Could It Be ... Murder?

Note: I wrote this last fall and never got around to pressing "publish." I'm not sure what stopped me — apparently I was looking for a big finish, but couldn't come up with anything.

Well, guess what? Nothing has occurred to me in the last four months, so instead of letting it linger in the limbo of the draft folder (or, probably better yet, hitting "delete" and moving on), here goes.

Awful Library Books featured Dressed Up for Murder  [last October], and mostly mocked the  horse chipmunk — Really? OK. If you say so. — on the cover. I was freaked out and intrigued, and I immediately began searching for it in a local library.

I found it and two more books in the series of ten in the system in Toledo. When they arrived, I was underwhelmed. They were in almost pristine condition, and the actual story in and of itself made sense, in a cheeseball 1980s  Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine short story kind of way.

What I didn't get was the intended audience for this series. It's small, so you think it's for kids. There's reading comprehension questions on the last page, so you think it's for kids. The fact that the guy in the chipmunk costume is murdered because he's fooling around with his boss's wife ... is not exactly for kids.

The other two books are about an attempted robbery with a Willy Loman–type as the chief of police in a small town and a spoof of 1940s noir featuring a cheating husband who gets his girlfriend to give him an alibi for his wife's murder. So, it's like Encyclopedia Brown meets Silk Stalkings.