Curse of the Spellmans is the second in the series by Lisa Lutz I have read this week. What a hoot. The Spellmans are a private eye family living in and working out of a Victorian house in San Francisco. The narrator, Isabel, a thirty-year-old with enough curiosity to kill a herd of cats, has a passel of mysteries on her hands in this caper.
To wit:
Why has Dad (retired policeman and the founder of Spellman Investigations) suddenly taken up yoga and eating salads?
Why is Mom, the trim Olivia, sneaking out of the house at night and vandalizing a certain motorbike?
Why is David, Isabel's handsome, perfect, attorney brother, staying home from work and spending his days watching television in his pajamas and drinking bourbon?
Who is the mysterious new neighbor with the suspicious name of John Brown? Why does he keep a room locked in his apartment? Is he using his landscaping business to bury bulbs or bodies?
In addition to those and other mysteries, we get to better know Henry Stone, neat and tidy, seasoned police detective, who was introduced in the first book, The Spellman Files. Henry has more sense than the entire dysfunctional Spellman family put together. Rae, Isabel's 15-year-old Froot Loop-eating sister, spends a lot of time with 'her best friend' Henry, to Henry's chagrin. He tries to teach her some manners and encourages her to read Dickens and to do her homework. He introduces her to the time traveling Dr. Who and, as is his way, won't let her watch the newer ones in the British television series until she has watched all the classic episodes from the beginning.
She in turn accidentally runs over him prior to his giving her a driving lesson. He forgives her but swears he will never give her another lesson. He keeps his promise.
The action and the humor fly by at breakneck speed. Some chapters contain only whip-sharp dialogue. There are plenty of surveillance jobs, picked locks, B&Es, interrogations, arrests, and GPS trackings to keep the Spellmans hopping. The characters are just quirky enough to be entertaining but not so much that they become unbelievable. Best of all, the mysteries get solved to the satisfaction of Isabel Spellman and the reader. Great fun all around.
I have just made the acquaintance of the crazy-funny family The Spellmans of San Francisco. They are a private investigation family that is made up of:
Albert and Olivia, aka Dad and Mom, founders and owners of Spellman Investigations. Albert is a retired police detective who met Olivia on a stakeout.
David, the perfect son who left the family business to become a highly paid attorney and sends background check work the agency's way.
Isabel, the twenty-nine-year old narrator of the action. She has a sketchy past full of youthful indiscretions, mostly wears leather and denim, in a pinch is not above sleeping in the backseat of her Buick, and refers to her ex-boyfriends by number.
Rae, the fourteen-year-old youngest daughter, is addicted to sugar in any form but especially Froot Loops, enjoys 'recreational surveillance', and has long soulful chats over a glass of ginger ale with Milo the bartender at the neighborhood hangout.
Ray, Albert's brother, is also a former policeman and now lives on beer, high-stakes poker games, and has a tendency to disappear on lost weekends.
All of the characters created by author Lisa Lutz in her first novel/mystery The Spellman Files (2007) live and work together in a four-story Victorian house. No one seems to think anything of following other family members to see what they are up to or bugging private phone conversations or snapping surveillance photos of each other.
When Isabel tries to quit the PI business, she gets one more case: What Happened to Andrew Snow? Andrew went missing fourteen years ago. Just disappeared on a camping trip with his brother. The parent Spellmans worked the case at the time of Andrew's disappearance and the file gets reopened as a condition of Isabel's exit from the agency.
But most of action comes as Isabel relates tales from the family history, investigations into prospective boyfriends, blackmail, stake outs, car chases, picked locks, interrogations, and just general mayhem and hilarity.
I am crazy about the Spellmans. Ms. Lutz has written a funny, funny tale that swept me along for its 350 pages. The dialogue is breezy and the characters are just fun to be with. There was never a dull moment.
It had everything I like: mystery, humor, idiosyncratic characters, and plenty of action. Plus, I learned a bit about the ins and outs of the life of a PI. I am glad to see that there are five more "Spellman Files" in this series to investigate.
