The Smiling Tiger: Todd & Georgine #3

This is Lenore Glen Offord’s third mystery set in Northern California and featuring the amateur sleuthing team of Georgine and Todd McKinnon. It’s 1949, and with the War well and truly in the past, Americans are relaxing into the warm bath of suburbia. Even groovy Northern California, even sharp-eyed Georgine and Todd McKinnon (last seen in The Glass Mask and Skeleton Key) have largely succumbed to the lure of comfortable conformity. But the McKinnons’ pleasant domesticity is shattered by the arrival of a distinctly nonconformist young man, who arrives unannounced one night, tells a wild tale, and dies a short time later. Why did he choose the McKinnons to hear him out? Sure, he hoped Todd would write a check, eager to turn the strange story into one of the thrillers he regularly sells to the pulps. But could there have been another reason? One bizarre phone call, and Georgine is all too ready to believe there might have been…