Tim Cockey, Hearse of a Different Color

Hearse of a Different Color is the second installment in Tim Cockey's series featuring undertaker-turned-amateur sleuth Hitchcock Sewell. The excitement begins when the body of a murdered young woman is dumped on Hitchcock's funeral home steps during the wake of one Richard Kingman, heart surgeon ironically dead of a heart attack. Hitchcock, of course, begins digging into the murder—in part because the dead woman pretty much fell in his lap, and in part because his weather-girl girlfriend Bonnie would like to earn some credibility as a reporter. Three hundred-odd pages later the shocking twist is revealed: we knew that the deaths of Kingman and the girl were related somehow, but just what the connection is comes as a surprise.

The book was, for me, very okay: the surprise twist and Cockey's occasional verbal play are in the plus column, but the book dragged for me, a lot. I like that our sleuth is an undertaker, but at least in this outing, very little is made of his fascinating but macabre profession. Hitchcock himself is unobjectionable, but neither does he have much of a personality at all—no particular traits to hang on him other than an annoying tendency to morph into Sam Spade the moment he sits down on a bar stool. A nice idea, then, adequately executed, but I'll probably pass on reading others in the series.