Carole Berry (1)

Bonnie Indermill, a temporary office worker in New York, takes a job with dodgy financial services company, Creative Financial Ventures. As Bonnie, says, "When you've been unemployed for six months and your resume, even without typos, is mostly a bad work of fiction, and the man you'd intended as your principal reference isn't in prison only because a team of psychiatrists found him unfit to stand trial for murder, you can't be too fussy."

Bonnie is initially delighted with her new job, and show more begins her probation with two other trainees: Helen Pilgrim, a grim young woman, "eager to grind her way up the corporate ladder" and Edwin "Fast Eddie" Fong, a hustler with, astonishingly, a Columbia MBA and a Chase Bank internship on his resume. Bonnie can't imagine what he's doing in a low-level training program with her, but soon realizes that "he had to be supporting half the bookies in Manhattan and running from the other half". Eddie has a serious gambling problem and it's not long before he and Bonnie are being chased through Chinatown and the New York subway system by Eddie's frightening "business associates".

Things go from promising to career-ending when CEO Ashley Gartner is found murdered following the office Christmas party. Eddie shamelessly courts hulking Vice President Charlotte Smoot and begins a meteoric rise within CF's upper management when Charlotte persuades / forces him to get engaged to her. VP Morton Fike, "a crazed little Napoleon", buys Mr. Gartner's share of CF and vaults himself to CEO. Bonnie accepts a job as Eddie's assistant, but has little assurance she can hang onto it as: a) she has no idea what she's doing; b) Eddie is "the biggest screw-around in the office"; and c) Eddie shows up at Bonnie's apartment one night via the fire escape, and then disappears with several Chinese gang members in hot pursuit.

Chinatown and lower Manhattan make a wonderful backdrop for this funny, clever mystery. It's the second of eight Bonnie Indermill mysteries and, for me, the best one of the series. Originally published in 1988, the office setting may seem old-fashioned now, with its not-very-sophisticated computers and secretaries still using electric typewriters, but it's very much the way I remember offices of the late 1980s.

This has been a favourite of mine for a long time, and I've re-read it often and still enjoy it every time. show less

When Bonnie is at loose ends in New York, the offer of a temporary job on an island in the Bahamas is too good to pass up. Of course all is not as it was described to her, and the luxury resort is actually a bit shabby, short-staffed, in financial trouble, and headed by a couple at odds with each other. And then there are the guests and local police and news of machete carrying thieves. It's all topped off by a suspicious death and the disappearance of Bonnie's roommate.

Trying to get serious about her career and life goals, Bonnie Indermill takes a job with a Financial Company and finds that her colleagues are all wrapped up in all sorts of shenanigans. When one of her bosses is killed, Bonnie finds herself in hot water with Chinese gangs and one obsessed murderer. I like Bonnie, who is uncomplicated, fun and takes her evidence to the police rather than going it on her own. Nice little mystery.

First Bonnie Indermill mystery. When one of the partners in the law firm she works for (as a clerical manager) is murdered in a seedy NY hotel, Bonnie begins asking questions; first, to help a personable cop and then on her own. Nice central character, perhaps a bit limited in range. Mystery was perfectly plausible.