The Bessie Blue Killer: A Hobart Lindsey/Marvia Plum Mystery - Hardcover

Lupoff's latest Hobart Lindsey/Marvia Plum story deserves four stars for its imaginative and unusual plot, its subtle but sidesplitting humor, its cast of wonderfully wacky characters, its thought-provoking commentary on race relations, and its nostalgic and fascinating look at the flyboys of World War II. Hobart Lindsey, intrepid claims adjuster for International Surety, is no stranger to murder and mayhem, but his newest assignment almost proves his undoing. International Surety has written an umbrella policy on Double Bee Enterprises, which is about to start shooting a film based on the Tuskegee Airmen, an elite group of blacks who flew B-17s in World War II. But the murder of a security guard at the film site has everyone more than a little nervous. And when Lindsey begins to investigate to determine if InternationaI Surety will have to pay up, he finds a case more puzzling and convoluted than any he's ever worked on. With the help of his new honeybunch, Detective Marvia Plum, and his old buddy, Lieutenant High of the Oakland Police Department, Lindsey follows leads from California to Louisiana and confronts drug thugs, thieves, kidnappers, and whacked-out war heroes. A fun, funny, fascinating read that belongs in every mystery collection. Emily Melton

In his hardcover debut, International Surety claims agent Hobart Lindsey, sent to ride herd on an umbrella policy for the filming of Bessie Blue, a film about black airmen in WW II, finds the production halted by producer Ina Chandler and technical advisor Lawton Crump's discovery of dead janitor Leroy McKinney. As Lindsey keeps explaining to everybody from his black girlfriend Sgt. Marvia Plum (Berkeley PD) to Oakland Homicide Lt. High, he's only trying to save the company's money, not investigate any murders--but after a trip to McKinney's neighborhood tavern erupts in more murder, there's no way for him to avoid a trip to McKinney's childhood home in Reserve, Louisiana--where he finds that McKinney was killed in an Air Force explosion back in 1944. And there's no rest from the grip of the military past in Lindsey's home life, either, as his mother struggles to rouse herself from her fixation on 1953--the year her husband died in his own war- -and Marvia has to fight her remarried ex, now a Gulf War hero, for custody of their son. ``There's no poison in you,'' Marvia tells Lindsey, and she's right: the gentle, reluctant detective suffuses this entertaining nostalgia binge with tenderness. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.