Lutz, Lisa – THE SPELLMAN FILES

[LJ Roberts]

THE SPELLMAN FILES (Private Investigator, Izzy Spellman, San Francisco, Cont) – Poor
Lutz, Lisa – 1st book
Simon and Schuster, 2007, US Hardcover – ISBN: 9781415432392

First Sentence: I duck into the parking garage hoping to escape.

Izzy Spellman is a private investigator from a family of private investigators. Her parents sent Izzy and her brother David out on their first official surveillance when they were 12- and 14-years old respectively. Izzy eventually decides to quit the family business but is told she must take on one last case—a fifteen-year-old cold case of a young man who’d gone missing.

I know I often complain about lack of character development, but not time. The entire book was character development with, oh yes, a plot, as a minor secondary aspect over half-way through the book. The book starts out with some funny scenes but quickly degrades to mildly amusing and finally to downright boring as the story plays its single theme over and over. It is redundant in the extreme. I found myself not particularly liking the characters as they quickly become the poster family for dysfunctional and the protagonist seems proud of her periods of indiscriminate sex and drugs and inability to form a relationship. The cold missing-persons case was interesting but by the time it’s introduced into the story, I found myself skipping everything else round it to find out what happened with the case. The book wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t worth having bought in hardcover.