You know how it is – you’re bobbing around in a canoe, keeping an eye on the home of an unscrupulous millionaire to try and gain some leverage for your clients – when an attractive young lady wearing not much at all climbs into your boat pursued by guards. One sneaky escape later, and she shows you a message in a bottle and all hell breaks loose.

That’s the situation that Perry Mason finds himself in, but once he has cleared the young lady of burglary, he finds himself defending her from a murder charge. But it’s rather hard to conduct a defence when you client isn’t telling you everything…

Well, just for once, I’ve lived up to my promise. In my end of year review, I mentioned that I was going to read Perry Mason this year. OK, to be fair, I was already halfway through this book when I wrote it, but I’ve been meaning to get back to his courtroom shenanigans for a long time.

Because, generally, these books are fun, especially when you get to the courtroom stuff. I know some people read these for the Perry/Della stuff – and there is an interesting encounter with a fortune teller that’s quite revealing in this one – but there’s also a lot of courtroom jousting as well. You get two trials, one where his client, Dorothy Fenner, is accused of theft and then when she is accused of murder. While it does help that his opponent in the prosecution is a bit of a chump, enabling Perry to run rings round him, it’s all damn good fun and rather clever.

The mystery as to whodunnit, while the suspects are short on the ground, does include one bloody great clue that I missed – it still takes a bit of a leap from that for Perry to suddenly pull the truth out his hat, but I still had no clue what happened by the time that Perry explained all.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of Dorothy, as once the second trial kicks off, she vanishes from the page – it would have been interesting to see if the incidents had changed her or not – but regardless, this is a first rate outing for Perry, more than worth your time.

There’s a very expensive paperback available from Amazon, but the ebook is cheap and you can get second hand ones for about a fiver.