Lawrence Sanders rates as one of my all-time favourite detective story writers. The entire McNally canon just oozes with all the things that makes a good crime pot-boiler - dastardly and clever crime, beautiful women, and a wonderfully authentic urban setting. Glamour, glitz, girls and gore, in o...
Bird store owner Hiram Gottschalk is a wealthy widower with a paranoid son and heir, twisted twin daughters, and shady employees. As the owner of Parrots Unlimited, Hiram believes that his life is in danger, so he hires playboy-turned-Palm Beach private investigator Archy McNally and his sidekick...
Number 4 in the series. I have been reading it for a few weeks in between my turn while bowling. Decided today to finally finish it, so a 2 book day. Archy McNally is one of the funniest characters to be the hero of a mystery series. He plays dumb, dresses loudly, is constantly unfaithful to his ...
Lawrence Sanders (1920-1998) began his hugely successful writing career in 1969 with this groundbreaking book, which won the Edgar Award for best first novel. Yes, it may seem a little dated now and parts of it read a little like an episode of a 1970's TV crime show, but it is still a fantastic f...
It’s pretty hard not to love a book that throws in such uncommon words such as hirsute, acumen, trichologist, inamorata, prolixity, and characters who confuse the Nutcracker with the famous Christmas ballet the Ballbreaker.” Archy McNally is sort of an American Jeeves, and I can envision Da...
Let's go back about a quarter of a century to THAT Palm Beach, Florida -- The one that Donald Trump was so anxious to be accepted into. Then, there was still a lot of the old money around and the need to fit in to a society that recently rich could only aspire to. This is where McNally & Son ha...
I have a whole series of books about McNally. Im not sure which one in the series this is. Im not sure you have to read them in the order they were written. I believe each story (book) stands by itself. Archy McNally works as a private investigator for his father's law firm. I know Ive read ...
Since I don't normally write reviews unless I have something specific to say, here's the break down of how I rate my books...1 star... This book was bad, so bad I may have given up and skipped to the end. I will avoid this author like the plague in the future.2 stars... This book was not very go...
Lawrence Sanders is the creator of Archie McNally, an offbeat soul in Palm Beach, Florida, whose adventures are light hearted and spoof the upper crust who populate that area. Timothy Cone is an offbeat soul in New York City whose adventures serve to throw light on the denizens of the Five Borou...
Mr. Sanders makes an interesting choice with this detective novel by providing slowly converging plot lines from the very beginning. We know the name and motive of the murderer, and the book is devoted to the detective's slowly approaching her until the book's finale. This helped avoid the annoyi...
The Bingham Foundation is a corporation that assesses the grant applications of scientific researchers. Samuel Todd is the corporation's field investigator, tasked with finding out all he can about Gordon Telford Thorndecker, Nobel Prize-winning doctor and resident darling of Coburn, New York. Th...
Archy McNally is at it again. Sent by his father to investigate what appears to be a simple situation -- a rich, socialite client wants the woman her son wants to marry investigated. Of course it becomes much more than that as murders start to occur. Can the seemingly unrelated murders be rela...
He is a Vietnam vet and he owns a table and three chairs. He sleeps on a mattress on the floor and his occasional guests drink from emptied jelly jars – make that – drink ALOT from emptied jelly jars. Cleo, his neutered cat, is regularly fed such fare as moldy cheddar and turkey salami, but Cle...
The Seventh Commandment by Lawrene Sanders had me hooked from the first page. I started it in the morning, and finished it in the early evening. Dora Conti, who is an insurance investigator, gets sent on the tough cases. What I find ingratiating is that Dora, the heroine in this story, is not a s...
I started reading this book years ago and got all the way to the last few chapters but never finished it. I found it again and decided to read it from the beginning because I knew the basic story but I wanted to refresh my memory of the details before I found out who stole to coin. By the time I ...