A wealthy couple offers Minneapolis private investigator Nils "Shap" Shapiro an assignment that sounds like a paid vacation: fly to California to make sure the couple's only grandson, Ebben, is spending his trust fund responsibly. It's frigid in Minneapolis and sunny in Los Angeles, so why not? Of course, the job is too good to be true. Like the previous three books in this series (including The Shallows), Emmy-winner Matt Goldman's engaging Dead West starts out breezily but a dead body is lurking just around the corner.
It takes Shap about five minutes after meeting Ebben to determine Ebben is indeed handling his finances in a savvy way--he's formed a film collective that requires a small investment of his money but promises healthy profits. Not all is rosy, though: Ebben is grieving the recent accidental death of his fiancée, Juliana, and it takes Shap only another five minutes to detect that Juliana was murdered. And Ebben might be next.
Shap is a winning combination of wit, decency and smarts, a man touchingly dedicated to his fiancée, best friends and baby daughter. He could be labeled a square but he's entertaining, such as in this observation of a client: "His neck was too small for his white dress shirt--the shirt didn't touch his neck the way Saturn's rings don't touch Saturn." In Goldman's world, even the bad guys are funny, and the author gives an amusing peek into the behind-the-scenes hustle of the movie industry. Readers don't need to have read other books in the series, but they'll probably want to after finishing this sharp and sweet installment. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd