It'd be a tough call to shoot Other People's Money. Black and white, certainly. A Hawks or a Lewis or an Aldrich behind the camera, Fred McMurray, Bogart, even Dick Powell up front. Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lore, Edward G. Robinson we'll take on trust. You get the point. There's certainly something old-fashioned about Arthur Lyons' opus. It even revolves around an ancient treasure.

Los Angeles PI Jacob Asche cannot refuse the kind of money offered by the mysterious Turkish businessman Saffarian to watch his runaway daughter. But almost as soon as it starts, Asche is bounced and a colleague does missing. Now he can't leave the case alone if he wanted, and when a key player fetches up dead, he finds himself up to his neck in a whole heap of international smuggling and billionaire art collectors. His search will take him as far as an oil-rig beyond the 12-mile limit before anyone has all the answers.

As they say, if in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun, and Lyons' novel is full of tangled telephone calls, enigmatic dames and swarthy foreigners with thick accents and hidden agendas. You'll search long and hard for sub-text here.

There's a comic soft-centre to Asche's hard-boiled narration, a half-hearted stab at social comment (a recurring sub-plot about the homeless of Tent City), and a little contemporary violence, but Other People's Money is pulling no surprises. It's a sleek, short, unthreatening read. If The Big Sleep's not on TV, you could do a lot worse.

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