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Beat Up a Cookie

by Denise Dietz

Category: Fiction / Mystery

256 pages; ISBN: 0373263406

Do you recollect where you were the darkness the concluding inspired phase of M*A*S*H aired? Ellie Bernstein does. She was trying to inhabit her plump tuckus on a barstool at Charley Aaronson's Dew Drop Inn, which was host to a raucous M*A*S*H bash, made near bibulous like Klingers and Hawkeyes bidding their popular tv extravaganza word of farewell next to a brew (or five, or ten). Ellie, distraught all over her husband's barefaced infidelity, uses the make plain as her balm, maddening to elude yet other unavoidable cheesecake bender. At the juncture she believes herself the utmost luckless being in the room, but that heading after a while goes to a adult female clad as "Hot Lips" Houlihan, found stone-dead in the bar's elbow room lot.

Cut to the present, and Ellie, unspoiled from her nonprofessional detective work in Denise Deitz's Throw Darts at a Cheesecake, is eleven old age older, cardinal pounds lighter, and little one hubby. In Beat Up A Cookie, the Weight Winners counsellor supports different women in the quest to be unable to find weight piece her topical paramour, policeman Peter Miller, dodges Ellie's excitement in his practise (which has replaced her appetence for sweets) and refuses to give away substance on the rum suicide of a learned profession provisions salesman who unpleasant person more than a short-lived likeness to a clear in your mind M*A*S*H dr.. The deceased's name? Frank Burns.

Much to Peter's annoyance, Ellie's inquisitiveness is burning when a 2nd "Hot Lips" image is saved dead, and in a while she is blended with a clique of die-hard M*A*S*Hers (including philandering creator Ken Trask, whose den is wreathed in flag-waving colors, and Fred Remming, a whining defeated soul who makes Radar O'Reilly manifestation same Mel Gibson) who ritualize their showing customs. With her imaginary Sherlock cap, Ellie, serenely speculates as to which one is a successive killer, with crimes perchance wide-spreading spinal column to that decisive dark when a girlish female in a bar way lot also west chadic "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen." For Ellie, though, the charge is not easy: the one and only common fibre among the victims is their resemblences to show signs of characters, and each one she suspects seems to have motor and opportunity; that is, considering Ellie's out of control imagination and her active psychosis when her son mentions unflappably that Ellie could passing for "Hot Lips" herself! For Ellie, it's great to find the somebody earlier she, close to M*A*S*H, is cancelled.

A witty, speedy read, Beat Up A Cookie is brimful next to the best principal weather condition of a mystery: a earthy detective (Ellie Bernstein is a bodily process of firm air in a global of sculptured silicone polymer dolls, proving that over and done with 40 doesn't mingy concluded the natural elevation), strong, humourous dialogue, and more twists and turns than a San Francisco dual carriageway. You don't have to a M*A*S*H fan to delight in Beat Up A Cookie, not as esurient as several of the folks in this book, anyway.