Steal the Show: A Willis Gidney Mystery

Hard-boiled PI fans will find a lot to savor in Kaufman's sequel to 2010's Drink the Tea. When Rush Gemelli%E2%80%94whose father, a former White House senior adviser, heads the Motion Picture Alliance Council%E2%80%94asks Washington, D.C., PI Willis Gidney to break into an Alexandria, Va., warehouse, a suspected movie piracy site, Gidney at first refuses. Later, business being slow, he accepts the well-paid job. At the warehouse, the detective finds disk burners running off copies of DVDs%E2%80%94and two Asian gunmen. Gidney escapes, but he gets a bad feeling about his employer's reliability. Meanwhile, his personal life takes a turn for the worse after he learns that approval for his adopting the two-year-old girl he rescued from a fire rests in the hands of a nasty caseworker. The flawed but humane lead and the rock-solid writing more than compensate for some less than credible plot twists. (July)