The most recent book I've completed is John Shannon's first
Jack Liffey mystery _The Concrete River_, which was a very
good, tense, modern update of the hardboiled novels of
someone like Raymond Chandler. Liffey lost his job as a
technical writer and has since subsisted as a sort of "semi"
detective, finding lost children and so forth, although he
does not, as yet, have a license. In the book, he's hired to
find a missing Hispanic woman who's something of a
neighborhood political activist--she's the mother of a boy
he'd previously been successful in tracking down. Liffey is
very big-hearted and willing to get involved in situations
which he's not familiar with the workings of--in one scene,
he sees a group of teenage boys pushing and shoving each
other in a junkyard area and is just about to stick his nose
in to see what's up when they pull out guns and start
shooting at each other. He's not willing to just put his head
down and ignore what's happening around him.
Another thing I liked and I guess this is
spoiler-worthy
**** SPOILER
is that, once he finds out that his search will ultimately
lead him to a mob-connected land deal, he's perfectly willing
to drop the whole matter. Once he gets his revenge on the two
lowly mob hitmen responsible for the death of the woman he's
searching for, he lets the rest of the mystery go, which I
thought was a bit unusual. Someone like a David Robicheaux
wouldn't have been able to do that.
**** END SPOILER
Liffey has a neat relationship with an ex-nun and the two of
them are dumped into a storm drain in a neat sequence that
almost kills the both of them. All in all, it was a memorable
first novel and had me looking for books 2 and 3 in the
series.
Craig Larson Trinidad, CO
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