The Tenth Commandment

I have read all of Lawrence Sanders books and they were all very well written and worth the time to read, in fact I have read some of them twice. So sad that he is gone and someone else is writing in his name. James Marcum

Very well-done novel about a diminutive private investigator uncovering just what happens when people break the tenth commandment. The author makes Joshua Bigg out to be sharp, eager and tenacious, but not a superman or Adrian Monk-style super sleuth, with the result that the protagonist was much more human than your typical detective. I also appreciated the secondary storyline of Mr. Biggs and his love interest.

Chief Investigator Joshua Bigg works for a prestigious firm of lawyers in New York, looking into suspicious circumstances around any of their cases. An intelligent, well dressed man of 5'3 3/8" (he insistes on the exact measurements), he is drawn into two cases which the firm is handling, the first being the disappearance of a Yale University professor and the second, the apparent suicide of the husband of a well known socialite. He befriends a police detective and the two of them form an alliance which enables them to dig deeper into the motives of a friend of both families, a clergyman who befriends wealthy widows and lines his pockets with their money. It's an amusing, well written story which exposes the many scams of unscrupulous con men who prey on the lonely and bereaved.

This is an excellent book about investigation. Joshua Biggs rapidly increases his knowledge and experience on solving several situations. although this main character is only 5'3 and 3/8", he is big among attorney investigators in New York city. This thrilling book is amazing. I really like this book because the author explains certain situations that many of us would recognize in our own private experiences that we for some reason do not really speak much of.