BOCA KNIGHTS

A widowed Boston cop who retires to Boca Raton for the weather gets more than his share of post-professional assignments.

In his time, Eddie Perlmutter has worn many hats. After being an amateur slugger, a decorated detective and a boxing trainer, he becomes security chief for a golf course, a ranger with authority to resolve disputes on the course and an amateur crimefighter—an episode that eventually wins him a job investigating the year-old death of Robert Goldenblatt, beaten to death over country-club politics, and resolving the conflict between newly arrived neo-Nazi Forrest Buford’s family and the largely Jewish population of Boca Heights. There’s only one suspect in Goldenblatt’s murder: Dominick Amici, a retired entrepreneur who’s dying of leukemia. And there’s no mystery involved in the confrontation between Boca Heights’s Jews and anti-Semites. So Eddie’s needed more as a referee than as a detective—which would be fine if he didn’t see red spots and act out violently from time to time. First-timer Forman supplies sexual interludes worthy of a geriatric James Bond, naughty humor courtesy of Mr. Johnson, Eddie’s penis, who addresses him in a nonstop stream of (what else?) double entendres, and extended back stories about Eddie’s family tree, the Aryan Army and 200 years of Haitian history.

The tone is good-natured rather than comical, and the story doesn’t have much more narrative drive than a photo album. Maybe the promised sequel will find Eddie ready to hit the ground running.