The main character and his situation are interesting and fun to think about. Charlie Waldo will keep no more than a hundred items. This time around, Charlie and ex Lorena are trying to find a teenager who has disappeared. The teacher who abused the teen (she says) has turned up dead; now what? I loved the first one - this one not so much. I have high hopes for the next one.

Published by Dutton on August 13, 2019

When a crime novelist introduces a new series and the first book is entertaining, a reader might wonder whether the success was a fluke. When the second book is just as good or even better, the series will probably go on the reader’s “gotta get the next one” list. That’s where I put the Charlie Waldo series.

Waldo is back in action in this sequel to Last Looks. Waldo is still struggling to live a minimalistic life that emits no carbons, but his relationship with Lorena Nascimento is forcing a tradeoff: in exchange for good sex, he must occasionally share an Uber with her. Lorena’s private investigation firm is struggling, even with the helpful publicity that Waldo has unwillingly generated. To earn a few bucks, Lorena agrees to help a teenage girl named Stevie locate her missing brother while her parents are on vacation. That task proves to be deceptively easy, but the investigation takes an unexpected turn when Stevie goes missing after her high school teacher (with whom she claims to have slept) is murdered. Waldo gets involved only because Stevie is a suspect and he thinks she might be innocent.

Waldo’s sympathy for Stevie is probably undeserved. Stevie is the teenage drama queen from hell. She taunts men with her flirtatious sexuality and tells so many lies that it is challenging to recognize the occasional truth she might utter. Waldo wants to believe her, a fact that Lorena attributes to Waldo being smitten by the provocative teen.

Having been sent on a wild goose chase by Stevie, Lorena soon finds herself chasing another wild goose when she is hired to prove that a woman’s husband is having an affair. That case also takes an unexpected turn. Naturally, the two odd cases are linked. Waldo and Lorena discover the link by the novel’s midway point, but they still have some detecting to do before they will understand why Lorena was twice hired under false pretenses.

More murders are committed —snotty Stevie generally appearing as the number one suspect — before the novel reaches its climax. The plot also involves designer drugs, a soap opera actress whose career has gone south, and sexting between cousins. Poor Waldo, who is the opposite of the typical macho private eye, is beaten repeatedly, mauled by an expensive dog, and tasered. It’s enough to make Waldo wonder whether he was smart to end his self-imposed exile. Doing justice and getting good sex come at a heavy price, at least in Waldo’s life.

The first novel established Waldo as a broken character who has tried to repair his life by owning no more than one hundred things. That characterization added humor to that continues in the second installment as Waldo frets about (for example) whether the sling for his broken arm should count as a new thing.

Waldo’s quirky character and his vulnerable nature makes him likeable, while his iffy relationship with Loretta illustrates difficulties that are common in relationships. At one point Waldo realizes he had “taken the depth of her investment for granted, luxuriating in his own doubts without a thought that all this time she had been harboring her own.” He understands that he isn’t the man Loretta expected him to be, but by the end, he wonders whether Loretta is the woman he wants her to be.

Below the Line blends humor and light drama in a smart plot with quirky but realistic characters. Waldo’s agreement to help a drug dealer’s daughter with a school assignment illustrates just how strange his good-hearted life has become, but that’s the kind of scene that makes me look forward to reading the next chapter of his life.

RECOMMENDED

Below The Line is an entertaining detective story, much of it set in wealthy Orange County, CA. Former detective Waldo has come from three years of mountain isolation to join again with Lorena, a private investigator and love interest. Waldo has some quirks. For me, the insistence on making him unique by having him environmentally conscious goes too far. It's a distraction.. Does he really have to do without fast means of transport in this auto mecca?
But Waldo is a good detective, and author Gould a good writer. He plots the novel carefully to keep the reader guessing. His characters are interesting as well. Okay, the 15-year old Stevie wore on my nerves. Maybe she is too credible a bratty teen?
I am glad I read the novel and look forward to others by Mr. Gould.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

BELOW THE LINE: A Charlie Waldo Novel
Howard Michael Gould
Dutton
9781524744861
Hardcover
Mystery/Thriller

Howard Michael Gould introduced ex-LAPD cop Charlie Waldo in 2018’s critically acclaimed LAST LOOKS. Waldo is so unusual a character to take place of honor in a detective novel that any fan of the genre owes it to themselves to at least take a look at that worthy book and BELOW THE LINE, Gould’s sophomore effort. Waldo, it must be said takes the minimalist lifestyle to an extreme, limiting himself to the ownership of one hundred items at any one time. There is a reason for this which is explained to some degree in LAST LOOKS, but it makes for a nice contrast with the hedonistic, ultra-materialistic backdrop of southern California. His lifestyle, of course, gets in the way of his work as a private investigator (he is self-imposed to traveling only by public transportation or bicycle) as well as his relationship with Lorena Nascimento, his, um, on-again/off-again professional and personal partner. Nascimento, in all probability, has difficulty limiting herself to one hundred pairs of shoes, let alone anything else. As is demonstrated repeatedly in BELOW THE LINE, it is also difficult for a couple to successfully hook up while on the road when only an extremely ecologically correct hotel will do and the girlfriend of the piece keeps hiding the “don’t change the sheets” card.

All of the above, however, is part of the (sometimes) irritating fun of BELOW THE LINE. While Waldo’s schtick gets a bit old here, Gould’s mystery writing is honed to a razor-sharp finish in BELOW THE LINE, what with a striking cast of characters who seem to leap off of the page. Front and center of those would be Stevie Rose, a spoiled, hot to trot teenager who retains Waldo and Nascimento to find her brother, who she claims is missing. It is evident almost from her first point of introduction in BELOW THE LINE that 1) Stevie is trouble and 2) the only time that she isn’t lying is when her lips aren’t moving. Things quickly move from a missing person assignment into an entirely different area when Stevie claims to have been seduced by a teacher from her exclusive private high school. When said teacher turns up as a murder victim the LAPD considers Stevie to be the prime suspect. “Big Jim” Cuppy who was and is Waldo’s prime nemesis on the force, is leading the investigation, which means that Waldo and Nascimento are hindered officially by the police as well as unofficially by their own client, who may well be guilty of any number of things, including murder. The problem which develops is that basically everyone is lying to Waldo when they aren’t trying to beat him very badly or otherwise dissuade him from discovering the truth about Stevie and a number of other things. Everyone has too much to lose, including Waldo, strange as that may seem.


BELOW THE LINE is very much a character-driven novel, and as irritating as Waldo may be at times Gould fills his creation with enough positive qualities to make him somewhat endearing, even as Waldo’s rabid anti-consumerism almost - almost - gets in the way of the story on occasion. Nascimento provides an interesting if excessive balance to the team and to the story. As a result, it isn’t until the very end of BELOW THE LINE that the reader discovers how and whether everything turns out. Maybe. Read it and see.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2019, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

This delightful book is for people who like their crime-fighting laced with understated humor. Think Lee Goldberg and Robert Crais, but for millennials,

Howard Michael Gould, the author of Last Looks and Below the Line, matches Goldberg and Crais puzzle for puzzle and with laugh for laugh, and he throws in the eco-conscious sensibility of an ex-cop who wants to keep his carbon footprint so small that he purges himself of all but 100 possessions.

There are also a lot of boy-girl questions in this story (not all of them resolved by book's end) and an abundance of potshots at the shallow So-Cal lifestyle.

Charlie Waldo, the main character, seems to have history with most of the book's other characters, especially Lorena, a private eye who seeks his assistance on a case and invites him back into her bed (past breakups notwithstanding).

There are characters from the movie business and bad guys who indulge in a little human trafficking on the side, and most notably a very messed-up teenage girl who seems to have toyed with most of the depravities available to prosperous Angelenos.

I liked Charlie Waldo a lot. My inner jury is still deliberating on Lorena (maybe a little too volatile and capricious to be believable??)

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance readers copy.

The story was okay but I couldn’t get past the lack of depth. Waldo appears as an ineffective and dull character to me