Who Killed One the Gun?

Little (A Tree of My Own) serves up a cutesy, sci-fi-tinged whodunit starring a PI who investigates his own murder while trapped in a Groundhog Day–like time loop. Private investigator One the Gun is searching for the killer of a man he nicknames Five the No Longer Alive. When the power goes off in One’s office building one evening, he heads to the basement to check the fuses, only to be shot—likely by the very killer he was pursuing. But death turns out not to be the end: One goes from bleeding out on the basement floor right back to sitting in his office, beginning the last day of his life all over again. In hopes of breaking the cycle, he interviews bartenders and femme fatales aplenty for clues about who killed him. Little has fun satirizing her 1940s noir influences, but her attempts at hard-boiled prose fall flat (One’s paramour, Two the True Blue, has “the kind of beautiful innocence that would make any altar boy give up his ticket to heaven just to steal her lollipop”). The mystery, meanwhile, loses too much steam before the final act. It’s an amiable misfire. (Oct.)