Drop Dead, My Lovely: 6

I drove by a bookstore in Dallas that was closing out it's inventory and bought several books for $1 each. I picked this one up on a whim. After reading it I would have happily paid full price for the book. It was a great lighthearted read cleverly done. I will pass this on to friends who enjoy a light read with good writing. Can't wait to see what else I might find from this author.

This book is brilliantly clever and fun. I stayed up till four am reading it, then immediately read it again upon waking. Best fiction I've read in a long, long time.

This centaur of a book--half mystery, half comedy--will prove equally upsetting and confusing to readers of both comedy and mystery. What is so funny about someone being killed? What is so mysterious when the private eye who tells the story is so obviously a deluded fool? As I make clear on the Unofficial Ellis Weiner website (www.ellisweiner.com), Mr. Ellis Weiner has, in this novel, outsmarted both himself and the reading public. The narrator--a hard-boiled, big-city detective who thinks, among other things, that "the Fonz" is an international police institution--commands very little credibility. And yet I have given it five stars. Why? Because I believe as many people as possible should buy it and read it, the better to expose to the world the disgraceful performance it is. The more people read this, the more people will be prepared and motivated to not read the next work foisted on the public by this too-clever-by-half author, who is too clever by half. Yours truly, Prof. Renee Willis, Euphonia College.

Amnesiac hero Pete Ingalls will have you laughing on every page. Believing that he is an old-style private eye, Pete calls the ladies "angel" and "doll"--getting decidedly mixed responses from today's liberated women. But the real action starts when the two cases he takes on sends him out on the streets to dig up clues. A bit like Steve Martin's "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" but far cleverer, "Drop Dead, My Lovely" will leave your sides aching.-Adrian W.

When he wakes up in the hospital, Pete Ingalls thinks he?s a private investigator and talks like a gumshoe out of a forties film. He has no memory of being a mild mannered hermetic bookstore clerk who had an accident when a pile of books fell on his head. His friend thinks he is putting him on but when he leaves the hospital, he opens up a PI office, places an ad in the newspaper, prints some business cards, and hires a secretary who wanders if her boss is legitimate or crazy.Actually Pete has two walk in cases that he eagerly grabs up. The first one involves Celeste Vroman who wants Pete to find her lover Jeff Litman who seems to have disappeared. He finds Jeff hiding at his office avoiding Celeste because he started an affair with Olivia Cartwright. His second case involves Catherine Flonger who thinks her TV reporter husband is cheating on her and wants proof. Neither case goes smoothly. Jeff disappears, Olivia is found murdered and Pete has a quickie with Catherine in a women?s dressing room. It goes downhill from there.What makes DROP DEAD, MY LOVELY an outstanding reading experience is the hero is suffering from amnesia yet effortlessly becomes a private investigator modeling himself on tough PI?s like Same Spade and Spencer. There is plenty of action because Pete manages to get himself in a lot of trouble while working on cases yet the best part of Ellis Weiner?s novel is the dialogue. Pete sounds like an anachronistic Phillip Marlow clone in a twenty-first century context and that makes for a hilarious novel.Harriet Klausner