Review: "Crown Vic" by Lee Goldberg

 

Crown Vic
by Lee Goldberg
Cutting Edge Books, 2023

Crown Vic is different from what novelist and screenwriter Lee Goldberg is known for writing – easy going, well-plotted, and general audience mysteries like his brilliant Eve Ronin series – but the two villain-as-hero tales included in this collection are hardboiled and naughty fun. In the novelette length, “Ray Boyd Isn’t Stupid,” we find the eponymous character rolling into a lakeshore resort, Granite Point Park Resort, in Washington, fresh out of prison for stealing cars in his used police cruiser Crown Vic Interceptor. He takes a liking to the place (after some persuasion) and accepts a job: $10 an hour, along with room and board. The local Sheriff’s Deputy takes an immediate dislike to Ray, but the women all love Ray, including his boss’s wife, which is where all the trouble starts.
     The second, and the shorter of the two stories, “Occasional Risk” begins where the first left off. Ray is back in his Crown Vic moseying around Arizona’s southern desert and killing time at a seedy roadside motel in a nothing town. Ray Boyd isn’t stupid, and so when a glossy big-moneyed woman seduces him in the motel’s swimming pool he knows she wants something more than sex from him, but he’ll take the sex just the same…
     Crown Vic’s stories are a marvelous mash-up of Dan J. Marlowe’s early Earl Drake novels – The Name of the Game is Death, Endless Hour – and the erotic thrillers so popular in video stores during the 1990s. But Ray, even with all his failings, is a Lee Goldberg character: observant, witty, at times downright funny – for the reader at least – and a heck of a good escape for all of us drab work-a-day slobs.

Go here for the Kindle version and here for the paperback edition at Amazon.