The Spellman Files
A deliciously witty, wildly inventive and wickedly funny novel
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
‘Fast-paced, irreverent, and very funny, The Spellman Files is like Harriet the Spy for grown-ups’ Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Eligible and American Wife
Izzy Spellman is 28, single and works for Spellman Investigations, a family-run private detective agency. She might have a chequered past littered with romantic mistakes - but at least she's good at her job. Invading people's privacy comes naturally. To the whole family. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail and wire-tap a Spellman.
But when Izzy's parents hire her 14-year-old sister to discover the identity of her new boyfriend, Izzy decides she wants out. Before they'll let her go, her parents ask her to solve one last case - a 15-year-old, ice-cold, missing person, impossible-to-solve case. But when a disappearance occurs far closer to home, Izzy's Impossible Case becomes the most important of her life.
‘Hilarious. My enjoyment of The Spellman Files was only slightly undercut by my irritation that I hadn't written it myself. The funniest book I've read in years!’ Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada
‘The Spellman Files is hilarious, outrageous, and hip. Izzy Spellman, P.I., is a total original, with a voice so fresh and real, you want more, more, more. At long last, we know what Nancy Drew would have been like had she come from a family of lovable crackpots. Lisa Lutz has created a delicious comedy with skill and truth. I loved it’ Adriana Trigiani, author of Lucia, Lucia and Big Stone Gap
Customer Reviews
Delightful
I fell in love with Isabel from the first page.
Family ties
Author
American. Wrote some screen plays no one wanted to make, so she turned them into novels about a family of private investigators that became best sellers. I liked a later standalone effort by Ms Lutz, The Passenger (2016), so I thought I should go back to see where the magic started. Or not.
Plot
The Spellmans are a family of private investigators in San Francisco. Dad's an ex-cop and Mum's always been nosy. They have some kids who get involved in the family business from an early age. David, the older one, is a too-good-to-be-true overachiever, who eventually becomes a corporate lawyer. Izzy, two years his junior, is a wild child but a gifted investigator from the age of 12. Uncle Ray, also a cop turned PI, starts out as a health nut, gets cancer which he manages to survive against the odds, then embraces a dissolute lifestyle because what good did all that health stuff ever do for him? Around the time of Ray's cancer battle, when Izzy's 14, the Spellmans have an unplanned kid they name Rae in his honour. Rae grows up to be a grifter and covert surveillance addict, as you would. The whole family's into surveilling each other, in fact. Stuff happens involving an unexplained disappearance from years before, while Rae goes missing in the present day. The end.
Narrative
First person by Izzy.
Characters
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely whatever. As well as the Spellmans, there's a tennis playing dentist, Izzy's bestie and partner in crime from back in the day who is now a hairdresser earning a six figure salary by styling hipsters, a long suffering bartender (it's PI novel, there has to be one), a police detective with a soft spot for the Spellman gals, yada, yada.
Prose
Clean, crisp and laugh out loud funny in places.
Bottom line
Shades of Carl Hiaasen for the first 200-250 pages. Overcooked after that IMHO, but I'm just a grumpy old white guy.