I could say many of the same things as I could say about Adam-12: The Runaway for this book. The structure is the same: the Adam-12 car guys handle a couple days’ worth of investigating in Los Angeles, including: repeated calls to a mansion deep within a narrow canyon by the nervous sister of the owner; documentary filmmakers who say they want to do a movie about a solid black neighborhood but who really want to shoot a movie about tension and crime, even if they have to manufacture their own riot; an armed robber targets the neighborhood in the shadow of a concrete plant; and so on.
The book’s climax occurs in the aforementioned mansion during an earthquake that isolates 300 partygoers, the Adam-12 guys, and a murderer, so Reed and Malloy get to play English locked room detectives.
A quick enough read and apparently only half as valuable on the Internet as its predecessor. I do have to quibble with the title, though, since there’s no one actually Dead on Arrival in either of the main cases that thread their ways through the book.
