Hot Ice - A Groovy Mystery Caper #2

I read the first "Groovy Mystery Caper" some years ago, back in 2011 not too long after it was first published.  The series is set in the 1960s, and its protagonist is Yancy Dunkle, a chauffeur for the quite outspoken Jean Sparks, former head of costume design at Colossal Studios.  Dunkle has a bit of a dilemma (other than stumbling into murder mysteries) - he has amnesia and cannot remember anything before just a couple of years prior.

After solving a murder in Palm Springs, Jean is taking Dunkle to Indio, California, just some twenty miles away, for a carnival, beauty pageant, parade, and some good, wholesome fun to take their minds off of everything they went through.  Of course, this is a mystery book, so it pretty much goes without saying that soon after their arrival in Indio, Dunkle and Jean stumble into a mystery involving - yes, I'm going to say it - midgets, clowns, and camel jockeys.

Interestingly enough, the author, James Huskins, doesn't bring in the murder until well over half-way through the book.  Instead, the mystery begins with a locked-room theft - someone has stolen the priceless Star of Arabia necklace from the safe in the locked library of Dunkle and Jean's hosts while everyone is there!  While the local beauty queen still has the knock-off copy of the necklace to wear at the pageant that week, Dunkle and Jean set about to find out what happened to the real necklace.

Meanwhile, their friend Polly, who is an investigative reporter, is in town as well, following up on a story that she claims could potentially blow the lid off of some long-held secrets in town.  But Polly disappears, and Dunkle and Jean begin to wonder if it has any connection to the theft.  Then there's the mystery of the midget's missing daughter at the local circus that is in town, as well as the mysterious message that the gypsy fortune teller gives to Dunkle about his past, and his future.  There are a jumble of mysteries and a plethora of characters - there are even some good, old-fashioned Nancy Drew-type foibles as they receive notes to drop their investigation, Dunkle gets conked on the head and tied up, they are almost run-down by a speeding automobile, and they get held at gunpoint.

The plot is actually well-thought out and expertly executed, with clues scattered here and there, and enough red herrings to keep you guessing up until the very end.  The only distraction from the story are the number of grammatical errors throughout the book.  Dunkle and Jean's hosts are named Earl and Bessy Garra - yet, whenever the author refers to the couple, he always identifies them as the "Garra's" (singular possessive) instead of the "Garras" (plural, non-possessive).  Once could have been overlooked, but the persistent use of the wrong possessive instead of plural became extremely distracting and constantly took me out of the story.  Then there was the use of "petal" (from a flower) instead of "pedal" (as in a gas pedal for a car); and the use of your's (non-existent word) instead of yours (showing possession).  And these distractions could have been annoying for me simply because I'm an English major and a grammar freak; perhaps for the every day person, these errors would not have jumped out at them.  For me, though, it was a clear reminder that there are no longer any true editors for books - editing is clearly a thing of days gone by, and computers are left to pick up on mistakes (which they don't always do when a word is spelled correctly, but it is a wrong word choice).

Regardless, I still enjoyed the story, and I love that Huskins is continuing the stories of Dunkle and Jean - particularly happy to see he has a third book forthcoming, Seriously Funny, so I can't wait to see what he has in store for these characters then!

RATING:  7 very revealing Aladdin costumes out of 10 for proving that a good mystery with fun characters can still be entertaining without any explicit sex or excessive violence.