Not as good as Black Maps, which is one of my all-time favorites, but still an okay read.

It was only after I’d begun reading it that I saw the blurb from Ken Bruen on the back, which should have given me a clue as to the writing style in this one. If Ken Bruen likes it, with his long, tedious navel-gazing protagonists, the same might have slipped in here.

The narrator, John March, gets a little more overly descriptive in this book, and seems… duller, somehow, in this book than the first one. Duller as if his colors were different, not in a boring sort of way.

Thankfully you can skim most of the wardrobe inventory, though the mystery is a pretty lukewarm one that you may have guessed whodunit pretty early on.

Death’s Little Helper isn’t enough to have soured me on Peter Spiegelman, but it’s definitely not my favorite book of his. We’ll see how the next in the series goes.