“I dislike most people, and the few I do like I certainly don’t trust one single bit.” – Mary Cooper
Los Angeles based private investigator Mary Cooper has never met a snarky remark she didn’t like. Unfortunately, she’s prone to blurting out any quip that crosses her mind no matter the setting or company, which is not exactly the best course of action when dealing with clients and fellow law enforcement professionals.
She manages to hold her tongue long enough to get hired by a wealthy woman whose seventeen-year-old daughter has gone missing. The mother’s not sure if the young woman was abducted or simply ran away, but that her last known boyfriend was both older and involved in the porn industry certainly casts a sinister pall over her disappearance. Given the family’s high profile they’d prefer to keep the police out of it, and pay Mary in cash to keep things “off the books” and find their daughter.
Since Mary’s boyfriend, L.A. Detective Jake Cornell, is now working Vice you’d think Mary would have an “in” running down leads in the porn industry, only Jake seems to have gone missing too… while working undercover with a film studio whose specialty is porn.
As she begins nosing around, Mary soon finds herself being tailed by a mysterious black Tahoe, encouraged to share information by another private investigator who also claims to be working the case of the missing girl, and encountering one sleazy porn insider after another. When people associated with the missing girl begin turning up dead – usually after Mary’s been to interview them – it’s clear there is something more going on than meets the eye, and Mary is determined to get to the bottom of it.
Murder With Sarcastic Intent is the second book to feature Mary Cooper, following Death by Sarcasm, and this outing finds Mary every bit as snarky as she was in her first adventure. And despite being set against the seedy backdrop of the porn industry, which makes for some wicked one-liners, the tone this time around is actually lighter overall than in Death by Sarcasm. Mary’s equally sharp-tonuged, septuagenarian Aunt Alice is back, as is Mary’s wannabe standup comedian uncle, Kurt. Alice may be the only one capable of verbally getting the better of Mary, and the scene where Mary enlists her uncle to pose as a famous porn director is laugh-out-loud funny.
Lest you think Mary’s all about the quips, however, you should know that she has a degree in criminology, is a highly intuitive private investigator, and is well trained in the use of firearms, all of which are handy because she’s gonna need more than sarcasm to deal with all the nastiness going down in Murder With Sarcastic Intent…though the one-liners sure are funny.
Murder With Sarcastic Intent is available as an e-book at Amazon.
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