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Neighborhood Watch
Jeff Andrus
其他書名
A Tracer Family Mystery
出版Scribner, 1996
主題Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
ISBN06841970659780684197067
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=VJBCtapehwUC&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋Newly licensed private investigator John Tracer has just squeaked through his first case, inadvertently dragging his wife Chris; their two preteen children, Shorty and Brad; and the family's cowardly watchdog, Dog, into harm's way. Perhaps, John thinks, he should give up the PI business for a more settled career. His misgivings turn out to be a long good-bye when the family's reclusive next door neighbor, known to local children as Crazy Riley, gives Tracer, Inc., enough of a retainer to keep the Tracers' creditors at bay while John hunts for Riley's elderly, alcoholic sister. Corinth Riley, once a femme fatale and aspiring actress, has not only turned into a wandering drunk, she also communes with flying saucers. John follows her trail from the Tracers' middle-class neighborhood near Monterey, California, to the tarnished glitter of Hollywood, with a stopover in the eerie backwoods of Oregon's Columbia River Valley, where a man has been holding a torch for Corinth for more than sixty years. When a torch of a different kind is used to set fire to the Riley family's farmhouse, where Corinth's aunt and uncle died under mysterious circumstances, Tracer himself is investigated. Meanwhile, when Chris, in a fit of goodwill, invites both sides of the warring Tracer clan to a festive Thanksgiving dinner, John fears the celebration will turn into a "psychodrama around the turkey" - prophetic words, as even Dog has to contend with a cousin's cat, and the entire family becomes part of the explosive and unexpected end to Tracer's case.