Baltimore Blues

I found that this book is good if you're the kind of person who likes action movies for the action and couldn't care less about the plot or character depth. Lowell Ransom is bored with being a social worker in Baltimore so he decides to become a Private Investigator. His first call is from a woman named Doris who wants to see if her husband is cheating on her. Instead he finds the husband is involved with secret work with his employer, and from there it gets into a whole mess of discovering politics and backdoor dealings.
Lowell is just way too lucky as a character, things that should have gone horribly wrong or been a major obstacle end up working out because either he knows someone (thanks to being a former Vietnam vet) who can get him exactly what he needs (weapons, equipment, etc.), or someone else shows up at exactly the right time to save him when he's about to end up with a bullet in his brain. Never mind that he was lucky to manage to get his very first case to be one that ends up paying off very handsomely in the end so that his wife now has no reason to complain about his change in career. That's the factor that makes him less interesting, he's a beginning PI who only has his Army training from 20 years ago and not only manages to land a big case on the first try, but his plans almost never go wrong.
Really, this book is good for a quick read on the beach, and at least the descriptions of Baltimore and Washington DC are accurate for the time, but it's the kind of read where you don't really have to think about the plot, you just want to see some explosions.