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First Los Angeleno JACK LIFFEY lost his job as a technical writer. Then he lost his wife and, for a while, his daughter to divorce. Now all he has left is the unerring ability to track down missing children, which keeps him busy, and for the most part away from booze, drugs, Raymond Chandler novels and other dangerous addictions. Sounds like yet another loser eye, but John Shannon infuses this series with a passionate vision all his own. There's a lot of the usual L.A. gloom and doom and angst, and a lot of sly winks at the P.I. tradition, but Shannon gets away with it all, because he's a very good writer. The Greek chorus of homies in the intros whose drug-dealing turf includes Jack's apartment building, the slow disintegration of the city through forces of nature and man (that obsession with nature is almost Canadian!), the surreal crime and traffic incidents, the little in-jokes, the tip of the fedoras to Ivan Monk and The Bradbury Building and even an elderly Philip Marlowe make this one of the best and most entertaining new P.I. series I've come across in years. Shannon's not content with showing just the usual mean streets of the City of Angels, he's after the whole enchilada: the crumbling infrastructure, the cultural, intellectual and moral decay, the man-made and even the natural catastrophes that seem to plague the place, as if God's got a hard-on for the whole damn city. Things fall apart; the centre doesn't hold, indeed. But somehow Jack Liffey endures... Author Shannon grew up in San Pedro, California, "amidst the sons of radical longshoremen, shipyard workers and fishermen. They still called themselves Yugoslavs then, rather than Croats or Serbs. My friends were proud of the tale -- probably apocryphal -- that their fathers had once hidden in wait for the LAPD "Red Squad," and beat the shit out of them." He has worked as a journalist, technical writer, video producer, a school teacher in Africa and a political activist. Besides the Jack Liffey books, he has published four other novels, including The Orphan, Courage and The Taking of the Waters, a multi-generational saga of the American Left. When I first read The Concrete River, I stated that I felt that Shannon was one guy to watch, and that fans of Ross Macdonald and Stephen Greenleaf should particularly take note. I'm glad to say that subsequent books in the series have proven me right, time and time again. Shannon is simply one of the very best private eye writers out there these days, a sharp-eyed social critic whose fierce anger and passionate intelligence never stand in the way of his muscular storytelling and all-too-human characters; a writer who casts his fiery, unflinching gaze not just upon his villains but his heroes as well. No truth that his next Liffey book is The Big Pothole, but whatever he decides to call it, it's highly recommended. HE SAID IT!
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