JEREMIAH HEALY – Swan Dive. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1988. Pocket, pb reprint, 1989, 1991.

   In terms of name recognition, John Francis Cuddy is the Avis of Boston PI’s and Spenser is the Hertz, but the latest novel by Jeremiah Healy is all but guaranteed to be a better read than the latest Robert B. Parker, and Swan Dive is no exception.

   As a favor to a lawyer friend, Cuddy agrees to bodyguard Hanna Marsh, who has, left her sadistic husband and is seeking both a divorce and the luxurious marital home. Roy Marsh, who is not only a wife-beater and womanizer but deals cocaine on the side, tries to persuade Hanna to drop the suit by disemboweling their daughter’s cat.

   Cuddy goes outside the law to teach Roy a lesson in litigation etiquette, but a few nights later when Roy and a prostitute are murdered in a fleabag hotel, all the evidence points to Cuddy, who is menaced not only by the police but by Roy’s coke-dealing colleagues hunting for a missing shipment of their stock in trade.

   Healy carefully balances whodunit and mean-streets elements, draws vivid characters (although too many of them speak Ethnic English), gives us the usual sharply observed tour of metropolitan Boston, and even imparts some movement to Cuddy’s long-stalled relationship with the lovely assistant D.A. whom he refuses to sleep with out of loyalty to his dead wife.

   I still think The Staked Goat (1986) is the best of Healy’s four novels to date, but Swan Dive is my choice for second best.