Rolly Waters Books

A fast-rising Internet startup. A computer programmer found dead in his swimming pool. As guitar-playing detective Rolly Waters investigates the dark underbelly of dot.com culture, will he find the secret key that fuels its success? The first novel in the award-winning Rolly Waters mystery series A powerful new voice on the crime-fiction (ForeWord Reviews). 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.

A darkly humorous noir mystery featuring laidback, guitar-playing private investigator Rolly Waters. 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 infuriatingly unpredictable 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 who 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?

2021 San Diego Book Awards winner! Trained dolphins drown a Navy diver. An animal-rights activist commits public suicide. Can guitar-playing detective Rolly Waters unearth one family's secrets before others die? On a cool winter evening, a speedboat hurtles across San Diego Bay and crashes into the Admiral's Club where a farewell party for the Navy's top-secret Dolphin Divers program is underway. As guests flee the ensuing fire, a woman named Janis Withers crawls from the inferno and screams her last words - Arion has returned! Guitar-playing private detective Rolly Waters finds himself pulled into the case when he connects Janis to a pair of dog tags left behind by Butch Fleetwood, a member of the Dolphin Divers who disappeared during a training exercise twenty years earlier. While fending off the FBI and local police, Rolly uncovers tantalizing connections between Fleetwood, a crusading journalist, a celebrity artist, a punk rock singer, a radical animal-rights organization, and the dead woman's own dysfunctional family. As he races against the authorities to uncover Arion's true identity, Rolly's investigation begins to reverberate with his own painful history. His search for the truth leads to a ruined casino on a deserted Mexican island where shocking secrets are unleashed in a ruthless showdown between tormented and tormentors.

2024 Shamus Award Finalist! An obscure rock'n'roll roadie dies under mysterious circumstances. His prized Jimi Hendrix guitar has gone missing. Can Rolly Waters save his new client from the ruthless collectors looking for it? When nurse and fledgling pilot Lucinda Rhodes hires guitar-playing private detective Rolly Waters to track down a Stratocaster guitar owned by her deceased father, Rolly is thrilled to take on her case, especially when he learns the guitar’s original owner may have been Jimi Hendrix. But Gerry Rhodes’s reckless personal history leads to more questions than Rolly and Lucinda have bargained for, as an aging rock’n’roll impresario, his trophy wife, a Russian gangster and the FBI get involved. When a forty-year-old shooting accident reveals a surprising connection to a pop star’s hit record, Rolly sees darker forces at work. And his and Lucinda’s lives hang in the balance. The fifth book in the Rolly Waters mystery series