Skip to main content

Palos Verdes Blue - Review

PALOS VERDES BLUE is the 11th entry in the Jack Liffey series. Jack is not a PI by trade, his skill is in finding missing kids. Mr. Shannon is an author that came to my attention about year ago. Like most Crime Fiction readers I am fascinated by Los Angles. Robert Crais and Michael Connelly cover contemporary LA better than anyone. While James Ellroy's LA Quartet maybe the City's document of the past. This doesn't even begin to cover writers like Chandler, MacDonald, et.al.

So where has John Shannon been all my life. An 11 series run is nothing sneeze at as publishing firms collapse in on themselves and the mid-list author is frozen out in the cold. Even before this blog found its way in to creation I liked to think I keep an eye out for 'talent.' John Shannon just shows the incredible amount of talent that exists in crime fiction. A writer, even a well established one, can be discovered every day.

As a 'series' reader it goes against my mild case of OCD to pick up an author this late in the game. Almost as an experiment it was intriguing to me, one that left me wondering if all of Mr. Shannon's books are this way. The missing child is a teenage girl that has already been gone for a week as PALOS VERDES BLUE opens. Jack is hired by the mother to find her.

I'm not giving anything away by saying that a resolution comes, but not in the way any other book has delivered it. And by that I don't mean in a narrative sense, I mean structurally. The book is filled with letters from two people. One set of letters comes from a boy who was involved with the missing girl, the other set of letters from an illegal immigrant worker. The letters are not referenced in anyway within the story. They exists as a kind of flashback, but they also further the story. Eventually Jack finds that the key to the girl's disappearance lays with her relationship with the illegal Mexican laborers who inhabit the homes of the rich beach dwellers. It is here that Mr. Shannon really turns his attention to how the Mexican underclass survives in a country that can barely stand to look them in the eye. The message is never heavy handed, but Mr. Shannon definitely has an agenda. While Mr. Shannon's focus maybe elsewhere he deftly weaves the larger threads of the disappearance through the novel. I am struck by the sneaking suspicion that this is the work of a master. Mr. Shannon's ability to leave the 'mystery' behind, but still create one that engages the reader is very special.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is it 'Aughts' or 'Oughts' - The Best of the Decade Pt. II

Better late than what quite possibly could have been never. I found the whole task of formulating and compiling this list to be not very enjoyable. Ugh. Not sure why this list proved laborious to produce. Holidays are not a good time for anything except opening gifts... like a 47" LG LCD television. Let's quit with the complaining and finish the list. If you started here you should go back to the beginning . 5 . DIRT - Sean Doolittle (2001) This was a real toss up for me. I could just as easily gone with the funny and brutal THE CLEAN UP. DIRT gets it by a nose because a lot of what I enjoy about Crime Fiction is discovery. THE CLEAN UP is a great book, one that you should read, but I knew it was going to be good going in. Mr. Doolittle is a terrific writer of human frailty. DIRT contains one of the great truisms of human behavior that we frantically keep secrets from our closest friends and family while just as equally hoping these secrets will be discovered and accepted. I ...
4 comments
Read more

The Very Best of Mr. Michael Connelly - Part 2

My August 31 post of The Hungry Detective ranked all the non-Bosch books. This list returns to take on the larger task of Mr. Heironimous Bosch. 9 Dragons made its appearance right before the Indy B'Con, and try as I might... ok I didn't try that hard... I didn't have time to read it for inclusion in these rankings. As a quick aside I don't want to undersell any of the books at the bottom of the list. Mr. Connelly doesn't know how to write a bad book, but in my case there have been occasions where I have not connected with his work. 13. THE NARROWS - 2004 It is because I love THE POET so much that this book is at the end of the list. When Mr. Connelly is at his best his works has the precision of a watchmaker. THE NARROWS just felt forced and not worthy of the intricacy of THE POET. 12. BLACK ICE - 1993 Second book. Third read. I thought the story was pretty flat. It has been well over a decade since I read this book, but the story of Mexican drug runner...
1 comment
Read more

Murder, Mayhem and the Return of Patrick and Angie

Back from Murder and Mayhem in Muskego IV . It was an ultimately very good weekend if not for a few hiccups. The original intention was to attend the mini-con with my sister who lives in Appleton. Alas, she caught one of the fifty or so colds she will have in the next three months. Everyone at The Hungry Detective office hopes she feels better, and we are already looking forward to attending the fifth installment with her next year. The second minor disappointment was the, I'm sure, entirely unavoidable absences of Duane Swierczynski and Harry Hunsicker . Bummer. (Ed Note. Duane's twitter feed notes a Christening... Cheers to that Mr. Swierczynski!) All of this is, of course, is weighted by the very wonderful news that Dennis Lehane , after taking the balance of a year off after finishing The Given Day, is writing a new book. And it is a Kenzie and Gennaro book. Woo-Hoo! In terms of my own education about Crime Fiction, Dennis is an important figure. I was reading a lot by the...
4 comments
Read more