Better put our best guy on it (that's what she said).
And maybe it's because I prefer my ssssssecrets to be SALACIOUS in nature, and mysteries are more about who did it, so thank goodness this one has a whopper of an omg at the end.
It really is, tho.
So. Paolo Cellini is an art collector and playboy and DEAD AT 30 of a heart thing, only maybe not, because former-detective-turned-chauffeur-because-of-tragic-career-mistake (like, he made a mistake as a detective and a woman BURNED TO DEATH IN FRONT OF HER SON, not like he realized that that being a detective sucked and switched to driving rich people around) Jack Bradley discovers some vitamin C tablets where Cellini's heart pills should be. (He figures out what they are by tasting them. He also dips his fingers in the reddish bath water at Cellini's apartment and tastes them, and I'm like, NO DON'T, IT'S BLOOD, but it's not. It's wine. Still, stop tasting things at crime scenes, detective.)
And it could have been Cellini's lover the jazz singer, but it also could have been his secret lover the whore (who is secretly not a whore [and also secretly omg that other thing {see above}]), or it could have been his nightclub manager who hates him and loves the jazz singer, and there's Jack Bradley trying to figure things out amidst being a chauffeur and having a wife in a wheelchair who wants to be euthanized (wait, I just read that book) and a son who hates him and there are layers, is what I'm saying.
There are also a lot of semi-colons. Like, a lot. What are you doing there, semi-colon? You are not a comma, nor an em-dash. Go hang out between two independent clauses. So James could use an editor there, or where the chipper old lady Jack works for is like, 'I fear death more than death itself.' I mean, I get where she's going but she didn't quite get there.
Alllllllllllmosssssssst...
There are some weird logical slips, like the cops smashing a bunch of valuable religious icons because they suspected they had drugs in them (oh yes, there's a drug ring and loads of religious art involved IN ADDITION to the murder), instead of just x-raying or ultrasounding or whatever sort of space technology we use these days to see inside of things we don't want to smash. But I read it to the end, because I wanted to know who did what, and I'm SUPER good at not finishing books these days, so that's something.
Seven caterpillars!