Why are the pretty ones always so insane?
The Vengeful Virgin (1958)
by Gil Brewer
220 pages - Hard Case Crime
Jack Ruxton never accomplished much in his life, and now runs a small home electronics sales and repair shop in Florida. One day he's called over to install some televisions and an intercom system in the home of an old sick man whose only caretaker is his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, the smouldering Shirley Angela. Pretty soon the house-bound teen and the dim-witted repairman have a plan in place to knock off the old man and keep the contents of his bank account.
There's some promise in the early set-up of the story, and Brewer certainly knows how to use his powers of description to make a woman an object of lust. But the biggest flaw is that Jack the narrator is dumb as a post. The plot he devises is obviously full of many things that can go wrong, and then when things start to happen, he seems oblivious to even the most basic details (as in, not having a clue what would happen with the estate after death, not realizing that there would be a funeral - though the author seems to be aware of these faults in thinking). And then, what happens in the last 20 pages or so really doesn't mach with the way the characters have been built up in the novel.
I will say, though, that that is probably the most fetching book cover I have seen.