Just Read: One of Us Is Wrong by Samuel Holt

Holt is the main character of this novel (actually written by Donald E. Westlake); I guess there was a vogue for pseudonymous mysteries when this was written (it was published in 1986).

It's from Westlake's heyday (not that he's slacked off much recently, but he published a lot of good books in the '80s, of lots of different types), and it's a solid, relatively serious mystery. My very favorite Westlakes (like everybody else, I suppose) are his funny crime caper novels, but he does serious mystery as well as anyone, and can make even an ex-TV star amateur sleuth plausible to me, which is a major accomplishment.

This is the first of three books published as by Holt, and I'll be tracking down the other two soon. (But the Westlake book I really want to read is Adios, Scheherazade, which hasn't been reprinted in over thirty years and costs much more than I want to pay for a moldy old book!)