Cleveland Never Loses in Les Roberts’s Mysteries

Can’t wait until the 2008 baseball season for more scenes of the city people used to call “the Mistake on the Lake”? Pick up any of Les Roberts‘s 13 Cleveland-based mysteries about the Slovenian sleuth, Milan Jacovich, which include Deep Shaker, Full Cleveland, Pepper Pike and the recent The Irish Sports Pages, all published by Gray & Co. www.grayco.com.

Roberts was the mystery columnist for the Plain Dealer when I was the book editor, so I can’t pretend to neutrality about his klobasa-sandwich-loving private investigator. But the Washington Post said of the first Milan Jacovich novel, The Cleveland Connection: “There’s an affection for Cleveland and an insistence on its ethnic, working-class life that gives vividness to the detection. Roberts writes with sharp wit, creates action scenes that are drawn with flair, and puts emotional life into a range of people.”

Roberts www.lesroberts.com is a former Californian whose love for his adopted city helps to drive the series. So you may not be surprised to hear that he’s a serious Indians fan: He appears on the dust jacket of one Milan Jacovich novel, The Lake Effect, in a Tribe jacket.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.