D. P. Lyle’s likeable Jake Longly series of mysteries continues with A-List, a tale of Hollywood and New Orleans.

Jake and his girlfriend Nicole are called to the Big Easy by her uncle, who is a major Hollywood producer. His company is shooting a science fiction film in the Louisiana swamps, but his star, actor Kirk Ford, has been arrested for murder. He woke from a drug-induced sleep to find his girlfriend strangled. He swears that he didn’t take the drug voluntarily, and did not kill her. But the police think it’s a slam dunk.

What’s worse, the girlfriend was the daughter of New Orleans’s biggest crime boss. If the state won’t execute Kirk, he’ll be happy to do it himself – or maybe he’ll just intervene regardless.

It’s a dangerous job, but Jake and Nicole have the back-up of Jake’s dad, the former secret agent, and his giant associate “Pancake.” Cross Hollywood with New Orleans and you get a swamp full of crocodiles, but they’re up to the challenge.

I find the Jake Longly books agreeable. They’re cheerful, which is a rarity in the genre. Unfortunately, there are less satisfying elements for this reader. The writing isn’t terrible, but it’s kind of “on the nose.” Never let me disparage the discipline of writing clearly, but you can be too clear. Spell everything out and you lose nuance. You’re treating the reader like an idiot. And there were some homophone errors – “oogling” for “ogling” and “lost leader” for “loss leader.” The dialogue was often stilted and (as I mentioned in the last review) all the characters talked the same way.

And Jake and Nicole smoked pot, which always puts me off.

And I figured out whodunnit fairly early on.

I won’t give the book an actual thumbs down, but it wasn’t good enough to persuade me to continue the series. You might like it better. Cautions for language and mature situations.