FFB: Turn on the Heat -- Erle Stanley Gardner

Now that Hard  Case Crime has issued the heretofore unpublished first novel in Erle Stanley Gardner's Cool and Lam series (The Knife Slipped), the next logical step was to reprint the second book in the series, Turn on the Heat.  I'd never read this one before, so it was as obscure to me as the unpublished novel (Turn on the Heat has been out of physical print for more than 50 years), and I'm grateful to Hard Case for releasing it and calling my attention it.  Cool and Lam are fun to read about, and Turn on the Heat has them in fine form.

The plot's almost impossible for me to lay out in simple form, but I can say that it begins with the disappearance of a woman twenty years before the action starts.  Now a lot of people want to find her, and one of them hires Cool and Lam to do the work for him.   The search takes Donald to the small town from which the woman disappeared, where he meets an attractive young woman, tangles with a crooked (and tough and mean) cop, gets mixed up in a lot of local politics, and generally stirs things up.  Murder ensues.

As usual, people and things are not always what they seem, and Lam put himself in and Cool in some tricky legal situations, or maybe I should say near-illegal situations, with Cool worrying about jail but liking the idea of a big payoff so much that the risks are worth it.

And the payoff does come, both figuratively and literally, as Lam ties everything together, and you see that Cool, who reminds us every twenty pages or so how smart he is, is right. 

I hope Hard Case plans to reissue more of the Cool and Lam books, as they've as much fun as ever.