Death Gets a Time-Out (2003)

In the 4th book of the series, Juliet investigates the murder of Chloe Jones, the young wife of Polaris Jones, a bizarre religious leader. The case is personal for Juliet, as her friend Lilly's stepbrother is accused of the crime. Waldman always brings in a controversial issue into each book -- in this case, it is recovered memories. Mystery lovers will enjoy the twists, turns, sex scandals, and blackmail. Everyone will love Waldman's tongue-in-cheek humor. ( )

Sex, drugs, blackmail—the typical stuff of hard-boiled detective novels.

Sex, drugs, blackmail, diaper rash, morning sickness, obstetrician appointments and stray Cheerios caught in the curls of your hair—these are the usual ingredients in Ayelet Waldman's series of Mommy-Track mysteries, starring criminal-defense-attorney-turned-stay-at-home-mom Juliet Applebaum. Trouble is, Juliet rarely stays at home; she's always pushing a stroller around Los Angeles, chasing no-good characters—adulterers, swindlers, murders, and so on—while juggling baby bottles and teething rings.

She's married to Peter, a successful writer of B-movies which feature zombies and flesh-eating cheerleaders, and mother to five-year-old Ruby and two-year-old Isaac. She frets over her weight, wonders if she should permanently retire her pre-baby wardrobe, whips up some fantastic cuisine featuring hot dogs and Velveeta, rushes between pre-school drop-offs and dry-cleaning pick-ups, and somehow finds time to squeeze in a little sleuthing. Okay, a lot of sleuthing.

In Death Gets a Time-Out, Waldman's fourth entry in the series, Juliet gets involved in a complicated murder case when her best friend, movie actress Lilly Green (a mega-star comparable to Julia Roberts), asks her help in defending her stepbrother. Jupiter Jones is accused of killing the second wife of his father, a charismatic New Age guru, the Very Reverend Polaris Jones. His Church of Cosmological Unity is building a religious empire in California and Polaris can't afford to taint his reputation with a murder, especially one allegedly committed by his son against his wife. Did I mention that the wife and Jupiter met when they were going through drug rehab together and that they were lovers before Jupiter introduced her to his father?

Tangled in the case is the shooting death thirty years earlier of Lilly's mother in which Lilly herself was implicated. While Juliet has a hard time believing her friend could have killed her mother when she was four years old, the Oscar-winning actress says it's burned on her memory and she's managed to keep it secret from the tabloids all these years.

Death Gets a Time-Out is arguably the best of Waldman's mysteries. It's certainly the most complex, with a dark cobweb of family dysfunction covering the whole plot. Think Chinatown, but with strollers and morning sickness. As Juliet digs up more and more evidence on suspicious deaths past and present, the list of suspects and motives grows and grows. Yet at no point does the story become so muddled we can't keep everything straight. Chalk that up to Waldman's snappy pace and the chattering, charming confessions of her Mommy gumshoe (who likely has gum—or Play-Doh—stuck to the bottom of her shoe).

I love talking to other pregnant women, or women with kids. If I ever stopped to consider that I was actively enjoying an entirely unironic conversation about the relative merits of Huggies versus Pampers, I might have bemoaned my lost intellectual life, but honestly, who has the energy for that kind of self-analysis? I'm too busy swapping intimate details about my weight, sex life, and my children's bowel movements with total strangers I meet in the playground.

Miss Marple had her knitting, Nero Wolfe had his orchids and Sam Spade had his knuckles, but Juliet Applebaum's got the sharp wit of her creator, a breezy, infectious humor that sets the Mommy-Track mysteries a cut above others in its class. ( )