Former football star, current private eye Burnside (no first name given) once vowed never to take a job just for the money. But that was before he fell in love with a woman whom he’s now planning to marry. And weddings cost money. At the beginning of Safety Valve, Cliff Roper, an arrogant and abrasive sports agent Burnside has tangled with before, offers him $10,000 to find out who fired some shots at his former partner, Gilbert Horne, with whom he broke up publicly and angrily. The police suspect Roper, and he’s got the NFL draft coming up; no time for this. So Burnside swallows his pride and agrees to look into the matter.

What he finds is a hive of southern California drama. The rich and beautiful are seducing one another, cheating one another, jockeying for status, and nurturing all the criminal motives any crime writer could ask for. And when Horne turns up murdered, even Burnside comes under suspicion. Now solving the crime is a matter of survival.

I’ve read other books in the Burnside series. Safety Valve is only the fourth, and it seems to me author David Chill still hadn’t quite hit his stride yet. The prose isn’t bad, but he occasionally falls into errors  like “a myriad of” or “hold the reigns.” There’s some lazy phrasing too, that could use closer editing.

I also thought the plot in this one a little loose. Still, I enjoyed the book as I’ve enjoyed the others in the series. Burnside is a sort of cut-rate Spenser, but the books are competent and entertaining. And they get better as they go along.