Reed Farrel Coleman, The James Deans ***

Despite the awards and the acclaim and the forward by Michael Connelly, The James Deans is a solid but unspectacular example of the reluctant private eye genre. It's all there: the pseudo-clever witticisms, the quickly sketched characters, the oblique references to events in other books of the series, and the plot where everything that happens to the hero relates to the case. The only surprising things about The James Deans are (a) that the title doesn't come into play until after the initial mystery is solved and (b) [spoiler] the bad guy isn't punished at the end. It's a perfect example of a three-star book in my rating system: not disappointing, but not exciting either.