This book has some of the funniest dialogue and wackiest characters we have come across in a long time. The Spellman’s are a dysfunctional family firm of private investigators who sadly can’t leave the tools of the trade outside the family home. This clearly makes for strained family relationships, when your mother runs a social security check on all your boyfriends, and totally destroys personal relationships when you know what your boyfriend is spending on his credit card before he gets the bill! The book is just brilliant and you have to read it!

Synopsis

Meet Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, private investigator. This twenty-eight-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking, and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to Get Smart reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors -- but the upshot is she's good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people's privacy comes naturally to Izzy. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman.

Part Nancy Drew, part Dirty Harry, Izzy walks an indistinguishable line between Spellman family member and Spellman employee. Duties include: completing assignments from the bosses, aka Mom and Dad (preferably without scrutiny); appeasing her chronically perfect lawyer brother (often under duress); setting an example for her fourteen-year-old sister, Rae (who's become addicted to "recreational surveillance"); and tracking down her uncle (who randomly disappears on benders dubbed "Lost Weekends"). But when Izzy's parents hire Rae to follow her (for the purpose of ascertaining the identity of Izzy's new boyfriend), Izzy snaps and decides that the only way she will ever be normal is if she gets out of the family business. But there's a hitch: she must take one last job before they'll let her go -- a fifteen-year-old, ice-cold missing person case. She accepts, only to experience a disappearance far closer to home, which becomes the most important case of her life.

The Spellman Files is the first novel in a winning and hilarious new series featuring the Spellman family in all its lovable chaos.

About the Author

Lisa Lutz grew up in Southern California. After graduating high school, she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, University of Leeds in England and San Francisco State University, although she still does not have a bachelor's degree. Lisa spent most of the 1990's hopping from a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting a mob comedy called Plan B. After it was made in 2000, Lisa vowed she would never write another screenplay. She began working on The Spellman Files  in January of 2004. In the fall of that year, she drove across the country and moved into a 200-year-old house in the town of Westernville, New York (pop. 300). It was there Lisa shoveled snow and wrote the bulk of her first novel. Though she's not on the lam, Lisa has not had a permanent residence in over two years. She's calling Seattle home, for now. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation