Roman Cantrell & Nikki Holden
Created by Elaine Raco Chase

Slick, fast-talking private eye ROMAN CANTRELL, who runs his own "topnotch security firm," teams up with streetwise, hotshot journalist Nikki Holden in this two-book series, set in and around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one of the first, and certainly one of the better, attempts to cash in on the romance/detective fusion success of Moonlighting and Remington Steele.

Author Elaine Raco Chase comes by it naturally, however. Already a successful romance author, she assures me that she actually created Roman and Nikki "long--1980--before Moonlighting and Remington Steele." She also mentioned she's working on a third book in the series. That's good news, as I see it. I never could quite figure out why this series didn't catch on. The idea of mismatched romantically-linked detectives may not be new but, in fact, I thought Chase did it a lot better than most.

Chase also edited the 1994 anthology, Partners in Crime, which features stories of mismatched detectives, but unfortunately Roman and Nikki don't appear. She also co-wrote the writing guide Amateur Detectives: A Writer's Guide to How Private Citizens Solve Criminal Cases with Anne Wingate in 1996..

NOVELS

• Dangerous Places (1987) ..Buy this book
• Dark Corners (1988) ..Buy this book