Gumshoe for Two: A Mortimer Angel Novel

Early in Leininger’s fast-paced, action-packed second novel to feature PI-in-training Mortimer Angel (after 2015’s Gumshoe), the wisecracking Mort, who’s temporarily alone while his boss/fiancée Jeri DiFrazzia is away, meets beautiful Holiday Breeze, whom he assumes is a hooker, in a Reno, Nev., bar. It turns out that Holiday is actually Sarah Dellario, a University of Nevada civil engineering student. She’s searching for her younger sister, Allison, who worked as a prostitute and has gone missing. Mort agrees to help her find Allison. The sexual tension between the two is palpable—especially because of Sarah’s penchant for taking off her clothes and parading naked in front of Mort. But this tension, coupled with the relentless sexual objectification of Sarah, gets old quickly and overshadows the plot, which also involves Mort receiving a package containing a severed hand. When the brutally unexpected conclusion comes, it’s jarring and tonally incompatible with what started out as a relatively lighthearted story. (Apr.)