Rating: 7

I figured this one would be a terrible breeze. At just 166 pages how could it not be a bad book?

I was truly surprised by this one, a vintage T.V. show tie-in from 1964. I’d never heard of Burke’s Law until I got this book. The premise is nothing but cheese: Amos Burke, a millionaire cop who rolls up in his Rolls, solves murders as the head of LAPD’s Homicide division.

I can’t speak about the TV show, but this book was a fairly tight mystery packed inside such a small package. (Oddly enough, this book is an expanded version of one of the series’ episodes).

It begins with the LA police commissioner receiving a panicked letter from Victor Haggerty, a boorish millionaire hypochondriac who’s paranoid that someone is out to kill him.

Because Burke runs in the same circles as Haggerty AND is the head of the Homicide division, our hero is sent to sniff around. He’s invited to a lavish pool party at Haggerty’s where the eponymous Beau Sparrow dies while diving into said pool using a defective electronic trampoline.

The paranoid Haggerty believes Sparrow wasn’t the intended target. Indeed, plenty of people have motive to kill Haggerty:

• His domestic staff
• Any number of employees at his various business concerns
• His wife (whom Haggerty suspects is having an affair with Sparrow)
• An aging starlet recently sprung from prison

But there’s problems with Sparrow’s death. Yes, he bumped his head but not enough to kill him. He had water in his lungs but he didn’t drown. He had congestion in his heart that made it looked like cardiac arrest but his ticker was as healthy as could be.

So how did he die?

That’s what Burke and his team of detectives set off to figure out.

If I had to complain about this book, it’s the three or four pages in the final chapter that spell out the murderous plot and how it unraveled, a la Scooby Doo minus the meddling kids.