In this new-ish addition to the LDS fiction lineup by Kerry Blair, we meet Samantha Shade, the hysterically bumbling but yet good-hearted wannabe private detective. Hired to run Nightshade, her uncle’s PI firm while he’s out of town, Sam is determined to make a success of it for herself and prove that she has what it takes to be a real gumshoe, but she only has one obstacle: herself.
While staking out a disreputable part of town to catch a political figure committing a no-no of the adulterous variety, she spies what she thinks is a man soliciting a young woman on a street corner. Feeling the need to stand up for truth and justice, she interrupts the transaction and manages to get the fellow led off in handcuffs. Imagine her surprise when that fellow turns out to be a police officer off duty, and all he was doing was trying to convince the young woman, a runaway, to come in so he could get her the help she needed. She feels like even more of a fool when that officer turns out to be the same man she hired to moonlight as a security guard for her firm. Already off on the wrong foot with the guy, an attractive and intelligent young man named Thom Casey, Sam is sure things couldn’t get any worse, until the object she was hired to guard turns out to look suspiciously like the mummy of an extraterrestrial, and then turns out to be missing.
Together with the mentally unaware Wendela (who happens to be a refugee from an insane asylum) and her brother Arjay, who’s nocturnal, Sam tries to clear Thom’s name from the charges she herself pressed, find the missing mummy, and keep from destroying the good name that her uncle has created for his business. Twists and turns abound in this delightful story, making it a page turner of the best and highest caliber from a very talented author. You will laugh out loud one minute and grip the pages with white knuckles the next.
(This book was published in 2005 by Covenant Communications.)
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