After Erle Stanley Gardner died, two complete Perry Mason novels were found in his papers. His publishers decided to publish them anyway - with a warning about the lack of editing and checks that Gardner usually did before publication.

This is the first of those 2 novels and the 81st Perry Mason novel to be published. It is unclear when exactly the novel was written - it was set aside at at unmentioned time so it could have been an earlier novel. The lack of editing shows in places - both in Mason's character (while he had always had an appreciation of the female form, some of his remarks here are borderline disturbing) and in the dialogue (I wonder if some of it would not have ended up cut or reassigned - Mason explaining the intricacies of a certain law provision to Della and Paul in the middle of a courtroom is a bit out of character for example). But despite the somewhat rough beginning and some weirdness later in the book, the story is actually interesting.

Morley Eden buys two plots from the same man, Loring Carson, and hires him to build a house straddling both lots. Except that it turns out that one of the lots did not belong to the developer - a divorce judge awarded it to his ex-wife, Vivian after Carson smeared her name publicly by having a private detective follow a different woman and using what he found in his divorce paper (why he did not even look at the pictures before submitting them is unclear and makes you strongly believe that the mix-up was intentional). Vivian decides to annoy Loring and cause issues with him so she takes possession of half of the house - after stringing barbed wire across the whole property - driveway, house, pool and all.

That's how the novel opens - Eden comes to Perry Mason to ask him to file a suit against Loring for deceiving him about the property's ownership. Perry decides to get involved and before long he is called to defend Morley Eden in court - Loring Carson is killed and the suspicion falls on our unfortunate house-buyer.

There are more beautiful women than you count - both in Los Angeles and in Las Vegas where a lot of the action happens, Lt. Tragg ends up chasing Mason across state lines and somewhere in there the truth starts emerging - everyone seems to have wanted to kill the man - frauds and concealing his wealth had apparently been normal for him.

The only one missing from the usual cast is Hamilton Burger - he sends a deputy instead (which as usual means that there will be a big blunder somewhere in the courtroom - not that Burger did not make a lot of blunders but his were rarely as spectacular as the ones of his deputies).

It is one of the novels where a reader can actually figure out the solution - there are no legal tricks or crazy ideas that pay off. It is not obvious but the clues are all there.

Overall a good addition to the series, despite the somewhat weird beginning of the story. And that leaves only one novel in the complete series (if we do not count the two in Thomas Chastain continuation 2 decades later). ( )