The Man with the Iron-On Badge

Harvey Mapes is a twenty-nine-year-old security guard who spends his nights in a guard shack outside a gated community in Southern California, reading detective novels, watching TVLand reruns, and waiting for his life to finally start . . . which happens when Cyril Parkus, one of the wealthy residents, asks Harvey to follow his beautiful wife Lauren. The lowly security guard jumps at the opportunity to fulfill his private eye fantasies and use everything he's learned from Spenser, Magnum, and Mannix. But things don't exactly go according to the books . . . or the reruns. As Harvey fumbles and stumbles through his first investigation, he discovers that the differences between fiction and reality can be deadly. With the help of his mortgage-broker neighbor and occasional lover Carol, Harvey uncovers a blackmail plot that takes a sudden and unexpectedly tragic turn . . . plunging him into a world of violence, deception, and murder . . . and forcing him to discover what it really takes to be a private eye.Lee Goldberg is a two-time Edgar Award nominee whose many TV writing and/or producing credits include Martial Law, Diagnosis Murder, The Cosby Mysteries, Hunter, Spenser: For Hire, Nero Wolfe, Missing, and Monk. He's also the author of My Gun Has Bullets, Beyond the Beyond, Successful Television Writing, The Walk, and the Diagnosis: Murder series of paperback originals. He resides in California.