Kissing the Beehive starts well, but the storytelling deteriorates pretty quickly. It's a great premise for a book: a blocked writer goes home and finds the story of his career--a thirty-year-old murder mystery. But Carroll isn't able to sustain a credible storyline. Clues start arriving out of nowhere. His hero hooks up with an unstable woman (named Veronica Lake, if you can believe it) who seems to be an authorly creation rather than anything human or real. The denouement is clever, but it ultimately diminishes the book, since it's a little too neat. All in all, a disappointment.