Will to Kill

Boy, did I enjoy the heck out of Mickey Spillane and Max Alan Collins' latest Mike Hammer mystery, "Will to Kill". So much so I stopped rereading "Comanche Moon" to finish it! Mike is out walking late one night when he spots half a body stuck in an ice floe in the Hudson. So Cal girl that I am, I had to look up what an ice floe is :) It turns out it's the body of a butler named Jamison, he worked for an old friend of Pat's named Dunbar. Chester Dunbar died three years earlier in what the investigating police called an accidental death (he had a heart attack and couldn't reach his nitro pills in time). Pat thought it was fishy then, but he didn't have jurisdiction, and now Jamison's weird death, which the police also determine was a bizarre accident, has Pat asking Mike to step in and investigate. Mike does, and travels to the Dunbar mansion to meet Chester's heirs: his two stepsons, Dex and Wake, his daughter Dorean, and his son Chickie, who is mentally unwell (my only beef with the book: supposedly it's set in 1965 and they call Chickie autistic, which they probably wouldn't have at the time, since it wasn't as prevalent or diagnosed back then as it is now). Dex and Wake are both awful human beings, more concerned with getting the car back that Jamison was driving than anything else. Mike is soon approached by each of the Dunbar heirs in turn to investigate something else: Dex is in up to his eyeballs in gambling debts and thinks the mob is after him and Wake is a closet homosexual who thinks his wife is trying to kill him. As if Mike doesn't have enough to investigate, then the local state trooper asks for his help with some missing teenage girls. Of course Mike is able to solve everything all in one fell swoop, because he's Mike Hammer and he's awesome. It was a lot of fun.