Author Grant McCrea has set himself a difficult task in creating a witty, hard-drinking, Chandleresque character, seemingly interested in pursuing women, who is also a married father. Rick Redman’s wife is slowly killing herself with drink while their 16-year-old daughter watches helplessly. Redman offers little help to either his daughter or his wife, as he spends every free moment at the bar.

Redman, a brilliant-but-fallen type, is a lawyer. He’s asked to defend Jules Fitzgibbon, the son of the firm’s major client, on charges of murder. Problem is, both Jules’s father and the firm’s senior partner seem to want Redman to fail.

Redman turns to his best friend and colleague, Dorita, a beautiful and brilliant lawyer, for help. (We should all have such friends.) To prove Jules’s innocence, the two of them must spend a lot of time in the shade of the Fitzgibbon family tree. Suffice to say, you don’t want to spend Christmas with this bunch. Jules’s father drove away his first wife – Jules’s mother – to take up with his first love and adopt a pair of Spanish twins who, interestingly enough, were born on the same day as Jules. It appears that Jules has been left out in the cold as Papa embraces his new family. But all may not be as it appears.

All of McCrea’s characters are distinctive, and the solution to the murder mystery is a surprise. The dialogue between Rick and Dorita snaps back and forth faster than a Ping-Pong ball. Dead Money is the first in a series, and McCrea has set the hook well