I love it when Gardner kicks off his latest case by getting deep down into the legal weeds of whether deferred drilling payments can be cured at the very last minute before the property is sold by the widow title holder or not. I know what he is referring to is very much a California property issue, and a fidgety bit of law, but dang, Erle, this is only eight pages into the book, and none of the characters have been properly introduced to us yet!
But finally we pull back to the bigger picture. Parker Benton, millionaire yacht owner, wants to buy an island from widow Keller on which to build a vacation home, and she’s more than fine with that, but here comes the sleazy oil guy Scott Shelby claiming he’s got drilling rights to the island, and if he doesn’t get a cut of this, Benton is going to have an oil rig in his front yard.
So Benton decides the best thing to do would be to invite everyone, their spouses, and Mason and Della, onto his yacht for an evening dinner cruise up the river to see this island. Up the river that is well known to fog over every night. Oopsies! Guess we will have to stay put for the evening! Good thing there are enough staterooms aboard for everyone (this isn’t a smallish boat, just sayin’). Well, during the night, shots are fired, someone may or may not have been murdered, and there are apparently two separate phone lines in this yacht (NOT a small boat). And just to add, in a story set in California, never trust the oil guys.
The Perry Mason books are always set somewhere in Southern/Central California, at actual locations but frequently with fictitious names, and I enjoy trying to puzzle them out. But in this half of the state, all rivers of any size run north-south, and the only ones that flow out to a harbor, i.e. the ocean, are seasonal ones. You may be able to get a kayak up the Los Angeles River at certain times of the year, but never a yacht. And having islands big enough to build vacation homes on? I call shenanigans, Gardner. You made this place up, didn’t you. But it was fun anyways, once we got past the first chapter.