You gotta love how spam is evolving. I received an email today, subject "Re: danger!"

I consigned it to Trash, then reconsidered, because it was so well written. Maybe you got one of these, too:

"hello. i work in a private detective agency. my name is not important now. I'm warning you that i'm going to watch you and monitor your telephone line. Do you want to know who paid for shadowing you? Expect my next e-mail.

P.S. I know, you don't believe me. But i think that the record of your yesterday's telephone conversation will assure you that everything is real. The record is in archive. The password is (snip)."

It is good practice NEVER to reply to spam, but if I had done so I would have written: Dear My Name is Not Important Now, your message arrived as I finished the second of two excellent mysteries by Anne Argula. These books put me in just the right mood to be shadowed by a dick and have my telephone monitored.

Yesterday I talked with my dentist's secretary. The phone rang a couple of other times but although the bell tolled, it did not toll for me. Why don't you call me to discuss the ethics of illegal phone taps? Whatever.

The books that put me in this mood are Homicide My Own, Anne Argula's first novel, and her second, Walla Walla Suite (A Room with No View). Both feature a menopause-challenged, prickly but intelligent, female police officer named Quinn, and her reluctant brushes with mysteries that fall into her overheated lap from time to time.

In Walla Walla Suite Quinn has become an ex-cop trying to make a living in the private investigation trade. She works out of a rundown office on Pioneer Square in Seattle. When Eileen, a young woman working in the same building, disappears, Quinn is drawn into the search, and... well, the jacket says it best:

"What looks like a missing-person case turns out to be anything but, sucking into its wake... Eileen's barely legitimate boss, her sexually vulnerable mother, a serial rapist and possible serial killer... Quinn's improvised investigation takes her to the dangerous dark corners of the human psyche and casts suspicion where she least expects it, which will ignite a burst of violence and a resolution that readers won't see coming."

OK, that is a bit overcooked. Try this, very well done, from the book:

"The door to his office was two inches ajar and I could hear him sobbing into his hands. I moved sideways a little. They call us gumshoes for a reason. Mine are black Rockports and they don't make a sound. I saw him through the crack, his head bent over his desk, a big automatic in his hands, looked like a 9. Whoa. Was I here in the nick of time or what?"

In the first novel, Homicide My Own, Quinn is a single cop and just as quirky. A routine assignment takes her on a long drive to Shalish island near Canada. She's accompanied by her partner Odd, a cop of Norwegian descent who turns out to be more than a little psychic. On the island there is a perv to collect from the Tribal Police Station and a 25 year-old double murder to solve.

Odd and Quinn arrive at the Indian casino:

"A small place and shabby, and the people in it looked sad and lost... So the security guy with the moon face led us to the eats and told the cashier we were compted [sic; see Notes] and handed us each a large oval plate, which was a good sign because my theory is that everything tastes better on an oval plate."

After that the story gets even better. Both of Anne Argula's mysteries, Walla Walla Suite and Homicide My Own, are full of surprises and female moxie. Be among the first to discover this entertaining new author.

Aired Sunday November 11, 2007 at 10:55 am and Wednesday November 14, 2007 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Homicide My Own by Anne Argula. Pleasure Boat Studio paperback $16. ISBN 1929355211. This book was an Edgar Award nominee.

Walla Walla Suite (A Room with No View) by Anne Argula. Ballantine Books paperback $12.95. ISBN 9780345498427.

Notes:

From the publisher: "Anne Argula was born and raised in Shenandoah, PA, an anthracite coal mining town. For the past 18 years Argula has lived in the Pacific Northwest, currently in Seattle WA.... Krapp's Last Cassette, the third novel in the series, will be published by Ballantine Books in September 2008."

About the word "compted" quoted above: I can't find this spelling, which appears on page 26 of Homicide My Own, in any dictionary anywhere, but however spelled, it's a common word in casinos (and theaters, and other places), meaning "on the house" or "free, because you are a big spender here." It must derive from "complimentary" and the only similar word I could locate online is the title of an out of print book, Comped by Bill Kearney, which refers to exactly that meaning.

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