“You look as though you took the full count,” he said.
“Only the count of nine,” I told him.
“You think you’re still in the fighting?”
“Yes.”

Bertha and Cool are hired to guard a high class party from gate crashers. Nonetheless, a jade Buddah and a pygmy blowgun go missing. And then the host of the party ends up murdered, by blow dart! It's a tough case to unravel, but Bertha and Cool take it anyway!
This read was much better than the last book I read in this series, "Fools Die on Friday”! A.A. Fair got his characters right back on the pages in the way that I like them most! Sort of confusing at the end, but a good read through and through! ( )

Most people know Erle Stanley Gardner as the writer of the 80-novel strong Perry Mason series, but he also wrote nearly thirty novels in the Cool and Lam series about a mismatched pair of detectives, which Gardner wrote under the pen name AA Fair. Unfortunately, Cool and Lam, at this time, is not available in ebook format with two exceptions. Bertha Cool is a heavy-set, loudmouthed, notoriously tightfisted, publicity seeking detective. Donald Lam is a slightly built, bantamweight detective who is cool, clever, and irresistible to beautiful women. Their partnership is odd, humorous, and somehow works. Cool seems to always get the agency in a jam and Lam always seems to deduce a solution.

The Count of Nine is book 18 in the long-running series and features a millionaire, missing artifacts from his world travels, his beauty queen wife, a model who can't keep her clothes on, and numerous other characters. It is Gardner's locked-room mystery where a body is discovered in a mysterious locked room with very little access. All of the action takes place in about a day or two and there are few actual action scenes such as brawls or shoot-outs. Nevertheless, Gardner skillfully writes this one so well that it is a quick read. Every book I have read in this series has been great and this one is no exception. ( )