Rolly Waters Books in Order

The Rolly Waters mysteries follow a part-time private investigator who is also a working guitarist in San Diego. Rolly is not the hard-edged, all-knowing detective of old noir stories. He is a recovering musician with bills to pay, a band to play with, and a habit of taking cases that turn out to be much larger and more dangerous than expected.

San Diego matters as much as any recurring character. The books move from beaches and industrial parks to clubs, taco shops, military sites, desert roads, and the tense spaces near the U.S.-Mexico border. Fayman uses the city’s real geography and layers it with music history, startup culture, local legends, and the complications of people whose pasts refuse to stay buried.

Rolly is a decent man in a messy business.

The series begins with Black’s Beach Shuffle, when Rolly finds a body after his band plays a party for a fast-rising Internet company. What begins as a strange murder pulls him into the deceptive world of a dot-com startup and forces him to confront parts of his own past. In Border Field Blues, vandalism at a bird sanctuary near Border Field Park leads Rolly into a case with cross-border consequences. He joins forces with another investigator as the danger grows.

Desert City Diva sends him after clues to a woman who vanished years earlier, starting with a one-stringed guitar and an unpredictable club DJ named Macy Starr. The trail runs through the desert, an old murder, and people who have spent a long time hiding what they know. In Ballast Point Breakdown, a deadly speedboat crash in San Diego Bay draws Rolly toward a decades-old disappearance involving a Navy diving program, an environmental group, and a shadowy figure from the past.

The fifth novel, Gillespie Field Groove, returns to the musical side of Rolly’s life. A nurse and fledgling pilot hires him to find her late father’s Stratocaster, a guitar that may once have belonged to Jimi Hendrix. The search brings old music-industry secrets, an aging promoter, criminal pressure, and a long-ago shooting into the present.

The books can be enjoyed as individual cases, but reading in publication order gives the clearest view of Rolly’s history and his friendships. Expect private-eye puzzles with dry humor, music references, and stakes that can get serious fast. Rolly may sound laid-back, but he keeps digging when easier people would walk away.