As the title Deader Than Disco (and its predecessor Killer Solo) indicates, the story takes place in the music industry.  Los Angeles to be specific.  LA is all about image and about who you know.

Jim McNamara is an unlicensed private investigator living in Connecticut.  He’s recently gotten the rep as the PI to the stars.  Jim worked in the music biz before getting kicked out due to alcohol and drug abuse.  So much for the appearance that alcohol and/or drug abuse is a must in the music business.

Angel, the latest pop music icon, has been accused of murdering a famous NBA player.  Jim has been hired by Angel’s publicist to find out who really murdered the basketball player.  Jim flies out to LA to get Angel’s side of the story and to investigate.  However, Angel won’t even acknowledge Jim’s presence much less talk to him about the murder.  Without any direction from Angel, Jim starts with interviewing her bodyguards and her ex-husband.

Then Angel disappears and now looks very guilty.  Now Jim has to solve the murder and to find his client before the police do.

The author uses celebrity name dropping throughout the entire book.  It’s used to keep up the LA image – Leonardo DiCaprio, John Travolta, Liza, Streisand, Reese and Ryan (Witherspoon and Phillippe of course) to name a few.  Celebrities are named to show the hero’s high profile clientele (Chris Martin from Cold Play, Sheryl Crow, Gwyneth Paltrow).  Celebrities were used for descriptions “… an adenoidal siren like Fran Drescher’s that made even the most neutral observation sound like a complaint.”  In addition to recent references (Busta Rhymes, Mariah), he uses pop culture the general population knows, like Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, and Monica Lewinsky. 

If you’re thinking this review has a lot of celebrity names, then you’ll be surprised with the amount in the book.  I tried counting the number of names dropped, but at 130 names I stopped counting.  That doesn’t even include the TV and movie references, like Will & Grace, Seinfield, Maltese Falcon and more. 

While the celebrity associations might impress some, I was not impressed.  The murder is lost in all the celebrity references.  Somehow among all the name dropping, Jim manages to solve the mystery.  The mystery plot lacks excitement, suspense or a thrill to involve the reader.  Reading about Jim conducting interview after interview after interview of people Angel knows got boring fast. 

Deader Than Disco failed the “pick-up/put-down test”.  In the time it took to read this book, I had put it down at least 10 times and read 2 other books in between.  If you’re into the who’s who of celebrities, my suggestion is to read the tabloids instead.

--Terry Lawrence