famed jazz singer uses Steve to try to cover his uxoricide

This book is a bit of a Walter Mitty-esque adventure in which the author and his wife play leading roles. So, the author's fictional counterpart, also called Steve Allen, shares most of the same past and personality as the real person, but the fictional Steve just happens to come across murders and gets to play sleuth. No doubt the novels are inspired by events in Steve Allen's real life, but twisted and recombined to create a murder mystery series. I have only read this one book so far from the series, part of my project to read the local public library's fiction collection one shelf at a time, so I don't know how this one compares with the rest of the series, but this novel was pretty good.
In this novel Steve is called away from a cruise to perform a show at the last minute in Vegas with an old friend. The friend's family is a mess, and shortly after Steve arrives in Vegas, a double murder occurs that threatens to derail the show, a murder the friend is suspected of committing. The clues that Steve follows are not all that readily apparent to the reader, so the ending is a bit unsupported, but there was enough foreshadowing that it at least didn't come as a complete surprise. The police detective was a bit unrealistically dumb at first, and I didn't think he was very consistent as a character, especially since after acting so dense, resentful, and stubborn, early on in the book, he turns out to be an effective detective after all and does a lot of the work towards securing the evidence needed to support Steve's intuited solution. Overall, I'd give this book ~4.5 stars, not fantastic, but definitely worth reading more of the series. ( )