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Inspector McKee #29

by Helen Reilly

Kill or Be Killed

...that was the game Inspector Todhunter had to play. Chase the killer--and the fortune he carried with him. The key to the murderer's plans was a gorgeous woman--clever, cold, greedy. The trail was hot. The Inspector had to move fast. The killer, after all, had nothing to lose by killing again.

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Helen Reilly was an American novelist. She was born Helen Kieran and grew up in New York City in a literary family. Her brother, James Kieran, also wrote a mystery, and two of her daughters, Ursula Curtiss and Mary McMullen, are mystery writers.

Reilly's early books were police procedurals based on her research into the New York Homicide squad. Her most popular character is Inspector Christopher McKee. Reilly also used the pseudonym Kieran Abbey.

Reviews

[dmayr · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Laura Walden dropped her husband at Idlewild Airport on the afternoon of March the third she didn't know he wasn't coming back.

When Alex Walden dies in a plane crash, the already disillusioned Laura finds out that her husband has been embezzling money from Raines Research. Suspecting that her husband's friend Gerrard Moore and the beguiling Beverly Deming have the money, which she intends to return to the company, she pursues them while being pursued herself by a private detective and ultimately ends up in Santa Fe, where a group of disparate individuals converge on the trail of the missing money and reveal their true colours as a murder and abduction and more attempted murders happen. Inspector McKee just shows up tangentially as Todhunter takes the reins in this investigation, but the plot moves swiftly enough and there is plenty of action and deception that makes this very readable.