JOHN SHANNON – The Concrete River. John Brown Books, hardcover, 1996. Berkley, paperback, February 1998.

   What this book is, or rather what it is not, is your grandfather’s traditional PI novel. One blurb on the back cover makes a comparison to Raymond Chandler. The setting is Los Angeles, true enough, and the comparison is not badly made, but the setting has been updated to modern-day LA (as of twenty years ago, that is), and it is Raymond Chandler as filtered more through Robert Altman’s version than any slavishly imitated copy of Mr. Chandler himself.

   The PI in question, for which this is his first recorded case, is Jack Liffey, a Viet Nam veteran and currently an out of work technical writer, a father of one, but now divorced and far behind on his alimony payments. To supplement his income he has discovered a knack for finding missing children.

   In this case, however, the woman he is asked to find is the Mexican-American mother of a boy he found several months before. He’s asked on the job too late, however. Her body is found washed up in Long Beach; suspicion is that she was dumped into the Los Angeles River somewhere a lot closer to home, and the river did the rest.

   The fact that she was working on behalf a community activist group fighting the conversion of an abandoned rubber plant into an opera house — an amenity for the rich, not the people who live in the area — is the only lead Liffey has to go on. But still. Murder on behalf of an opera house? No. There is more to the story than that, as Liffey soon painfully discovers.

   Shannon’s view of L.A. is near apocalyptic. The city is running on fumes, with rotten infrastructure and bizarre traffic incidents consistently occurring as Liffey makes his way around town in hunt of a wider truth, a search for morality, if you will. His budding romance with an ex-nun also takes up a good portion of the book, which naturally will slow things down for the reader who expects only a pulp fiction mentality on just another PI tale.

   Which, to repeat myself, most definitely The Concrete River is not. One quote may may be enough to tell you whether or not this is a series meant for you:

   Not for the first time, he thought of his marriage as a hat that had blown off while he was looking out over a canyon. He’d made a grab for it at the time, but then it was just gone, dwindling out of sight, leaving a bit of hat feel around his forehead but even that fading fast. It was the kind of thing that could still make you feel guilty about being broke, though.

   In case you were wondering, though, and you’re looking for more, there is a scene later on that shows that when he needs to be, Jack Liffey is also as hard-boiled as they come. Guaranteed.

      The Jack Liffey series —

1. The Concrete River (1996)
2. The Cracked Earth (1999)

3. The Poison Sky (2000)
4. The Orange Curtain (2001)
5. Streets on Fire (2002)
6. City of Strangers (2003)

7. Terminal Island (2004)
8. Dangerous Games (2005)
9. The Dark Streets (2006)
10. The Devils of Bakersfield (2008)

11. Palos Verdes Blue (2009)
12. On The Nickel (2010)
13. A Little Too Much (2010)
14. Chinese Beverly Hills (2014)