The novel opens when Fiona Purcell, ex-wife of Dowan Purcell, hires Kinsey Millhone to investigate her ex-husband’s disappearance. It’s been nine weeks since Dr. Purcell left the nursing home that he runs, disappearing at around 9pm after chatting to one of the inmates, an elderly lady who plays an important role in this novel.
Where is he? No-one has found the car he was driving, or his body.
As many fans of Kinsey Millhone know, she is an expert in insurance fraud. And sure enough, there is plenty of that going on by a couple of nefarious characters, who are eager to shift the blame onto Dr. Purcell. Then there are his two wives. Fiona, Wife Number One is suitably bitter at her lot in life. She doesn’t spend money wisely and stands to gain quite a bundle on the good doctor’s death. And then there is Crystal, Wife Number Two, who was originally married to an abusive man, divorced, and then married to Dr. Purcell. Purcell is 69, she is 29 and they have a 2-year-old son together. Crystal is the person who shows the most emotion over her husband’s strange disappearance. She seems to be very upset. But then she has so much to cope with in the shape of her fourteen-year-old daughter Leila, who is just as obnoxious as any teenager can be. Yes, Crystal herself was a teenaged mother, being only fifteen when her daughter was born. Leila leads her family a merry dance. She is confrontational with her mother, and makes no secret of her deep-seated dislikes for her stepfather, Dr. Purcell.
But the P for Peril is really about none of this, but instead a promising dalliance that Kinsey finds herself ensnared in, when the charming Tommy Hevener appears on the scene, and starts to woo her. Of course Tommy and his twin brother Richard are not what they seem, and what follows is a spiral downward from seeming politesse and rationality, to much darker places.
Although I see why many readers complained that this novel didn’t end, for me, it wasn’t a problem. The novel fades out with Kinsey having wine with Crystal and her best friend Annika. The three women sit on the porch chatting, seemingly having a good time. But only the reader knows that they are waiting for Rob Jordan, a cop that Kinsey knows, to arrive. And when he arrives, the reader knows that Reality is going to come crashing down. For Crystal is going to have the shock of her life when she realizes that her only daughter Leila, together with the connivance of best friend Paulie (a hardened criminal), has stolen thirty thousand dollars that belonged to her late husband Dowan Purcell. But that is not all. For the reader also knows that the person responsible for Dowan Purcell’s death lives at Crystal’s house.
