He Is The Great Pretender

Decoy #2, MOON OVER MIAMI, may have been the last of Signet's series. Whereas the first book, THE GREAT PRETENDER, found hero Nick Merlotti on assignment for the government in search of stolen heroin, MOON OVER MIAMI plays like a TV mystery. For no good reason, besides the fact that his confidante, the mysterious Mr. Waves, talks him into it, Merlotti investigates the murder of an elderly Miami woman, who was beaten to death inside her home. A young Latino, who refuses to provide an alibi for the time of the killing, is arrested and presumed guilty. Waves is convinced of his innocence; Merlotti, not so much, though he looks into it anyway.

Jim Deane's mystery reads pretty well, though one must admit not much happens. The big setpiece involves Merlotti's capture by a mobster who's only tangentially involved with the plot. Merlotti's preoccupation with sex, which smacks you in the face from the book's first awkward sentence, is distracting, especially when he becomes intimately involved with the 17-year-old high school "fuck goddess," Vicki Greystock, who is a witness putting the Latino suspect at the scene of the crime.

When it comes to whodunits, Deane is no Rex Stout, and when it comes to bang-bang action, he's no Don Pendleton, but you could do worse than this jumble. I don't believe there were any other Decoy books (Merlotti does no decoying in either), and it's not hard to figure why.

A Credit To The Force

Signet's Decoy series revolved around Nick Merlotti, a charismatic thief and master of disguise who enjoyed a high-profile career that included taunting the police after another daring ripoff. Several years after "The Great Pretender"'s last caper, he reappears to rob a bank, but is busted. A cop named Duffy (an old acquaintance of Merlotti's) and an assistant district attorney named Passantino offer Merlotti a deal: go to work for them, kinda like Robert Wagner in IT TAKES A THIEF.

$5 million in heroin vanished from a police evidence locker shortly before a major trial, and Duffy believes the cops involved are on mobster Louie Gianfreddo's pad. To avoid jail, Merlotti agrees to work undercover and ingratiate himself into Gianfreddo's organization to find the drugs and ferret out the dirty cops. He is teamed with a mysterious black electronics expert named Mr. Waves, who appears to have made the same type of deal with Duffy and Passantino that Merlotti did.

Told in first person, 1974's THE GREAT PRETENDER, the first in the Decoy series, is not terribly interesting, but I can't say that I hated it. Although he's supposed to be a disguise artist, Merlotti doesn't really do anything like that in the book, nor does he do any stealing or Rockfordesque scamming. I don't even know why the series is called Decoy, because the word or name never appears in the book, and the hero doesn't do any decoying.

I have at least one more Decoy book that I'll give a chance to. There's nothing really wrong with THE GREAT PRETENDER. But there's not a lot right with it either. Besides the cover, of course.