and the final reveal in this book definitely makes the entire book worth reading!  In true Christie-style, Grove has Max bring all of the suspects together in one room (in this case, it is the sound studio for the radio show), and live on-air, Max calls out each suspect, reviews each person's motive, and one-by-one eliminates them until there is just one person left - the killer!  And very careful readers will pick up on one particular clue -a simple statement made by one of the suspects that actually has a very important connection to one of the internal illustrations - I caught it immediately when the remark was said and guessed this person was the killer, and I was right!  But I give Grove credit for keeping it subtle, but laying the groundwork so that once the killer's identity is revealed, the reader can see that all the clues were there from the very beginning.  Otherwise, if you miss that one statement, then you could very well bounce around the suspects trying to figure out whodunnit.  Grove throws plenty of misdirects, and admittedly, at one point, I thought perhaps the killer was the roommate of one of the suspects (and it could have been, as there were clues that pointed to this person!), but I changed my mind when the real killer said something that I remembered seeing in one of the illustrations - which is why it is so important to pay attention to those internal drawings!

 

And speaking of which, there is no signature on the cover art, nor on any of the internals, so I have no way of knowing who provided the art for this book.  The internals offer framing for the drawings, which is something Sanford Hoffman tends to do on his illustrations for this series; however, the way in which the people are drawn in this book lead me to believe it was not Hoffman who did the art.  It's truly a shame the publishers did not credit the cover and interior artists for these books, as they do these days.  This series has offered up some pretty great art, both on the covers and inside, and it would be nice to be able to track down some of that art (if it is still in existence today and has not been thrown out or otherwise destroyed).  But, alas, I guess that was not meant to be.

 

Something I did find a bit strange with this book is that for the first time since this series began, the published provided a complete listing of every book in the series thus far (including the three books published alongside this one - books 22, 23, and 24) in the front of the book across from the title page - HOWEVER, that listing shows book 21 as The Final Fair by Marcia Blair (#476) and book 22 is this book (#475). The number in the parentheses appears to be a portion of the ISBN, and since this book has an earlier ISBN than the Marcia Blair book, it would make since that this book was published first, as book 21.  But the error does not stop there.  While books 23 and 24 are listed with their proper titles, in the back of the book, on the order form page, book 25 is listed as Who Killed Me? by Laura Allen (#497), book 26 is You'll Be The Death of Me by Miriam Lynch (#494), book 27 is Murder by the Book by Norma Schier (#495), and book 28 is The Whispering Cat Mystery by Josephine Kains (#496).  Yet, when they were published, book 25 was You'll Be the Death of Me, book 26 was Murder by the Book, book 27 was The Whispering Cat Mystery, and book 28 was Who Killed Me?  As you can see, the actual publication order followed the ascending ISBNs.  So, I'm not sure why the books were listed out of order in the front listing and on the order form page, but looking ahead, I found that this error does not get corrected until we are into the 30s for this series!

 

A few tidbits worth nothing: first, Rob (Max's boyfriend) offers to take Max to the Blue Boar Inn (p. 68), which was a real restaurant in San Francisco.  Interestingly, you can find for sale on eBay matchbooks from that restaurant (which I say is interesting, but matches play an important role in this mystery!).  We had a Blue Boar restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up, but it was nothing like the one described in this book.  The second thing is when Max comes across the column typed up by Shelby Duncan, she notes the column "had been completed because the -"30"- the mark newspaper people use at the bottom of their last page of copy - had been typed" (p. 78).  I smiled when I read this, because I had previously learned about this when I was reading the Penny Parker series by Mildred Wirt (Benson), as the title character in that series helped her father, who owned a newspaper.  Lastly, during the big reveal, Max references a play that is mentioned in Shelby Duncan's column: "a new topless production of The Iceman Cometh..." (p. 170).  That is an actual play, written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill, which premiered on Broadway in the 1940s (some 30 years prior to the publication of this book). I cannot begin to imagine what a "topless" production of this play would have been like!

 

Without a doubt, this is my favorite book in the series, and most certainly, the best plotted and written of them all!  This one certainly sets a very high standard for the 39 books to follow in this series!

 

RATING:  10 unstruck pink wooden matches out of 10 for superb plotting, excellent execution, and fantastic fun in trying to solve this one!