I’m going to do something different tonight, in reviewing David Handler’s short Stewart Hoag mystery, The Girl Who Did Say No. I’m going to give the book a less than enthusiastic recommendation, in spite of my fondness for the series as a whole.

The set-up is pretty standard for the series. Hoagy, one-time literary wunderkind and current ghost-writer to celebrities, gets a high-priced offer to do an editing job. Anna Childress, a legendary Hollywood sex symbol of the 1960s, died recently and left her personal diaries behind. Rumor has it the diaries contain the straight dope on all the film industry’s dirty laundry from the big studio days. Her agent has arranged to have the removal of the diaries from the bank safe deposit box broadcast on national TV. Millions are expected to watch, and the book is a guaranteed monster bestseller.

But when Hoagy arrives in LA, he’s immediately waylaid by the last of the old studio moguls. The studio head is willing to pay him twice his promised fee to just walk away from the project. The industry’s secrets need to remain secret, he says. That’s what people would really want, if they knew what was good for them. Hoagy refuses.

The story worked out in a fairly predictable way, it seemed to me, and was uncharacteristically downbeat for this usually light-hearted series. Plus, I detected at least one political barb. And it seemed to me the price was a little high for a book of this length.

But you might like it better.