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Coffee-swilling, wisecracking Rollo is a private investigator who’ll likely win your heart as well as your funny bone. He’s scrambling to keep his small agency, with its cadre of colorful coworkers, financially afloat while juggling multiple cases that keep him bouncing from LA to the outskirts of NYC and even to the modern-day wilds of Deadwood, South Dakota. Rollo’s good at his profession but bad at being a father to his kids who live with his ex-wife. The fact that he constantly beats himself up over this, while it’s obvious his children still adore him, makes him even more endearing.
All manner of mayhem—and multiple means of dealing with the same—fill the files of Rollo’s cases. There are security and surveillance operations, several missing persons’ searches, and associations with certain criminal elements that occasionally call for a degree of felonious fixes from Rollo that do not endear him to the tightly wound local, state, and federal authorities. Their agitation with him may also have something to do with the fact that a number of individuals involved in Rollo’s investigations have a bad habit of getting killed.
Meyerhoff has pulled off a trifecta in this novel. He’s created a charming protagonist and supporting characters you hope to see more of in subsequent adventures. He’s constructed a plot intricate enough to intrigue but not too complicated to keep up with when all the loose ends are neatly knotted. And he’s written it with prose that’s fun to read and dialogue that has the snap and crackle of actual conversation. In the genre’s parlance, this is what’s known as “a damn good book.”
RECOMMENDED by the US Review