THE GODDAUGHTER CAPER

Leaving a life of crime isn’t easy when your kooky mob family keeps inundating you with the dead.

Now that she’s sworn off crime for almost an entire week, Gina Gallo (The Artful Goddaughter, 2014, etc.) can turn to planning her Christmastime wedding to Pete, her fiance. But when you’ve grown up with crime, it knows where to find you, or at least your Family with a capital F. That’s what Gina tries to tell herself when she and cousin Nico’s wedding-planning bonanza at the family’s restaurant, La Paloma, is interrupted by Aunt Vera’s complaint about the dead body in the kitchen. Just because she knows the identity of the deceased, an old high school no-goodnik named Wally, doesn’t mean Gina has anything to do with his plugged corpse. It doesn’t matter whether or not she’s gone straight: Gina ends up with Wally in her trunk en route to the chop shop once more to avoid the suspicious attentions of local Steeltown cop and adversary Rick Spenser. All this is only the beginning, because the very next day Nico and Gina find another corpse in place of a statue Nico had ordered through the mail. In getting rid of this body and hiding out from Spense, Nico and Gina come upon a large cache of coffins in the family hideaway, a find that suggests that Gina’s almost crime-free lifestyle isn’t contagious. Gina was hoping the biggest surprise she would have sprung on her would involve her bridal shower, but maybe her relatives have something more they aren’t telling her….

This caper from Campbell is just that: ridiculous relatives running around and covering up crime after crime. A good read if you don’t take it too seriously.