Blackmailer

Blackmailer by George Axelrod
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Publisher Dick Sherman gets offered the last book of a dead prize winning author by a mysterious woman and gets drawn into a web of lies and murder. Who sent the thugs to his house looking for the book? Who killed the woman who first offered it to him? Who really owns the book? What does his old flame have to do with it? And does the book even really exist?

I really dug this entry in the Hard Case series. There were a lot of twists and turns and enough red herrings to make figuring out who did it pretty difficult. Dick's a good character and doesn't act like a super hero. In fact, he gets his ass handed to him more often than not. The whole plot around Charles Anstruthers's last manuscript is fairly engaging, as is the three way deal surrounding it.

Blackmailer is defintely worth the few hours it will take to breeze through it for any fan of detective fiction.

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