The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 August 2008
by Carolyn Weston
This novel is a relatively straightforward police procedural. The book itself has fallen into obscurity, though it still has one claim to fame. In it, we meet Casey Kellog, young college-educated investigator for the Santa Monica police department. He's bright, but disliked by his more working class colleagues. He lives at home and drives a Mustang. His partner is Al Krug, a crotchety officer of the old school, cranky, straightforward, mostly honest, and given to stereotyping the perps and victims on his beat. He complains about married life and drives a beat-up old camper pickup truck. Do the characters sound familiar yet? A girl is found floating in the bay, with a lawyer's business card tied around her broken neck. The lawyer, David Farr, is instantly a suspect, but he tries to convince the police of his innocence before they come up with enough evidence to arrest him for one, two, maybe three, murders. He is unfortunate enough to be a karate expert, boat owner, and to have been intimate with the victim. The girl is Holly Berry, an airy beauty who hangs around with a hippie band called Piccolo Incense, down at a bar in Venice Beach. The lawyer certainly had opportunity and means, but what about a motive? There is not a lot of subtlety in the story. It is direct and fast-moving, though just convoluted enough to keep the reader's attention. The book was published in 1972, and has some of the characters, settings and situations of that time. It's the first book this reader has encountered that features Synanon as a setting, without it being the cause of all the trouble. Anyway, overall a pretty entertaining and basic police mystery. (This book and its characters were used as the pilot plot for the old TV series The Streets of San Francisco, in which the names and location were changed, of course, but it otherwise stayed very close to the original text.)