Those eyes glared at me disapprovingly. “You’re a bit of a sneaky customer, aren’t you?”

“I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I’ve spent the past several years hanging around with the wrong sort of people.”

“What sort of people would that be?”

“Famous people.”

A cozy mystery. A clever narrator with a scene-stealing basset hound sidekick. Witty narration, and lots of name-dropping. Stewart Hoag, celebrity ghost-writer, is back in The Man Who Couldn’t Miss. Like the other recent books in the series, it’s set back in time, in the early 1990s, when Hoagy is getting his act back together after ruining his writing career (and his marriage) with drugs. Now his actress ex-wife Merilee is allowing him to live in the guest house on her Connecticut farm and he’s working on his long-delayed second novel. Meanwhile, she’s overwhelmed with producing a one-night, benefit production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, to try to save the local small theater, a kind of shrine where many big actors got their starts. She’s got a cast made up of old friends, now big movie stars, who studied with her in college.

But one more old “friend” shows up – R. J. Romero, the most talented actor of their whole circle, who utterly wrecked his own life and is now a petty criminal. He’s holding something over Merilee’s head, and blackmailing her – and he pulls Hoagy in as a go-between.

Also, there’s unease in the theater. Aside from the challenge of a leaky roof and a stormy forecast, there are tensions between the cast members. It all looks like fairly normal group dynamics – until somebody gets murdered.

I liked The Man Who Couldn’t Miss, though author Handler didn’t go as deep into his characters as I would have wished – it’s not that they don’t surprise you, but we didn’t see the layering here that was on display in some of the other books.

There’s also the issue of Hoagy’s risk-taking. He has a penchant for walking into mortally dangerous situations with no more back-up than his witty dialogue and his dog’s loud barking. Very politically correct, but stupid in the real world.

Nevertheless, all in all, it’s a fun book in an enjoyable series.