Corruption in Cleveland

"I don't read detective novels; I live them."

Spoken by Milan Jacovich in Whiskey Island by Les Roberts

Cleveland private investigator Milan Jacovich has lived quite a few detective novels since his first, Pepper Pike, in 1988. His last, Speaking of Murder, came out in 2016, however, and that one had a co-author (Dan S. Kennedy). Les Roberts, once a force in Hollywood when he produced Hollywood Squares and wrote for such shows as Candid Camera, The Jackie Gleason Show and The Lucy Show, is now 81 and no longer able to produce one novel a year as he once did.

Roberts supposedly moved to Cleveland from Southern California after visiting the city to produce a TV show for the Ohio Lottery. He liked the city so much he made it his home and began writing a series of murder mysteries featuring a certain ethnic investigator named Milan Jacovich. In the Cleveland area at least, those novels, most recently published by a Cleveland publisher (Gray & Company), are a very big deal.

One wonders how his 2012 effort, Whiskey Island, was received by Clevelanders, however, especially those who run the city, for Roberts paints municipal and Cuyahoga County officials in a dim light. Most of them are on the take, as becomes clear when Jacovich is hired by a city councilman to discover who is try to kill him. Bert Loftus is under indictment after an FBI investigation exposed enough buying and selling of favors to give any number of people, many of them other public officials, a reason to want him dead now that he seems willing to tell all in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Jacovich, like Roberts himself, is getting older and needs help, so he has hired a fiery young military veteran named Kevin O'Bannion to handle some of the duties, preferably the rough stuff. Also new is a Cleveland police detective named Tobe Blaine, whom Jacovich finds attractive enough to make him feel years younger.

This is a fine entry in the series, full of lively dialogue, hot sex, furious action and nail-biting suspense. The killer — and there is a murder along the way — won't be as much a surprise to readers as it is to the investigators, but that doesn't detract from an excellent book.