Publisher's Weekly Review
The setting is Hollywood in 1942, and someone is out to kill John Wayne, in this 11th adventure featuring private gumshoe Toby Peters (Down for the Count. A man named Lewis Vance lures Toby to his hotel room, ostensibly to hire him for a case. But Toby, after awakening from a stupor induced by a drugged Pepsi, finds himself in the room with Vance's corpse on the bed and John Wayne pointing a .38 at his chest. Wayne has also been lured there by a cryptic phone call and is suspicious of the P.I., but when he learns that Toby is a chum from his old neighborhood, the actor hires him to find the real culprit. The case gets more tangled when Toby discovers a link between Vance's alleged killera shady desk clerk named Teddy Spaghettiand the theft of a $10,000 donation (made by Charlie Chaplin) to a charity promoting Soviet-American relations; he soon find himself in Chaplin's hire to recover the stolen money. As in the other entries in this series, Kaminsky's use of period detail and his appealing renderings of real-life celebrities provide the strongest recommendations for this well-plotted mystery. (March 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
As most film buffs will guess from the title, this time the star-client for 1940's shamus Toby Peters is John Wayne: in the foolishly hectic opening chapters here, both Wayne and Peters are tricked into showing up at a seedy L.A. hotel--where they're more or less framed for murder. The sleazy culprit behind this clumsy seam, it seems, is desk-clerk Teddy Spaghetti. But things get much more complicated when Teddy disappears--along with the corpse of one Lewis Vance and $10,000 from the hotel-owners' private safe. Is Teddy himself (who soon turns up dead) the mastermind behind all this mayhem? Or is it an unseen villain named Alex--who seems determined to assassinate Duke Wayne? And what about those hotel-owners, a shady married couple who've bilked assorted stars (including Charlie Chaplin) out of pseudo-political donations? As usual, aging tough-guy Peters gets roughed up, even jailed, along the way to the final revelation/showdown. Also as usual, the plotting is nonsensical and convoluted--too flaky for credibility, not loopy enough for inspired whimsy. (Stolid, dull John Wayne keeps saying things like ""I'm getting a little tired of this""--and the reader keeps agreeing with him.) But, as in other recent outings, narrator Toby gives lots of wry attention to his amusing entourage (landlady Mrs. Plaut, dentist-partner Shelly, et al.)--making this a fairly diverting mix of nostalgia and Runyonesque comedy, if no more than a labored washout as mystery. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
