Jack Packard and Doc Long are back—the detectives of I Love a Mystery. Jim Bannon is Packard: serious, cool, businesslike, and tough to fool. Barton Yarborough is Doc—he of the southern drawl, gentle sarcasm, and vaguely comical attitude and behavior. Together they tackle another case, this time attempting to sort out a set of entanglements involving family and colleagues of a missing adventurer.
The opening minutes set up the mystery quite well—the characters are introduced and laid out carefully, but it's genuinely tough to tell who is who, who's on which side. Gradually, deliberately, the mystery opens and unravels and eventually builds to a rather exciting climax. The story itself features a shrunken head, the mysterious disappearance of an explorer who may or may not be dead in a jungle somewhere, a collection of his mutually suspicious family members, and a taxidermist who keeps a large black mountain lion in a cage outside his shop.
The acting is passable if not great
Bannon and Yarborough are fine if slightly bland, Anita Louise and Michael Duane are tightly wound and thus somewhat unpredictable as the young couple, Mona Barrie is suitably concerned yet perhaps a tad shady as wife and stepmother.
The dialog occasionally aims at humor (standing next to a museum case of shrunken heads, Packard suggests that he and Doc put their own heads together, at which Doc winces, "I wish you wouldn't say that"—ha ha) but mostly it's a straight mystery that plays up the spookiness of such elements as said shrunken heads, some poison dart guns, the growling cat, and the general air of suspicion that the family members create around themselves and each other.
A tidy little mystery that's tightly plotted and efficiently produced.
