Milan Jacovich Books In Order

Publication Order of Milan Jacovich Books

It takes a special kind of person to come up with a character who is an ex-cop, Vietnam veteran who happens to have also been a former football player with a Master’s degree who goes on to be the best Private Investigator on. An ordinary person might wonder if such a person could exist in real life and the truth is relative depending on how far any person can stretch their imagination reality then Milan Jacovich can be as real as any P.I. out there.

So, who is Milan Jacovich?
Jacovich is no ordinary private eye. If there is such a thing as anti-hero then Jacovich epitomizes all that isn’t commonly found to be true of great private investigators. With all his history (interesting as it may be) some would even think of him as a loser, a lone crusader who sticks with the bone not because he has some sense of moral center but because he cannot help himself. Sure he seeks justice and can use the money but there is something fundamentally broken with Milan and once you get that sense, you want to know what it is.

He is not Sam Spade or hardboiled Spenser instead he is a six-three, 230 pounds, tough and lean looking Slovenian American, proud of his heritage almost to a comical fault. He slugs Stroh beer with the best of them, has a weird penchant for klobasa sandwiches and will not miss a good Polka dance and happens to live in the not-so- glamorous city of Cleveland, Ohio.

Like most Private investigators, he really is a loner. That has little to do with his job but it has something to do with his nature. Unfortunately, he has an ex-wife who has a typical Slovenian iron will. Of course, she has custody of their only son (no right minded family court judge would have given someone like Milan custody of a child) who he only gets to see every other Sunday.

How he came to be: The Creator
Going back to needing to stretch the imagination and see reality in a different light in order to imagine a person like Milan Jacovich, we have to pause – Milan Jacovich is a fictional character created by Les Roberts whose life is painted in colorful hues just like his character’s. He is a war veteran; a mystery novelist with time spent writing and producing for Hollywood television networks and has been described as an actor, singer, businessman, teacher, musician and more.

The first encounter the world has with Milan Jacovich is when a rich advertising executive calls his in the dead of night to offer two thousand dollars for a twelve-hour job of being his personal bodyguard. When Milan gets to the Man’s house in the suburb of Pepper Pike he finds no one home. The Executive’s wife then hires Milan to find the Husband who now turns out to be missing. Milan search takes him through the world of the rich and powerful where he has an encounter that almost costs his life. He is then thrown into the dark underbelly of Cleveland where the mob operates and politicians looking to get power or stay in power do shady deals. The twists and turns of this first story make for an interesting and engrossing read. Pepper Pike lays out the foundation of what life as a Cleveland P.I might look like. The mob characters that featured in Pepper Pike show up in the next installment of the Milan Jacovich life as a P.I. saga titled Full Cleveland, which by its title, is set to take readers deeper into the dark world that lies beneath the small, unassuming city that is Cleveland. This is where we are introduced to the Buddy who can read people. The P.I. with a sense for trouble unfortunately for him, trouble seems to be attracted to him.

The different faces of Milan Jacovich
There are 18 books chronicling Milan Jacovich’s life as a private investigator and in each, we learn something new about him. He is compassionate and ready to help a friend as he does in Deep Shaker. He goes deep into the drug world to help a friend who’s son is involved in selling drugs but things always turn horribly wrong and our hero manages to get through with the skin of his teeth.

Milan is a people’s person, despite the fact that Slovenians and Serbs don’t get on so well, he manages to get into the tight, cold and unfriendly Serbian community to search for a missing old Serbian man in the 4th installment: the Cleveland Connection. There is the gratuitous murder and an overlord who rules the Serbian community and keeps the old hatred simmering until it boils over.

By the time you read through his escapades through politically themed “The Lake Effect“, the sojourn through the art world where nothing is ever what it seems, to the television or celebrity world fraught with stalkers and dreamers trying to inhabit the lives they cannot have in “A Shoot in Cleveland”, you will notice a couple of recurring characters that are always drawing him into the shadows whether he wants to or not like the Mob boss that was in the first ever installment, Don Giancarlo D’Allessandro and his nephew Victor Gaimari. In all the stories, the lives he comes across, the cases that find him and those he stumbles upon there always seem to be one common thread– crime touches everybody from unassuming housewives, college students to powerful businessmen and the odd old geezer no one pays any mind to. It cuts through social class, economic standing, politics, the underworld and everywhere else where people are simply trying to survive and make it through the day. The fact that there is someone who average people can relate to who manages to inhabit Cleveland’s various communities in a Cleveland that might be somewhat real or totally made up has made this series popular. Even though the 18th book The Ashtabula Hat trick sees Milan venturing out of the city, Cleveland has firmly claimed him as its own.