McCollum's Run
Patrick O'Donnell
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 iUniverse
ISBN: 0595292348

A senior citizen PI gets involved in death & deception in the High Sierra.

As a quid pro quo for investigating his daughter-in-law's father's real estate partner, shamus Phil Oxnard & his wife Paula are treated to an end of summer - beginning of hunting season vacation at Pole Pine Lodge, a ski resort with big-time dreams at Bilbray Pass in California's High Sierra.

While quenching their thirst at the lodge's bar after the long drive all the way from Orange County in their restored Thunderbird, a customer from Ohio asks Phil if he's seen the person in the photo he's showing around. It seems the young man dropped off the face of the earth a few months back.

Amid Save-The-Deer protestors & the first of the hunters, Phil & Paula see the sights, talk to the denizens & encounter many a bizarre story. As most everyone in the mountains has come from somewhere else, with pasts not exactly pure as the hoped-for driven snow, Paula, an inveterate do-gooder is in her element, & her husband is having the time of his life.

What was to have been a charming rest turns into trouble when a painting is vandalized, a not-much liked odd-job man is found shot in the forest & an artist is savagely beaten. Then a man is killed in a hunting accident.

McCollum's Run is the second Phil & Paula Oxnard mystery -- their first was Ortega Night. This one is a sedate, complex tale about real estate & greed, blackmail & murder in a mountain village where petty problems, driven by unsuspected prospects of wealth, become powerful, lethal passions.

The disparate clues are carefully gathered, sifted through until, in a fine, old-fashioned climax, the treachery is uncovered.

Phil's & Paula's 43 year marriage takes second place to the mystery at hand -- which is unfortunate as I was far more interested in this husband & wife team than all the other characters, however, McCollum's Run is an entertaining evening's read. I look forward to their next adventure.
(01/25/04)

Rebecca