LES ROBERTS – Collision Bend. Milan Jacovich #7. St. Martin’s. hardcover, 1996. No paperback edition.

   You know by now that I think Les Roberts is one of the better and certainly one of the more underrated PI writers around today.  It appears that he’s decided to let his Saxon series languish and concentrate on Cleveland PI Milan Jacovich, and that suits me just fine. Les gives really good Cleveland.

   Milan Jacovich encounters that hoariest of PI cliches, a visit from an old love, one from whom the parting was painful and the wound slow to close. A television journalist at the station where she works has been murdered, and the man for whom she left Jacovich is under suspicion. Even worse, he was having an affair with the dead woman.

   But she wants Milan to prove him innocent, and she knows that the moral code that drove them apart will make him do everything in his power to help the man — if he takes the case. He knows he shouldn’t, but he does; and even before the last shot is fired he realizes that his first inclination was the right one.

   You’d think reviewing a book you like by an author you like is about as easy as it gets for a reviewer, wouldn’t you? Well, maybe not. When it’s an author you’ve reviewed many times before, there’s a tendency to run out of new things to say, or any fresh ways to say them, and that’s  where I am with Les Roberts.

   He still writes immensely readable prose; still makes of the City of Cleveland a colorful and likable character in itself; still writes about a strong, capable, but intensely human and fallible human being in Milan Jacovich; and is still as good at characterization as anyone around.

   But you’ve already heard all that from me, right? So why don’t I just reiterate that the man writes really good books, and that this is one of them? Okay. Done.