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Spygirl is supposedly a memoir about Amy Gray's job at a low-life private eye firm. In fact, it is mostly about her unremarkable love life, with a running subplot about her eccentric private eye co-workers and the funny people she runs into in New York. "Funny" sometimes means "ethnic," as in the Muslim cabbie with a crush on her. I waited for him to do something interesting, but no: he was Muslim! And a cabbie! And he had a crush on her! That, apparently, made him worth an anecdote. There was also a Korean guy with Tourette's syndrome. Again, Korean! With Tourettes! Anecdote!
What was conspicuously absent was the reason I bought the book: accounts of her private eye investigations. Those consisted of a couple of mildly interesting stories, which made up approximately one-tenth of the total verbiage. What a bait-and-switch.
In False Colors, Kit gets roped into impersonating his missing twin Evelyn by their charming but slightly addle-pated mother; this is supposed to be for one evening, but Evelyn doesn't return, and the woman he was courting thinks Kit is Evelyn. Worse, Kit starts to fall for her. This is mid-rank Heyer, amusing but not reaching the heights of hilarious. (Kit could have gotten into much more sticky situations than he actually did.) The main characters are likable, but it's the supporting cast of older people who shine: the lovely, goofy mother; the formidable grandmother; the fat, wealthy dandy who has much more to him than meets the eye.
What was conspicuously absent was the reason I bought the book: accounts of her private eye investigations. Those consisted of a couple of mildly interesting stories, which made up approximately one-tenth of the total verbiage. What a bait-and-switch.
In False Colors, Kit gets roped into impersonating his missing twin Evelyn by their charming but slightly addle-pated mother; this is supposed to be for one evening, but Evelyn doesn't return, and the woman he was courting thinks Kit is Evelyn. Worse, Kit starts to fall for her. This is mid-rank Heyer, amusing but not reaching the heights of hilarious. (Kit could have gotten into much more sticky situations than he actually did.) The main characters are likable, but it's the supporting cast of older people who shine: the lovely, goofy mother; the formidable grandmother; the fat, wealthy dandy who has much more to him than meets the eye.
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For instance, in a comedy about impersonation, it is much funnier when the character doing the impersonation must bluff his way through a situation when someone says, "You told me you'd give me your answer last week!" It is much less funny when the impersonator avoids bluffing by privately asking his valet what the guy was talking about, and the valet tells him-- and the valet is correct. (Actual example from False Colors.)
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Are you looking for RL accounts of being a PI? If so, I've got a couple of books I can recommend. They're not literary masterpieces, but they're unsensationalistic (urm...is that a word?) and give a pretty good idea of the real day-to-day of the job, which is far more tedious than it appears on TV :)
William Pankhurst - True Detectives
Marilyn Greene (with ghostwriter) - Finder: the true story of a PI
and one about being a tracker, which I found fascinating because it's partly about training for the job, and part personal memoir:
Hannah Nyala - Point Last Seen