In spite of the unwelcome appearance of pot-smoking in the previous volume of this collection, I enjoyed the first book in Jack Lynch’s Pete Bragg series enough to continue with the second book, The Missing and the Dead.

Here we find our San Francisco private eye retained by a local celebrity, an over-expressive female TV personality, to look for her brother, Jimmy Lind. Jimmy is an insurance investigator, and he’d been sure he was on the trail of a much-sought, missing artist when he vanished. Oddly, a cop disappeared around the same time in the same area, a sort of artist’s colony.

As is characteristic of the series (so far as I can tell so far), our hero works at solving the puzzles he encounters, but the malevolent genius in the background is such as he could never have imagined. Once again, he’ll survive by luck as much as by strategy, and he won’t really know what he’s facing until the Big Reveal, when it’s almost too late.

But one doesn’t read Hard-boiled for the puzzle solving. The Missing and the Dead was fun to read, a page-turner with lots of fighting and (implied) sex. Plus some surprisingly sensitive characterization. And most satisfactorily, it’s pre-Woke. When a drunk persists in harassing the woman Pete is romancing, he decks the guy, and she doesn’t lecture him on how she doesn’t a man’s protection, but rather appreciates his gallantry.

And the pot-smoking, though mentioned, is restricted to off-stage.

I recommend The Missing and the Dead as popcorn reading.