Shoot the Piper: A Randall Gatsby Sierra Mystery

An absence of danger and a smug tone spoil this second outing of iconoclastic, Pacific Coast PI Randall Gatsby Sierra, introduced in What Rough Beast? Former boozer, former hippie, former soldier and all-around, sax-playing Renaissance man, Sierra agrees to trace his old pal Jock MacLeod, counterculture icon and hedonistic legend. Legendary Jock, having disappeared in Britain with a monstrous publisher's advance, may be working his way north to Scotland, where his roots are and where his newfound nationalistic fervor might find its truest expression. Hill, a bang-up prose stylist who clearly knows his literary lore, takes time and care building up Jock into a mythical Kerouac-like figure, but fails to reveal why the writer is on the lam. Somewhere on the far edges of a narrative that is littered with thick dollops of British history, a hippie gathering at Stonehenge and a protest against a nuclear plant assume significance. Sierra has a winning way with ladies and seems equally comfortable discussing the Grateful Dead and the works of Thomas Carlyle. His adventures ought to be a lot of fun, but, lacking a developing plotline, they aren't. (Apr.)