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It was just another typical Sunday night for the five LAPD detectives who gathered on Reggie Drabyak’s boat for their weekly poker night. But by Monday morning, everything had changed.
When they arrive at the station for their morning meeting, partners Terry Biggs and Mike Lomax are informed that Jo Drabyak, Reggie’s wife, has been murdered. Before long, their investigation leads them to Jo’s business venture with a number of other cops’ wives and best-selling mystery writer Nora Bannister.
Each year, the wives invest in a house to fix up and sell. At the same time, Nora works on the latest book in her House To Die For series—which is set in the latest flip house. The open house / book release party for each house is a huge success—and bidders battle it out to pay top dollar for a house where a fictional murder took place.
But as the bodies start piling up, it begins to look like someone’s trying to cash in even more—using real-life murders.
Marshall Karp’s third Lomax and Biggs novel, Flipping Out, is a wildly twisting mystery. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, he’ll throw another wrench in the works. Some of them pan out, while others are just tossed out there to keep you guessing. In fact, it feels as if there’s a new clue with every new page—and that keeps the story speeding right along. From house-flipping to crime novels, the story branches out in so many interesting (and unexpected) directions that you’ll have to keep reading to find out how it all comes together.
Since I haven’t read Karp’s earlier novels, though, I often found it challenging to keep track of the characters. There are five detectives, plus four wives and a girlfriend, and they’re not always easy to keep separate (especially since they’re not very well developed this time around). I’m guessing that it won’t be as much of a problem for Karp’s fans, who already know and love the characters—but clueless newcomers like me could find it a bit confusing at times.
Still, Karp’s style is clever and witty, and the story is filled with enough laughs and Hollywood-style intrigue to keep you entertained from beginning to end. While it does feel a bit far-fetched at times (especially in the end, after everything has been revealed), Flipping Out is entertaining nonetheless—and it’s as much of a guilty pleasure as those house-flipping shows on HGTV.
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