Author Robert Greer started out mining the field of black private investigators with his series hero C. J. Floyd. Floyd is a hybrid, part bail bondsman and part antiques dealer (though he’s since given up the bail bonds business and bountyhunting).

Comparisons were immediately made to Walter Mosely’s long-running unlicensed private eye, Easy Rawlins. Easy’s adventures to date have gone from 1948 to 1968 and seem to have locked into the late 1960s. Floyd is contemporary, but the focus of his investigations seem to mix current crimes with past events of a historical nature. On the surface, there might be some resemblance between the two series, but there are vast differences.

The early Floyd adventures concentrated on the bail bonds business and moved quickly into murder investigations. The last three novels have their foundations anchored more deeply in Floyd’s interest in the antiques business and conspiracy theories. As a result, Greer’s already complex plots have deepened even more, with mixed results.

In The Mongoose Deception, Greer put Floyd directly in the path of a conspiracy cover-up involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The body of Antoine Ducane is discovered in the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel in Colorado, Floyd’s home state, and events move ponderously to involve the private eye. In fact, Floyd doesn’t even step onto the book until nearly eighty pages in, and by then it’s almost too late for the reader to take interest.

When a second man is murdered who had ties to Ducane, Floyd starts poking into the truth of the assassination. He immediately draws fire from mafia dons, a JFK conspiracy investigator, and even the CIA. His fellow antiques dealer, Mario Santoni, ends up getting offered as the patsy for the assassination by mafia bosses in their 80s (which strains credulity a bit), so Floyd has more personal stakes involved than just his own curiosity.

The JFK assassination has fueled a couple of generations now, and the mysteries involving his death will probably never be satisfactorily resolved for everyone, but Greer takes another stab at it. Conspiracy theorists and junkies will probably enjoy this one.

But for me everything got a little convoluted. There were too many characters to keep up with (I finally had to keep a notebook to keep everyone separated) and too many subplots (although all were interesting). It’s a case of too many good things thrown in at once. The subplots with Floyd’s mom and ex-girlfriend could have waited for a more opportune book and allowed the author to focus more on this investigation. I think I would have enjoyed a stripped-down version a little more myself.

Greer’s writing is solid, and I like a lot of dialogue in the novels I read, so he fits the bill there as well. His descriptions of Denver and Louisiana are dead on as well. And there are a lot of esoteric facts along the way. The problem was that too many of them were too familiar. The JFK assassination has been, literally, done to death. Obviously Greer felt he had more to say on the issue. But I’ll be looking forward to Floyd’s next outing, and hopefully it’ll steer clear of such controversial subjects – unless they’re ones that haven’t been so heavily mined or exploited.