The Last Best Friend by George Sims

The Last Best Friend by George Sims ISBN-13: 9781464209000 Paperback: 192 pages Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press Released: Nov. 7, 2017

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from NetGalley:
At 2pm on a Monday in 1966, Ned Balfour wakes in Corsica beside a beautiful woman. In the same instant, back in London, fellow art dealer and Dachau survivor Sam Weiss falls ten stories to his death. Ned refuses to believe that Sam's death was intentional, and his investigation thrusts him into the deceit and fraudulence of the art world, where he unmasks more than one respectable face.


My Review:
The Last Best Friend is a mystery set mostly in England in 1966 and was originally published in 1967. The mystery involved something that happened during WWII. However, the first 27% of the story was mostly a mid-aged man (Ned Balfour) carrying on an affair with a girl half his age and, later on, having sex with a friend of his wife. The actual sex happened "off screen" and was thought or talked about using euphemistic terms, but there was one scene with graphically described upper body female nudity.

Anyway, it took a while for Ned to decide that his best friend's death was suspicious and that he should look into what his friend was doing that last week. He wasn't particularly clever in how he tracked down clues. Sam's other friends passed on most of the needed information, and some thugs let him know that he was on the right track. Once all of the information came together, Ned tried to deal with it himself before finally deciding to tell the police what he knew. Vengeance is his. There was some bad language. Overall, I'd recommend this interesting mystery (though it took a while to get going).


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


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