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In the fourth installment of the award-winning Rolly Waters mystery series, the guitar-playing detective investigates a friend's public suicide and its connections to a reclusive harmonica player, punk rock bands, former Navy SEALS, animal-rights militants, a top-secret dolphin-training project and the dead woman's own dysfunctional family.

Rolly Waters has many reasons to regret going out for Mexican food at 2:30 in the morning. Not least because then he would never have met dance-club DJ Macy Starr - possibly the most infuriating and secretive client he has ever taken on.Macy Starr wants Rolly to find out what happened to the young woman she knew as Aunt Betty, the woman who rescued her as a child and then disappeared without trace. The only clue she has to go on is a curious one-stringed guitar.Rolly's investigation leads to a weird world of alien-obsessed cults, a strange desert hideaway known as Slab City - and to a 20-year-old unsolved murder case. But how can he solve the mystery if he can't even trust his own client?The third novel in the Rolly Waters mystery series.

Rolly Waters is a recovering rock musician and part-time private eye. One night his band performs at a blowout party for EyeBitz.com, a fast-rising Internet startup that has the city of San Diego talking. When Rolly returns after hours to retrieve his guitar from the host's mansion, he finds a dead body floating in the swimming pool. His discovery sets in motion a series of intrigues that drag him into the surreal world of dot.com culture, as well as the dark heart of his own uneven past. Black's Beach Shuffle updates the classic Southern California gumshoe world of Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald with contemporary technology riffs, new millennium anxieties and sun-blotted humor. It pumps out a page-turning mix of plot twists, colorful characters and laugh-out-loud humor as Rolly's investigation ricochets him from the high-tech industrial parks of Torrey Pines Mesa to downtown blues clubs, from street taco shops to the penthouse of the La Jolla Hyatt, from the hallowed halls of academia to the sands of Black's Beach, San Diego's official clothing-optional playground.

When nesting grounds at the Border Field Park bird preserve are torn to shambles by eco-vandals, Rolly Waters is hired to follow the tracks left behind. Feeling less than optimistic about finding the perpetrators, he begins his due diligence, crossing paths with a local border vigilante, a tormented vaquero, and an aging rock groupie. A menacing house call from a scalpel-wielding orderly in pursuit of a prostitute named after an 80's pop hit confounds Rolly's case even further. After police detective Bonnie Hammond hands him a coroner's report, he knows it's turned deadly. Border Field Blues is the second volume in the Rolly Waters mystery series, following the critically-acclaimed Black's Beach Shuffle. Amid family issues, band gigs, and personal temptation, the guitar-slinging detective rocks on, putting his sleuthing skills and his life to the test.