Harper; The Case of the Lucky Loser

I know, a non Perry Mason book! It was a super short, quick read, which was good, because it was terrible.
I hate saying that about any book. I know how hard the author worked, I understand their hopes and dreams about getting their work published and having people read it. But, unfortunately, some books just aren't that good, and this was one of them.
I wanted to read it because first of all, it's horror, and second of all, it takes place in a fictional Southern California town called Harper, which is near "Newland Beach" and "Huntingdon" (amazingly enough, he used Laguna Beach without trying to disguise it). The town of Harper was built on an old decommissioned military base where a strange guy posing as a cook poisoned and killed some people. The people who lived in Harper don't want to talk about the strange things they saw there, which were really not scary, at least not how they were described. The main character, Gordon, grew up in Harper and relates how three of his preschool friends were killed by weird flying plastic pieces, later two of his school mates died in his house, one strangled by a rubber mask, the other by a lamp shade. His older sister was kidnapped by a gorilla but managed to get away. The neighbor's house fell into a huge sinkhole, and a guy got his arm ripped off by a creature with a torch for a head. His grandparents (who lived next door) eventually moved, his parents were permanently traumatized. It was all very nonsensical, even for a horror book
 

Back to the good stuff. Mason is asked by a woman on the phone to go watch a case in court, and she'll pay him for his opinion of a witness. Mason obliges (mostly out of curiosity) and sees the tail end of a hit and run case. Ted Balfour is convicted of running down and accidentally killing an unidentified man while driving drunk. When Mason talks to his client, he discovers she's the secretary to Ted's wealthy uncle. She's also in love with young Ted, but doesn't dare say so. Mason tells her he thinks the main witness was lying, but there's not much that can be done now.
The next day Mason gets a call from Ted's other uncle, Guthrie, asking him to take over representing Ted. He's sending his wife, Dorla, in to speak to him, as Guthrie is still down in Mexico. There was a lot going on in this book, including the corpse, who isn't who anyone thought he was supposed to be. Seriously, why doesn't the prosecution ever check these things out? Dental records don't match? No difference. Fingerprints aren't the same? Eh. They shrug it off. Gardner really makes the D. A. look like a bunch of fools.