The Nature of Things

My rating: 3 of 5 stars The Last Word , latest in Lisa Lutz's series about a wacky San Francisco family of detectives, is well-named, for Lutz tells us it is literally the last word we will have from Isabel (Izzy) Spellman. She insists that she will not be writing any more of these adventures in Izzy's voice. There may be more Spellman stories but they will likely be told by Izzy's younger sister Rae. That's probably a good thing because, frankly, Lutz seems a bit bored with Izzy in this one. Maybe she's just run out of ideas for her madcap adventures. Anyway, as Izzy is pushing ever closer to forty, her juvenile attitude toward life begins to seem a bit cloying and inappropriate to say the least. We meet Izzy again here after she has managed a hostile takeover of the family private investigation business. She has the assistance of her two siblings in this, but her parents know who is to blame. Izzy becomes CEO, CFO, president, and whatever other titles add up to tr...

I've been reading really serious literature recently and I decided that I needed a bit of fluff to clear my reading palate. It doesn't get much fluffier than Lisa Lutz and her family of ditsy San Francisco detectives, the Spellmans. This is the fifth in the Spellman series. Several years have passed in the family's history since the series began, and yet it is hard to see much growth in most of the family members. They still spend more time surveilling each other, trying to trip each other up, and playing silly pranks than they ever do on working for their clients. It's really hard to see how they keep the business going. In this episode, it is not only the Spellmans who are hiding things from each other, but all of their clients seem to have ulterior motives and are hiding secrets which may or may not impact the jobs they've hired the Spellmans to do. On the home front, Rae, the younger daughter, is now in college. David and Maggie are married and are now the paren...

The wacky family of San Francisco private investigators is back in #4 of Lisa Lutz's Spellmans series. Nothing has changed. They are just as quirky and paranoid as ever. They still spend way more time investigating each other than they do working for paying customers. No wonder the business is sinking into the toilet. Daughter Isabel (Izzy) has finally committed to the family business and will take it over when her parents retire. If there is anything left to take over by then.  Pater familias  Al has lost a chunk of money in the stock market and there don't seem to be enough paying customers to put the family business back on a firm financial footing. What to do? Meanwhile, Isabel's romantic relationship with bartender Connor seems to be failing as well and her mother is blackmailing her into dating at least one lawyer or other professional each week because she's convinced that Connor is wrong for her. Son David seems to be faring better in the romance department. His...

This is another wacky romp through San Francisco with one of the most screwed up private investigators you are ever likely to meet - on the pages of a book or anywhere else. Namely, Isabel (Izzy) Spellman, she of the Spellman PI dynasty. At the beginning of this book, Izzy is no longer associated with the family firm. She is working as a bartender in her friend Milo's bar, The Philosopher's Club, and barely getting by. She has finally found an apartment she can afford in the Tenderloin but she finds that she's unable to tolerate the wildlife that share the apartment with her and she contrives a characteristically Izzy-like solution to her problem. Her brother, David, with the 2500 square foot house with three bedrooms now lives alone since his divorce, but Izzy can't bring herself to ask for his help or to move in with him. However, when she learns that his house has a secret basement apartment, the solution seems perfectly clear to her. She decides to squat there witho...

I've been reading some dark books lately. It was time for something light and frothy. Lisa Lutz's second entry in her saga of the dysfunctional, but highly functioning, Spellman family,  Curse of the Spellmans , filled the bill nicely. How to even begin to sum up this story? The Spellmans are a family of San Francisco private detectives. The head of the family, the father, is a former cop. The mother is a hot size 2 dynamo who attempts to keep a tight rein on her family's shenanigans. The oldest child, David, is the perfect son, and is now (in his thirties) only tangentially involved in the family business. He is a successful lawyer, now married to his sister's best friend, Petra. The middle child, Isabel (Izzy) is the narrator of these stories and the focus of the action. The youngest child, teenaged Rae, may actually be the best detective in the family and she has adopted Inspector Henry Stone of the San Francisco Police Department as her best friend, much to his chag...