If fictional detectives were brought to life and lined up youngest to oldest, Nancy Drew and Kinsey Millhone would stand close enough to whisper secrets. Just about everyone old enough to drive would be over 30. That's one of the reasons we were glad to meet Jason Keltner, a Gen X musician just getting by in Los Angeles.

"Trouble Comes Back" is Keith Snyder's third book about Jason and his best friends, Robert Goldstein, an actor landing walk-on parts in sitcoms, and Martin Altamirano, an artist who pays the bills by working at an off-roading magazine. Jason's intermittent paychecks come from composing the music for video games.

Forced to move from their funky Pasadena boarding house, the trio splits up. Jason and Robert find a place at the beach, and Martin heads home to Long Beach to live with his troubled mother and his little brother.

To Jason and his friends, the 70s are a concept (and a source of home-decor ideas), rather than a memory. They've got one genuine relic — a rain lamp — in the beach pad. Then they meet a living artifact of the era: rocker Dwight Cooper, a.k.a. Uncle Trouble.

Dwight is bad news in more ways than one. He's a junkie, which makes him a negligent parent and somewhat of an artistic risk — he tends to blank out in the middle of songs. His supermodel ex-girlfriend wants custody of their 6-year-old, Donna. After the ex writes Dwight a threatening letter, Jason, Robert, and Martin are hired by a slick security firm to keep Donna safe.

That's simplifying, of course. The trio gets involved with Dwight by sheerest coincidence--he's shooting up at the apartment of Martin's mom's scummy boyfriend when Martin, Robert, and Jason show up to have it out with the boyfriend.

Soon, Martin and his brother move in with Robert and Jason. This gives them two kids to keep track of.

This book has so much going for it. It's literate, sophisticated, funny and fast. It gets inside LA's struggling, freelance artist world completely and with real affection. It presents a model of male friendship that is unusually honest and deep.

Jason hardly seems old enough to have a past, but he does — two, in fact. One, an ex of his own who isn't ready to let go, shows up at his door. The other — his former line of work — haunts him from within.

Julie: As I read, I marked passages that were funny enough to quote. By the time I'd finished the book, half the pages were dog-eared. Here's one example, a description of children disembarking from school buses at the site of a field trip: "Teachers exited first, and parsed the subsequent flow of kid-atoms into molecules that threatened to destabilized energetically and revert into individual little enthusiasm particles."

Ben: This book is like "Rent" without the tragedy. It makes me yearn for a set of sharp, witty, quirky and educated friends following me around everywhere to provide background patter to feed the laugh track of my life's unseen audience. It's also refreshing to find a book where the characters visit New York and miss L.A., instead of vice versa.

—Ben and Julie Kaufmann