#26 in the Gregor Demarkian police procedural series set in Philadelphia.

Jane Haddam, as an author, drives me crazy because her books are so uneven. You can have a tautly-written, well-plotted police procedural followed ranting polemic against some aspect of US life or culture, followed yet again by a very good if not spectacular story. That about describes the trajectory of her last three books. so, you never know what you’re going to get when you open the cover, either literally or metaphorically
(in the case of an e-reader).

Haddam always has an ax to grind, but she is remarkably objective about the way she applies it. While it is clear that she dislikes extremists of any stripe, she avoids stereotypes (for the most part) and came come up with surprising characters, both major and minor, who are complex and not at all what one would expect.

In her latest book, Wanting Sheila Dead, she takes off against reality TV, an area bout which I know exactly zip since I’ve never watched such a show in my life. However, her plot revolves around the attitudes and production of such a show, not on audience reactions or even for that matter, the impact of the celebrity host or hostess. But it is pretty clear that Haddam doesn’t think much of the genre.

Since this is #26 or something like that in the series, we are updated on Gregor and his brand-new wife, Bennis. They were FINALLY married in the previous book (it only took about 5 or 6 books in the series to pull the wedding off) and have returned from their honeymoon in Jamaica. Naturally, Demarkian is immediately pulled into the Armenian-American neighborhood’s problems, with suspicious goings-on with an elderly resident; he is also involved in a peripheral sort of way with odd goings-on in the production of the reality TV show, America’s Next Superstar, whose host, Sheila Dunham, is the Sheila of the title--a truly nasty piece of work.

Fully 40% of the book is taken up by the preliminary story, as Haddam leads us through casting and initial production phases. Because there are 16 young female contestants, there is a larger cast than usual for Haddam’s book, but she manages to make them all more or less interesting, even though fairly simple characters--interesting enough, anyway, for the purposes of the plot.

The denouement involving the show is a little bizarre but not far-fetched, not in this day and age in the US. While interesting, the book could have used more of Bennis, Father Tibor, and some of the Armenian neighbors, although The Very Old Ladies--three elderly women who are the Armenian version of the Greek Eumenides and chorus in a Greek tragedy rolled into one--play a prominent part.

Not as good as her best, but still worth reading. ( )

Not long after returning from their honeymoon, Gregor becomes involved in two investigations: a shooting at a reality show, and the odd illness of an elderly neighbor. The host of the reality show is a very unpleasant woman, and just about anyone who ever met her would want to kill her, but she's not dead. The neighbor, on the other hand, is an inoffensive near-recluse, with a strange lack of paperwork.

A lot of wheel-spinning, to not much purpose. Gregor seems slightly depressed, and the whole book reflects that.

(Note: the teaser chapter for this in the paperback edition of Living Witness is nowhere to be found; the only similarity is the reality show setting, the unpleasant host, and her efficient assistant. I kept wanting to read that book and not this one.) ( )