The title says it. It's an enjoyable browsing book with a hit-and-miss index and not much reference value. Features, loosely organized under the seven deadly sins, include lists of titles by topic, true-crime anecdotes, matching quizzes, first lines, lines from movies and TV, and many apt quotations from Alfred Hitchcock. Most admirable is the brief highlighting of currently undervalued past writers, e.g., Craig Rice, Cyril Hare, R. Austin Freeman, Arthur Train.

Factual quibbles: Did the Nancy Drew novels often involve murder as Hallie Ephron states in her introduction? (The Hardy Boys books certainly didn't, and they were edgier than the Drews.) Body Heat was not a remake of Double Indemnity, at least not officially, and the defendant in Twelve Angry Men was not African American.