The Hoffa Connection

To find out who killed a Madonna-like superstar and dumped her body in her Beverly Hills swimming pool, the TV detective must unlock the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance twenty years earlier.

Having solved the murder of JFK (The Grassy Knoll) and the Tate-LaBianca killings (The Helter Skelter Murders), Lt. Columbo now digs into the mysterious disappearance of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. As in the previous volumes, it's a present-day crime that sets the rumpled L.A. cop on the chase-here, the murder of Regina, a raunchy, Madonna-like rock star. The killing and the killers are shown, just as in the TV episodes; the intrigue comes from seeing how Columbo will solve the case. What might have been a perfect crime goes astray when Regina is accidentally cut as two members of her entourage, acting on orders from a mysterious superior, force the star to stay in her swimming pool at knifepoint until she becomes exhausted and drowns. What follows involves mob conspiracy and counter-conspiracy-and lots of padding and some ludicrous plot twists, with the Hoffa linkage adding next to nothing to the weak and pointless story. To cap it off, Columbo's tried-and-true TV shtick, from the omnipresent cigar to the old raincoat to the verbal mannerisms, just don't work in print. This is one of those books that's worth reading only if your TV set is on the blink.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Columbo, the rumpled, cigar-chomping L.A. homicide detective, continues his transition from television to print as he investigates the murder of a Madonna-like pop superstar discovered drowned in her pool the morning after a postconcert party. All Columbo initially has to go on is the discovery of a small cut under the victim's left eye. The reader knows the murderer's identity from the start, of course, and the fun is traipsing along as Columbo questions those present and finds answers to all the "one more little thing(s)" that always catch his subjects off guard. This is a fine mystery, marred only by the "Hoffa connection." The series' conceit has Columbo solving modern cases, which leads to answers regarding famous unsolved mysteries. Here it's unnecessary. The Hoffa angle is trotted out at the conclusion (the superstar's murder was Mob related) and seems tacked on only to maintain the gimmick. Otherwise, this is a solid entry in an always entertaining series. Wes Lukowsky