HARD LOOK

A search for the missing wife of yuppie hood Jerry Meyer, whom the client has glimpsed from behind on a body-building postcard he bought in Tampa, takes p.i. Miles Jacoby out of his Greenwich Village bar, Packy's, and down to the Sunshine State, where he faces such knotty problems as what to do about the body the police are about to discover in his hotel room and which Sarasota exit to take off the interstate. While waiting for his round robin of humdrum calls—to the distributor of the postcard, the producer, the photographer—to flush the head of the designer-drug ring who's bent on killing him or scaring him off, Miles makes time with Tampa Deputy Cathy Merrill, to no great effect. An inconsequential circus of the ordinary, with a mystery, a supporting cast, and a culprit as forgettable as its hero—yet still an improvement on Miles's last outing in Separate Cases (1990). If you liked that one....