Vintage Golden Age Mystery
Cloak and Dagger Challenge #124
Monthly Key Word: Always
TBR #101
Date Finished: September 30, 2018

Shell Scott is hired by a mother to find her missing daughter. It seems that the teenage daughter had become involved with a Southern California cult with a shady leader with whom Shell had tangled before. The first stop leads him to a sanatorium, where instead of investigating like a normal detective, he gets put in a straight-jacket, escapes, sees a dead body being buried in the woods, and shoots a doctor dead at close range. On the run from the police, he invades the cult compound multiple times, is chased by 50,000 cult members, and fakes his own death through explosives to expose the cult leader who had used the same method days before. Of course.

Despite all the crazy shenanigans, this isn’t a bad Prather novel, as he keeps his conservative opinions quiet, other than one or two passages. As only the ninth book out of 42 in the series, this series had yet to devolve into the undisciplined mess it later became. Of course, none of this is supposed to be a logical detective story, but rather an excuse for “humor” and wackiness and whether any of that succeeds depends on the mood you’re in as you read it. Having read 20 of these now, my mood tends to range from indifferent to annoyed.