Jacob “Jack” Levine is not your regular fictional private eye. He’s Jewish, middle aged, and bald. He has a lady friend with a “friends with benefits” arrangement. The line goes : “I even took my socks off. In my circles, that’s class.”

Still, he’s not immune to the fairer sex.

So when the leggy blonde came in one morning with a problem, Jack was more than ready to help. She had a bit role in a play on Broadway, just having moved from the chorus line, and her problem was blackmail!

It seems when she was on the west coast trying to make it in the movies and in need of money, she’d had a moment of indiscretion and had made a couple of stag films. Now someone was demanding money and promising to tell the show’s producer and she needed the job so bad!

Jack got a twenty dollar retainer from her and said he’d see what he could do.

He soon finds himself in over his head.

 A dead body turns up, the producer calls and is being blackmailed as well. He knows there’s a girl in the show who’s made stag films, but not who, and wants Jack to make the pay-off, twenty thousand.  Another dead body, his first client disappears and Jack figures out she’s more than she seemed(he knew she’d not told him everything), someone is taking shots at him and sending goons by his home, and politics enter the picture, going all the way to the highest office in the land.

I liked this P.I. novel and I have a second one I will get to shortly.

For more forgotten books, check out Patti Abbott over at her blog, PATTINASE, on Fridays.