Christy Barritt. Hazardous Duty. River Heights, 2012. E-book. Squeaky Clean Mysteries.

—————. Ready to Fumble. River Heights, 2017. E-book. Worst Detective Ever Series.

Christy Barritt’s mysteries are told in a lighthearted tone in the first person, but the stories are fairly serious at the core.

Hazardous Duty tells of Gabby St. Claire, crime scene cleaner. Yes, that is a thing. She is hired to clean up after messy crime scenes. In this case, she is cleaning up the house of a Virginia gubernatorial candidate whose wife has been murdered. She finds a pistol that somehow the police missed (it was hidden under a floorboard), and while she is still cleaning up, someone sets fire to the house.

Gabby is single, and there is a helpful male neighbor who has just moved in from California. He is a lawyer but has decided to start over after a broken engagement. Only it turns out that his almost future father-in-law is the man running against the newly-widowed candidate for state office.

There is also a police detective who is alternately annoying and helpful. Of course, he probably feels the same way about Gabby. There is enough interest to keep reading to find out whodunit. This is first in the Squeaky Clean Mysteries series. Besides an introduction to an occupation I had not known existed, this is as much a romance as mystery.

The romance element seems a little contrived, but Gabby is observant, and as we know from Sherlock Holmes, that can make for becoming a decent detective.

Ready to Fumble is a lighthearted, first-person mystery that had a little more traction for this reader. Joey Darling has played the title role in a popular detective show about a tough female detective named Raven. The show was canceled partly because of the bad publicity her ex-husband was sharing with tabloids about their breakup. All her property was in his name, so she is broke except for some residuals from reruns.

She is a native of Virginia and returns East to look for her father who has suddenly gone missing. She gets a job in the North Carolina Outer Banks (off-season) as a hairdresser because she thinks her father might be there. Before she got her acting break, she had a hairdresser’s license. She also obtained a Private Investigator license in California just to get a better idea of her television role—a true method actor.

Even in the off-season Outer Banks some people recognize her, and she is asked to find a missing boyfriend. She explains that she is not really a detective. Her “client” knows that but gives her an advance that she cannot refuse. When she tracks down the boyfriend to a cheap motel, she finds his murdered body.

She realizes that the room is staged just like one of the episodes of her show. Other weird things happen. She finds that the local police and federal marshals have been following the boyfriend and some of his connections. She works with the police detective Jackson and her surfer neighbor Zane.

I detect some plot similarities between the two books (a helpful, good-looking single neighbor?), but this one is more tense and fast-paced. The mystery gets wider and weirder. Joey does help the police solve the mystery—and just in the proverbial nick of time.

These events distract her from her real reason for being in North Carolina, namely to find out what happened to her father. She gets a few clues, but I guess if we want to find out what happened to him, we will have to read the next installments.

If it promises to be more mystery and less boyfriend-romance, the Worst Detective Ever series is probably worth another look. But if you like the romance, the Squeaky Clean Mysteries may suit you as well.