Lost Among the Angels

I'm going to try to keep up with posting about my current reading so I don't get further and further behind. I'll post about beach reads in between. I just finished Lost Among the Angels by Alice Duncan. I assume I bought this because someone on DorothyL said something about the series. It's a fun read. The protagonist is Mercy Alcutt, a Boston Brahmin, who has come to Los Angeles to live with her sister and brother-in-law. The time is 1926. Mercy is a protected rich girl who doesn't want to live in her ivory tower anymore. So she gets a job as a secretary to a private detective, Ernest Templeton. Templeton is a not very successful detective, a former police officer who had to leave the force because he was too honest. He deals with crimes on the seedy side of LA; the world of gangsters and molls. Generally I don't like mysteries in that world but this is an exception.

I always enjoy a funny mystery and this is one. A lot of the humor in this book is Mercy's reaction to a world that she doesn't know. You are often ahead of her because you know what the slang refers to. (I was ahead of her on figuring out the bad guys too.) Mercy is a plucky woman who throws herself into her new job. She doesn't want to be a secretary, she wants to be Templeton's assistant. Fun to read. I will look for the next in the series with pleasure.