The blurb says this story is based in Los Angeles. It isn’t. It’s based far north of there.
However, this second adventure to befall a bookseller called Adrien English (who’s from LA) is a racy and enjoyable bit of hokum involving a gay man who finds himself playing the sleuth. English is left a ranch by his grandmother, but finds a corpse in the driveway.
The body has disappeared by the time the cops arrive, but some mysterious strangers have been seen excavating on Adrien’s land.
There’s a cop into S&M and other endearing characters in this fast story with its rising body count, which follows Josh Lanyon’s first, Fatal Shadows. If you don’t like the story, at least you can amuse yourself by counting the number of American and British spellings, for there’s a right old mixture for some unexplained reason, even occurring in the same paragraph sometimes.