Books I've read this week

One of the books I picked up at the sale on Saturday was There Was a Little Girl by Ed McBain, ©1994. The story takes place in Florida and concerns a small circus that wants to buy a piece of land where they can put on shows during the winter. The circus owner hires a lawyer, Matthew Hope, to make an offer for the land and while trying to make the deal, he upsets someone and ends up getting shot. During the rest of the story he's in the hospital in a semi-coma. His good friends, who are two private investigators and a local cop, follow his trail for the week before the shooting trying to figure out what he was doing in the bad part of town where the shooting occurred and who did it. The story unfolds through their dectective work and also flashbacks that Matthew has as he lays in the hospital, and includes circus performers, drugs, lies, sex, blackmail, burglary, and murder. The plot line was pretty good but I don't think the author needed to include quite so much circus information. I also thought the ending left the reader hanging somewhat but then decided that Matthew Hope wasn't really the story. The story was just about finding out who shot him and why.