I'm not normally much of a mystery reader. I guess I'm a bit of a prose snob. I confess. For my taste, mysteries tend to be a bit insipid. Characters are too often one-dimentional: overly described and under-developed. Plots may be clever but are so totally predictable. Atmosphere is too often written in little florid slashes, in a kind of straight-jacketed prose brought in specially just to set the scene.Not so with John Shannon's Jack Liffy series. Wow. These books rock. This man can write. His sentences are beautiful and thought-provoking, yet he can slash through a scene, leaving you breathless and needing more, as well as anyone I've read. And Shannon gives the reader real characters and a true sense of place, not just walking cartoons and specially engineered atmospherics.
This new book, The Orange Curtain, may be the best yet in the Jack Liffy series, but all of Shannon's Jack Liffy mysteries have been well done. The first book, Concrete River really captured for me a section of the slimy underbelly of Los Angeles. No mystery writer since Chander has sliced LA open and spilled out its guts as compellingly as Shannon has. LA is a huge place. There are lots of corners to explore. This new book, The Orange Curtain, takes in, among other things, Orange County and its huge Vietnamese population. It's a great book, whether you want to disappear into it on the coast-to-coast airliner or want to take it in over several days and savor its wonderful prose and interesting characters. It's a great book, and this is a series that just keeps getting better.
There is plenty of punch in this book for you mystery addicts, plenty of hard-boiled sentiment and riveting, page-turning action. But between the lines--in the lines--there is also some superb writing.
I can't wait for the next one.
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