In addition to writing over twenty to thirty paperback original titles, Ozaki was a reporter, a beauty salon operator, and ran several phony mail order colleges, according to his biographies. Inquest was published under his own name about midway through Ozaki's writing career. It is a fairly short paperback novel, easy to read, and does a great job of keeping a low reader's attention. It has a great opening sequence when a red haired high - heeled dame busts into a bar, beats the crap out of the bartender and wreaks absolute havoc before disappearing into the night. Rather than a mystery, it's a stunning portrait of a corrupt double dealing county and how the sheriff's department and its cronies conspired to cover up corruption. It is a story told in terse third person narrative from numerous points of view, including a courtroom inquest before a handpicked grand jury. It also takes place in the invented torn of Stilwell, Wisconsin, where a number of Ozaki's novels take place. The town of Stilwell is in some respects similar to Ozaki's own Wisconsin hometown and it is firmly set in the fifties. It is a good story, but if one were to find fault with it, it might be that the narration is often removed and impersonal and loses a bit of the passion and desperation that a first person narration might have. ( )

Osaki's book starts off as a rather slimy story about drunken brothers with bladder problems and sex-crazed college students, then settles down into a plot-driven story about a corrupt sheriff's department, a coroner who makes a mistake by going with the flow, a DA, a reporter--well, you name it. There are really too many characters for a book this size, and Ozaki's narrative doesn't do them all justice. He spends a couple of pages providing bios of the members of the coroner's jury, for instance, but none of this info really matters when the inquest actually takes place, because he treats the jurors as basically non-entities. A few other characters seem like good ideas when introduced, but are never fleshed out. Nevertheless, the writing is fluid and the story interesting enough to pull you in and keep you wondering until the disappointing ending, which wraps things up too abruptly and neatly. ( )