August may be here but summer's far from over. Get this book. Go to the beach. It'll be worth the sunburn you get on your back as you refuse to turn over because you keep flipping pages.

Dawn Patrol is a crime novel about a private investigator and his friends whose one shared obsession is a love of surfing. It's compelling. It's intriguing. The characters are very likable. It's the tale of the Californian Dream of sun and surf verses the Californian Reality of urban sprawl, dingy strip malls and, of course, rampant crime.

The only thing it does wrong is that it doesn't do anything wrong. It feels almost a little too slick for its own good. It feels engineered for a short attention span with chapters that are rarely more than three pages in length and paragraphs that seem to max out at four sentences. As knowledgeable as Winslow is about what he writes, sometimes you feel as if you're being served Sangria by someone who prefers to sip Chardonnay.

You know what it is?

It's like going to a Van Halen reunion concert and truly wanting to see - for some perverse reason - David Lee Roth, assless chaps and all; but getting Sammy Hagar instead.

But what the hell. It rocks! It's a fun fast read that knows how to build tension. What more could you ask for? Especially when you're headed for the beach.