Pete Amsterdam struck it rich through no fault of his own, and he's put his novelistic ambitions aside with his business suits and retired to Key West to live in relative luxury, surrounded by his wine collection and music library. He never considered his PI license as anything but a tax dodge suggested by his accountant. So when a man who's supposedly been dead for two years turns up by the side of Pete's hot tub and asks him to help retrieve the money pouches he buried on a nearby island just before he disappeared, Pete is completely uninterested. But when the man turns up dead again, a beautiful blond yoga teacher who was his best friend convinces Pete to finger the killer and find the treasure--which is how a mild-mannered guy with a taste for the good life gets tangled up with a local mob boss, a gangster who runs a gambling ship, and his dangerous nymphomaniac daughter, ending up in a very funny caper novel that's Laurence Shames's best yet. The pacing ambles a bit, allowing lively digressions on the disparate characters, who end up at the end of the continent and reinvent themselves as regularly as the turning of the tides. This is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of Florida mysteries, and a fuller description of the hero's inner life than Shames has provided in earlier books. --Jane Adams


From Publishers Weekly
Shames's eighth Key West novel (after Welcome to Paradise) has its moments of charm and interest, especially when narrator Pete Amsterdam, debuting here, describes the particular pleasures of the setting: "Key West is a place to withdraw to, a retreat without apology or shame. And you learn things from the place you live. One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine." Pete has learned this lesson well, as a man both disappointed (by his lack of success, especially with women) and contented (with his cozy house and the freedom to indulge his three main interests--wine, music and tennis--without actually working). Unfortunately, his accountant has talked Pete into getting a PI's license for tax reasons, and that's where the trouble begins--for Pete as well as for the novel. Shames does provide a few original touches--for example, the well-built blonde who arrives early on to hire Peter (and catches him naked in the hot tub) and who turns out to be a cross-dressing man. But the plot quickly bogs down into a routine search for two missing mail pouches buried on a spit of sand, sought after by not only Pete and his soon-to-be-late client but also by the usual assortment of local thugs and corrupt cops. Too bad. Amsterdam and his main squeeze, a lithe yoga instructor named Maggie, deserve better next time out. Author tour. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
When pseudo-private detective Pete Amsterdam is visited by a man wearing a dress and makeup who asks him to retrieve two bags of stolen property, Pete declines. After all, he is only listed as a private detective to dodge paying his taxes. When the potential client is found dead the next morning, Amsterdam begins to investigate (perhaps out of boredom, perhaps because he needs focus and meaning in his life), thus putting himself and everyone he comes in contact with in immediate danger. Shames, the author of seven other romps set in Key West (e.g., Welcome to Paradise), has a gift for taking ordinary people, placing them in extraordinary situations, and creating hilarious and meaningful outcomes. Here, the author has cut out all extraneous descriptive passages and most character development (we are told only about Amsterdam) and keeps the plot to a bare minimum. The result is either his masterpiece or a novel gone slightly wrong. However it is perceived, this is a delightful book through which to escape the stress of everyday life. For all public libraries.DJo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., OH Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, David Lehman
The Naked Detective is a lighthearted, sardonic homage to the detective novel as a form.


From AudioFile
In another of Shames's seriocomic detective novels set in wacky (according to him) Key West, the hero claims to be a detective as a tax dodge. So he's surprised when a fugitive in drag appears at his hot tub wanting to hire him. Then the new client winds up murdered. Ron McLarty narrates in an appropriately light, wisecracking style. However, a little more personality would have given this moderately diverting material a great deal more charm. Y.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
"I never meant to be a private eye. The whole thing . . . was my accountant's idea." Here's a new twist on the age-old dilemma of how to get an amateur sleuth into the game. Shames, who writes some of the most entertaining comic mysteries in the genre, gives us reluctant PI Pete Amsterdam, a retiree in Key West who pretends he's gone into the detective business in order to deduct the cost of his new wine cellar. The tiny ad in the Yellow Pages was only intended to legitimize the scam, but unfortunately, it brings Pete a client, a cross-dressing bartender on the run from the Mob. Pete refuses to take the case, but when the bartender is killed, and his friend, a stunning yoga teacher, asks Pete to find out what happened, well . . . a sleuth is born. The resultant adventures bring Pete out of his midlife funk and into the arms of the yoga teacher, but not before we've chuckled our way through a couple of hours of delightful hijinks, laid-back Key West style. Reading Shames is just plain fun. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
Since making his bundle back in Jersey, Pete Amsterdam’s leading a Key West regimen of late mornings, tennis, Chardonnay, and a p.i. license he maintains strictly as a tax dodge—until he meets the leggy blond client he can’t refuse, partly because showing her out would require him to bolt nude from his hot tub, partly because the charming she turns out to be an equally intriguing he, but mostly because his would-be client turns up dead the next morning on Tank Island. The late Kenny Lukens had run off to the Bahamas just as fast as his long, long legs could carry him after relieving his boss, Lefty Ortega, of two payroll pouches, one containing the night’s receipts from Lefty’s bar, the other something Lefty wanted back even more. Kenny’s friends and foes alike gang up on the reluctant Amsterdam, prodding him to discover just what Kenny had buried on Tank Island and why he came back to unbury it. Soon after lissome yoga instructor Maggie plies Pete with herbal tea, he’s scrambling off the side of her dry-docked trawler for a closer look at Kenny’s boat. Inspired by a note Ortega’s daughter Lydia passes him at Lefty’s funeral, he stares down her bodyguard to get into her condo. He even takes a turn at straight-up interrogation, questioning Lydia’s partner Mickey Veale about Ortega’s business. But before long, it’s his own curiosity and long-buried ambition that propel him toward full-fledged sleuthing.Though Amsterdam’s not as much fun as the geezers and innocents of Shames’s first seven novels (Welcome to Paradise, 1999, etc.), his debut still gets him off to a worthy start.Author tour -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Praise for Laurence Shames

Welcome to Paradise

"The story unfolds at comic warp speed . . . burlesque, as campy and crude as a night at a stag party. But it is also a love story, scored for belly laughs."                  
--New York Daily News

"Zany humor . . . Shames mixes sun and fun, wise guys and dumb guys, smart gals and bad gals with such wit and style it makes you want to head straight for Key West and join the party."                         --The Orlando Sentinel

Mangrove Squeeze

"Like [Elmore] Leonard, Shames mixes comedy and crime expertly. . . . A delight-fully offbeat crime comedy, Florida style."                               --Booklist

"Critics have compared [Shames] to the great crime absurdist Carl Hiaasen, but he's not only treading on the master's heels; in plot, invention, and sheer vigour he's overtaken him."                           --Literary Review (London)

Virgin Heat

"Nearly impossible to put down. Its Key West setting and laugh-out-loud wit recall the best of Carl Hiaasen. Its quirky characters and tough-mindedness are like Elmore Leonard."        --The Plain Dealer

"[T]his slapstick caper, a gravity-defying structure of impossible coincidences, has been built for fun. . . . And even his zaniest characters have a dark core that gives them dimension in this sun-bleached land of forgetting."                                        
--The New York Times Book Review


Review
Praise for Laurence Shames

Welcome to Paradise

"The story unfolds at comic warp speed . . . burlesque, as campy and crude as a night at a stag party. But it is also a love story, scored for belly laughs."                  
--New York Daily News

"Zany humor . . . Shames mixes sun and fun, wise guys and dumb guys, smart gals and bad gals with such wit and style it makes you want to head straight for Key West and join the party."                         --The Orlando Sentinel

Mangrove Squeeze

"Like [Elmore] Leonard, Shames mixes comedy and crime expertly. . . . A delight-fully offbeat crime comedy, Florida style."                               --Booklist

"Critics have compared [Shames] to the great crime absurdist Carl Hiaasen, but he's not only treading on the master's heels; in plot, invention, and sheer vigour he's overtaken him."                           --Literary Review (London)

Virgin Heat

"Nearly impossible to put down. Its Key West setting and laugh-out-loud wit recall the best of Carl Hiaasen. Its quirky characters and tough-mindedness are like Elmore Leonard."        --The Plain Dealer

"[T]his slapstick caper, a gravity-defying structure of impossible coincidences, has been built for fun. . . . And even his zaniest characters have a dark core that gives them dimension in this sun-bleached land of forgetting."                                        
--The New York Times Book Review


Book Description
"I never meant to be a private eye."

Thus are we introduced to Pete Amsterdam, the world's most reluctant sleuth and the improbable but totally engaging protagonist of this wry and irresistible novel.

Naked in his hot tub, Pete is idly reviewing his morning tennis game when trouble arrives in the form of the inevitable blonde. This being Key West, the blonde is not quite what she seems, and it's useless to explain to her that he's not a real detective--that, in fact, he got his P.I. license strictly as a tax dodge, a way to pretend his new wine cellar is an "office." She's got troubles of her own--big troubles that are utterly foreign to the cozy little paradise Pete has crafted for himself.

Why, then, does the unwilling gumshoe allow himself to be squeezed ever tighter against Key West's humid underbelly--involved with the likes of local bully Lefty Ortega, his nympho daughter, and the sleazeball who controls the island's gambling boats? And why does he feel that his life is being taken over by the demands and traditions of the detective story?

Will Pete blunder his way through to solving the crime? Will he penetrate the leotard of the lissome yoga teacher who is his only ally? The answers will be found in these fast-moving and hilarious pages, where the hard-boiled flirts with the postmodern. Think of this novel as Raymond Chandler meets Woody Allen meets the Coen brothers, and as a romp that somehow breaks through to serious consideration of the themes of community and responsibility, and the notion that maybe all of us could be heroes--even if mostly in spite of ourselves.


From the Inside Flap
"I never meant to be a private eye."

Thus are we introduced to Pete Amsterdam, the world's most reluctant sleuth and the improbable but totally engaging protagonist of this wry and irresistible novel.

Naked in his hot tub, Pete is idly reviewing his morning tennis game when trouble arrives in the form of the inevitable blonde. This being Key West, the blonde is not quite what she seems, and it's useless to explain to her that he's not a real detective--that, in fact, he got his P.I. license strictly as a tax dodge, a way to pretend his new wine cellar is an "office." She's got troubles of her own--big troubles that are utterly foreign to the cozy little paradise Pete has crafted for himself.

Why, then, does the unwilling gumshoe allow himself to be squeezed ever tighter against Key West's humid underbelly--involved with the likes of local bully Lefty Ortega, his nympho daughter, and the sleazeball who controls the island's gambling boats? And why does he feel that his life is being taken over by the demands and traditions of the detective story?

Will Pete blunder his way through to solving the crime? Will he penetrate the leotard of the lissome yoga teacher who is his only ally? The answers will be found in these fast-moving and hilarious pages, where the hard-boiled flirts with the postmodern. Think of this novel as Raymond Chandler meets Woody Allen meets the Coen brothers, and as a romp that somehow breaks through to serious consideration of the themes of community and responsibility, and the notion that maybe all of us could be heroes--even if mostly in spite of ourselves.


From the Back Cover
Praise for Laurence Shames

Welcome to Paradise

"The story unfolds at comic warp speed . . . burlesque, as campy and crude as a night at a stag party. But it is also a love story, scored for belly laughs."
--New York Daily News

"Zany humor . . . Shames mixes sun and fun, wise guys and dumb guys, smart gals and bad gals with such wit and style it makes you want to head straight for Key West and join the party."--The Orlando Sentinel

Mangrove Squeeze

"Like [Elmore] Leonard, Shames mixes comedy and crime expertly. . . . A delight-fully offbeat crime comedy, Florida style."         --Booklist

"Critics have compared [Shames] to the great crime absurdist Carl Hiaasen, but he's not only treading on the master's heels; in plot, invention, and sheer vigour he's overtaken him."--Literary Review (London)

Virgin Heat

"Nearly impossible to put down. Its Key West setting and laugh-out-loud wit recall the best of Carl Hiaasen. Its quirky characters and tough-mindedness are like Elmore Leonard."--The Plain Dealer

"[T]his slapstick caper, a gravity-defying structure of impossible coincidences, has been built for fun. . . . And even his zaniest characters have a dark core that gives them dimension in this sun-bleached land of forgetting."         
--The New York Times Book Review


About the Author
Laurence Shames is the author of seven previous Key West novels, as well as screenplays, essays, and several books of nonfiction. A former contributing editor to Esquire, his work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives with his wife, Marilyn, in Key West, Florida, and Ojai, California.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One

I never meant to be a private eye.

The whole thing, in fact, was my accountant's idea. A tax dodge. Half a joke. A few years ago I made some money. Made it the modern American way: by sheer dumb luck, doing work I hated, on a silly product that only made life more trivial and more annoying. I took the dough-not a lot of dough, but enough to live on for the rest of my life if I wasn't an asshole about it-and moved full-time to Key West.

I'd had a funky little house there for years. Wood frame, shady porch, tiny pool that took up most of a backyard choked with thatch and bougainvillea. Vacation house. Daydreaming about that place, the time I'd eventually spend there, got me through a lot of crappy afternoons in my stupid office up in Jersey. Now I wanted to really make it home.

So I told my accountant to free up some cash. "I'm renovating. Building an addition."

"You're putting in an office," he informed me.

"Office? Benny, I'm retired."

"Bullshit you're retired. What are you, forty-six?"

"Forty-seven."

"Forty-seven you don't retire. Forty-seven you have a crisis and change careers."

"There's no crisis, Benny. I'm putting in wine storage, a music room, and a hot tub."

He raised his hands to fend off the information. "You never told me that," he said. "It's an office and it'll save you thousands. Tens of thousands. Plus your car becomes deductible."

I made the mistake of keeping silent for a moment. Call me cheap. I shouldn't have even thought about it, but the idea of saving tens of thousands made me pause.

"Become a realtor," Benny suggested. "Everyone down there becomes a realtor, right?"

I'd dealt with realtors in my life. "I'd rather shoot myself," I said.

"Shoot yourself," he muttered, then started free-associating. "Tough guy. Humphrey Bogart. Hey, call yourself a private eye."

"Don't be ridiculous."

He quickly fell in love with his idea. "Ya know," he said, "there's a lot of advantages. Private corporation. One employee: you. You get a gun-."

"Benny, cut it out."

"-get a license-"

"How you get a license?"

"Florida?" he said. "Probably swear you haven't murdered anybody in the last sixty, ninety days."

"Benny, I don't wanna be a private eye."

He paused, blinked, and looked somewhat surprised. "Schmuck! Did I say you have to be a private eye? I said we're calling you a private eye. You'll get some business cards, put a listing in the phone book-"

"Commit fraud-"

"What fraud? You're committing failure. Look, the government allows three years' worth of losses. By then we've depreciated the work on the house, the car lease has expired-"

Well, the whole thing was preposterous-and I guess I kind of like preposterous. Having an amusing thing to say at parties, occasionally in bars. Something incongruous and intriguing. So on my tax returns, at least, I became a private eye. Pete Amsterdam, sole proprietor, doing business as Southernmost Detection, Inc.

That was two and a half years ago. I have a license somewhere in a drawer, and a gun I've never fired rusting in a wall safe. Until very recently, thank God, I hadn't had a single client. Three, four times a year someone calls me up, usually on some sordid and depressing matrimonial thing. I lie and say I'm too busy; for some reason the potential client apologizes and quickly gets off the phone, like I'll charge him for my precious time. My only worry has been that the IRS might come snooping around to see if I was legit. This has been a sporadic but uncomfortable concern, since, for me, feeling legit has never come that easy anyway.

But in the meantime the house improvements came out beautiful, suited me to a T. I'm divorced. I live alone. I guess I'm a little eccentric. Mainly it's that I don't pretend to care about the things that most people pretend to care about. The news. What's on television. The outside world. I have a small, tight core of things that still can hold my interest; I arrange my life as simply and neatly as I can around those things, and the rest just sort of passes me right by. I like wine. I like music. I like tennis. After that the list grows pretty short.

Must sound meager to people who live in places where everyone is busy and engaged and avidly discusses what's in the theaters or the paper. But Key West isn't like that. Key West is a place to withdraw to, a retreat without apology or shame. And you learn things from the place you live. One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.

So I've been more or less content down here. Tan, reasonably fit, generally unbothered. I do what I want and, better still, I don't do what I don't want. Which includes being a private eye. In fact, two and a half years into this fraud of a vocation, I'd practically forgotten I was listed in the phone book.

Or I had until a few weeks ago, when the client I'd been dimly dreading came marching into my unlocked house, stormed past the wine room and through the music room, out the back door and around the little pool, to catch me naked in the hot tub and to turn my whole life upside down.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The gumshoe bit wasn’t Peter Amsterdam’s idea. His accountant made him do it. But Pete should have figured that with a comfortable tax dodge in the sunny Florida Keys comes the inevitable knockout blonde looking for help. Sometimes life can be like the movies. Unfortunately for Pete, it isn’t black and white.

There’s more to the blonde than meets the eye. And fast on her stiletto heels is a hotshot Key West thug, his possibly duplicitous nympho daughter, a goon in control of the islands’ gambling boats, and a stone-cold corpse whose unexpected appearance has stripped Pete down to his last nerve. All he has to work with are what’s left of his wits, a gun that’s never been fired, and the dashing hope that he can survive this crime long enough to solve it. . . .

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Shames's eighth Key West novel (after Welcome to Paradise) has its moments of charm and interest, especially when narrator Pete Amsterdam, debuting here, describes the particular pleasures of the setting: "Key West is a place to withdraw to, a retreat without apology or shame. And you learn things from the place you live. One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine." Pete has learned this lesson well, as a man both disappointed (by his lack of success, especially with women) and contented (with his cozy house and the freedom to indulge his three main interests--wine, music and tennis--without actually working). Unfortunately, his accountant has talked Pete into getting a PI's license for tax reasons, and that's where the trouble begins--for Pete as well as for the novel. Shames does provide a few original touches--for example, the well-built blonde who arrives early on to hire Peter (and catches him naked in the hot tub) and who turns out to be a cross-dressing man. But the plot quickly bogs down into a routine search for two missing mail pouches buried on a spit of sand, sought after by not only Pete and his soon-to-be-late client but also by the usual assortment of local thugs and corrupt cops. Too bad. Amsterdam and his main squeeze, a lithe yoga instructor named Maggie, deserve better next time out. Author tour. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

When pseudo-private detective Pete Amsterdam is visited by a man wearing a dress and makeup who asks him to retrieve two bags of stolen property, Pete declines. After all, he is only listed as a private detective to dodge paying his taxes. When the potential client is found dead the next morning, Amsterdam begins to investigate (perhaps out of boredom, perhaps because he needs focus and meaning in his life), thus putting himself and everyone he comes in contact with in immediate danger. Shames, the author of seven other romps set in Key West (e.g., Welcome to Paradise), has a gift for taking ordinary people, placing them in extraordinary situations, and creating hilarious and meaningful outcomes. Here, the author has cut out all extraneous descriptive passages and most character development (we are told only about Amsterdam) and keeps the plot to a bare minimum. The result is either his masterpiece or a novel gone slightly wrong. However it is perceived, this is a delightful book through which to escape the stress of everyday life. For all public libraries.--Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., OH Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

David Lehman - The New York Times Book Review

A diverting sendup of murder mysteries . . . A lighthearted, sardonic homage to the detective novel as a form. . . . Shames has a breezily engaging manner...

Kirkus Reviews

Since making his bundle back in Jersey, Pete Amsterdam's leading a Key West regimen of late mornings, tennis, Chardonnay, and a p.i. license he maintains strictly as a tax dodge—until he meets the leggy blond client he can't refuse, partly because showing her out would require him to bolt nude from his hot tub, partly because the charming she turns out to be an equally intriguing he, but mostly because his would-be client turns up dead the next morning on Tank Island. The late Kenny Lukens had run off to the Bahamas just as fast as his long, long legs could carry him after relieving his boss, Lefty Ortega, of two payroll pouches, one containing the night's receipts from Lefty's bar, the other something Lefty wanted back even more. Kenny's friends and foes alike gang up on the reluctant Amsterdam, prodding him to discover just what Kenny had buried on Tank Island and why he came back to unbury it. Soon after lissome yoga instructor Maggie plies Pete with herbal tea, he's scrambling off the side of her dry-docked trawler for a closer look at Kenny's boat. Inspired by a note Ortega's daughter Lydia passes him at Lefty's funeral, he stares down her bodyguard to get into her condo. He even takes a turn at straight-up interrogation, questioning Lydia's partner Mickey Veale about Ortega's business. But before long, it's his own curiosity and long-buried ambition that propel him toward full-fledged sleuthing. Though Amsterdam's not as much fun as the geezers and innocents of Shames's first seven novels (Welcome to Paradise, 1999, etc.), his debut still gets him off to a worthy start. Author tour