Sneaks

"More heavy-handed whimsy and cluttered plotting--as Dearborn V. Pinch, that cutesy, courtly, irascible amateur sleuth (Rotten Apples, 1977) finds the corpse of Louis Martin under a bush in Greenwich Village. The police declare it a mugging, but Pinch disagrees--and is hired by Martin's roommate Edward Roycroft to prove that the murder was planned and executed by Leo Beggs, a Florida real-estate tycoon whose wife Molly was having an affair with Martin. So off goes Pinch to La Playa, Beggs' lush Florida resort populated by oddball guests and staff, including mad Cuban emigr‚ Ra£l Baki. More death ensues--Beggs soon is an apparent suicide--and Pinch's life is much-threatened, to the dismay of his ever-pursuing, protective son Benjamin. Some amusement with the eccentric cast of characters, but, as in Rotten Apples, it goes on too long and without much sense of form or pacing; so, mostly for connoisseurs of adorable-old-folks fiction."