Okay.as a huge fan of Houdini, I was a little disappointed in the characterization in this book. My equally beloved harpo came through unscathed . Plot was ok, would have expected more wit from a book featuring Benchley & Parker ( )

Dorothy Parker and crew are back! This time they get mixed up in the nutty world of art as a friend of their kills himself jumping of the Brooklyn Bridge, only to see his so/so art jump up in price! Their quest to find out what happened to him takes them to the den of Mickey Finn and Harry Houdini performances at the Hippodrome. A fun adventure with Parker and Benchely coming to the rescue yet again! ( )

The Algonquin Round Table was a literary salon that met in the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the 1920s, bringing together some of the great writers in that time and place, more specifically, Dorothy Parker and Peter Benchley, but also including Harold Ross, Robert Sherwood and Alexander Woollcott. The conceit here is that Parker and Benchley become amateur detectives in the Thin Man tradition solving crimes of an artistic bent. These writers were wits of the highest order and the author tries to inject some of that bon mots humour into the novel, with some, but not complete, success.

Murphy describes the 1920s New York world well and squeezes in several references to historical people, places and events. What is missing here, I think, is the acid burn of the original writers. They were funny with their puns and speedy retorts, but the real laughs came with an edge of maliciousness and Murphy does not deliver on that.

The plot is fairly standard with a nice twist half way through, but peters out after that as too much of the book is concerned with tying up loose ends and the sub-plots do not compensate for that. ( )

This second volume in the series was OK, a very light read. Naming a main character in a mystery Ernie McGuffin made one part of it very easy to guess. At least the mystery took another turn after that, though not an unexpected one, that was harder to solve. ( )

I wasn't sure about picking this book up, since I thought the first one was only so-so, and You Might as Well Die languished on my TBR for some months before desperation for something to read forced me to pick it up. I'm glad I did. I won't say I loved it, but it was a much stronger effort and I enjoyed the story quite a bit. The book held my attention, it had a nice pace, not an overabundance of introspection, and engaging characters (the croquet was cracking me up!).

All in all a good story and I'll definitely keep my eye out for the third book. ( )