Jeff Strand is one funny guy, and when he puts his mind to it, Mayhem ensues. Andrew Mayhem, that is.

Mayhem is Strand's would-be gumshoe—a sort of low-rent version of Lawrence Block's Scudder, but saddled with a cute family and way too much fear of his wife rather than alcoholism. There's a hint of TV's Rockford in Mayhem, maybe the way bad guys (and just guys in general) tend to beat on him with abandon. Caught in a kid's tree-house filming a midday adulterous rendezvous, he can't help cracking jokes even as protective neighbors bruise his face. He's not as good-looking as Magnum, another TV gumshoe, but his friend Roger qualifies as the kind of friend Magnum had in spades.

Mayhem is honorable, and that goes a long way. But he's less than honorable when he and his luckless college buddy (and frequent babysitter) Roger are approached by a beautiful woman in a bar and offered twenty grand to dig up an illegally buried corpse—that of her husband—to recover a key which must be on his person. Mayhem needs the cash, because he's jobless, prospectless, his camera was smashed to bits, and he's been in a car accident his wife doesn't know about. So, why not? What's one dug-up corpse?

What, indeed? Well, if the corpse turns out to have been buried alive—as well as armed—then things might not be as easy as they seem. Suddenly implicated not only in the disinterment, but also possibly murder, Mayhem and Roger are targeted by a wickedly accurate crossbowman. Now someone has kidnapped the two of them, and has apparently done in their employer. Someone with a distinctly macabre sense of humor who has decided Mayhem should be allowed to solve the crime—and various about-to-occur crimes—by putting together bits and pieces of an evolving puzzle which leads Mayhem from place to place and from grave to grave. And also leads him to Ghoulish Delights, a low-low-budget horror film outfit who just may have been involved in "private" movies for secret customers.

It should be stated up-front that Graverobbers Wanted is fiendishly entertaining nearly from page one. Though the prose is straightforward, there is a playfulness evident in the author which trickles down to all the characters, including the suspects. The narrative voice is a near-perfect copy of every hard-boiled P.I. tale ever told, though Mayhem is more the soft-boiled variety—he really feels pain! While generally functioning as a mystery, the book also sustains a strong undercurrent of horror—both because of the horror film theme and the "secondary" film business (can you spell "snuff"?). Also because limbs and heads get separated from torsos with regularity in the second half. The killer's humor spars effectively with Mayhem's own in the first-person narrative. The one flaw I see is that the humor wanes a bit when Mayhem's own children are kidnapped, throwing the reader into a somewhat confusing predicament—can the book still be funny once innocent people start to die? It may be noted that the serious tone of the final third vies somewhat with the hilarious set-up. Fortunately, Strand navigates the line with sufficient confidence and skill to pull it off, but a non-horror reader might well blanch at the gruesome results. More Mayhem occurs in Strand's Single White Psychopath Seeks Same and the forthcoming Casket for Sale (Only Used Once), which, given their titles, are likely to caress both your funny bone and your gag reflex. And isn't that why we read, anyway?