The supply of fictional beach bum private eyes never seems to run low. Today I review Deep Six, first in D. P. Lyle’s series about Jake Longly.

Jake Longly is a former major league pitcher, retired due to an injury. He runs a bar and grill on Key West, to the disapproval of his father Ray, a former government spook who runs a high-end private investigation company. In spite of this, Ray calls Jake in from time to time to help him with jobs.

One of those jobs has Jake surveilling a house in a wealthy neighborhood one night. Good and bad come from this. The first bad is that his ex-wife, who lives in the neighborhood, discovers him, assumes he’s stalking her, and smashes his car windows with a golf club. The good is that he also meets the girl of his dreams, who kind of leaps into his life and takes up residence there. He’s not complaining about that.

But the worst thing is when he learns that the woman he actually was watching has been murdered in her house, almost right under his nose. He has an alibi for the crime (his new girlfriend, Nicole), but his father Ray is not going to let this affront go uninvestigated. The trail will lead to organized crime and a ruthless Russian mobster who likes to take people on one-way ocean cruises. Jake and Nicole will end up on one of those cruises, culminating in a fairly original – if implausible – showdown.

The story wasn’t bad. The author, however, needs some seasoning, in my view. His dialogue is kind of stilted, and all the characters talk the same way. At one point he gave us a moment of narrator confusion, as if he’d originally written the whole thing in the third person, then decided to break it up between first and third, and missed a spot. The male fantasy element is well provided for in the person of the girlfriend Nicole, who’s pretty much any man’s dream girl. Sex scenes are frequent, but not too explicit. There’s also a little casual pot smoking.

I enjoyed Deep Six, with reservations, and am reading the second book.