BLUES IN THE NIGHT

Ex-con Dave “Mace” Mason gets way more than he bargained for when he agrees to shadow his old friend Paulie Lacotta’s ex-girlfriend.

It’s not as if Mace owes Lacotta. If anything, it’s the other way around, since Mace’s refusal to give up the small-time crook to the feds cost him a stretch in Pelican Bay. Maybe Bayou Royal, where Mace had been working with his dad since his release, just felt too slow. So he’s back in L.A., living at the Florian on Sunset, where his window looks straight into Angela Lowell’s apartment. Art appraiser Angie doesn’t go out much—just small trips to Slick on Melrose and Cruise Line on Hollywood Boulevard. When she pulls up to Honeymoon Drug Store, things begin to get interesting. But they really heat up when she drives her yellow Mustang out to Malibu to visit Tiny Daniels, one of Paulie’s mobbed-up rivals. Barging past the guardhouse at Tiny’s gated community, Mace finds Tiny and his houseman Carlos shot dead, the security men dying and Angela naked in bed in a Demerol stupor. He knows that the plastic coin in Tiny’s lifeless mouth must be the key, but it isn’t until he outwits three pairs of strongmen—British hit man Thomas and his mentally challenged brother Timmie, government agents Corrigan and Drier and their bearded Russian counterparts Gulik and Klebek—that he learns the value of the seemingly worthless toy.

Lochte (The Talk Show Murders, 2011, etc.) is just as fast-paced and funny flying solo as when he’s wingman for Al Roker or Christopher Darden, both of whom he's collaborated with in the past.