Lee Goldberg, Watch Me Die

The hero of Lee Goldberg's Watch Me Die is twenty-six-year-old slacker Harvey Mapes. Harvey's pretty much just marking time with his life, idling by day and logging residents into their gated community by night. But things change when one of the residents asks Harvey to follow his wife on his off hours. Harvey takes the job and discovers that he's got a latent penchant for detecting. All those years of watching Mannix and Rockford reruns have paid off—at least to an extent: things can get a bit dicier in real life than they do on TV. Like everything else I've read by Lee Goldberg, Watch Me Die was a pleasure to read. I particularly liked Harvey's backstory. He's about as amateur an amateur detective as one can get at the book's outset. There are no sequels yet, but the author informs me that there will be one day, which is good news.