Spring Harrowing

The story opens with Asey's housekeeper-cousin upset with him because he allowed his photo to be taken for the cover of the NEWSORGAN magazine wearing his old clothes. The set-to is interrupted by the arrival of a friend in an antique Porter car that Asey had a lot to do with perfecting years before. The next morning this friend, Bart Paget, is found dead of a clawing. There's a wealthy young widow who keeps a pair of lynx cats as pets -- Smith and Wesson are their names and someone has let them out of their cage. Asey sets about investigating and sorthing out a bunch of characters that include a flighty, impetious neighbor, her ex-Navy son and a live-in friend who is a fortune teller. There's a one armed man who's obsessive about his small golf course, a sunken ship that has re-surfaced in a recent storm and a pretty young woman who knows too much and becomes the second victim. There's suspense, but it's not intense. There are murders, but they are not graphically violent, there old-fashioned detecting such as you'd find in an Agatha Christie book and there's humor. I often find myself chuckling at the antics of the characters in these mysteries. This is a good one and one of my favorites.