The Man With the Iron-On Badge

The Man With the Iron-On Badge is the Lee Goldberg novel that took him out of his usual media-tie-in work (Diagnosis Murder, Monk, A.K.A. Ian Ludlow) and into the kind of LA PI fiction that the form has been making for sixty years. Harvey Mapes is a private security guard who decides to take on actual investigative work and quickly discovers that he is in well over his head.

Goldberg writes the LA noir with more honesty than the form usually allows. Mapes is genuinely unprepared and Goldberg refuses to give him action-movie shortcuts. The case (a missing rich kid whose family wants the disappearance handled quietly) opens into the kind of long-running fraud that the LA tradition has been documenting since Ross Macdonald.

Four stars. A surprisingly clean piece of LA crime fiction. Recommended for readers who like their PIs underpowered and their LA written by someone who knows the freeways.