Cover art credited to John Jinks, the overall design to Barbara Buck.

Joseph Hansen - Obedience

MYSTERIOUS PRESS. Hardcover edition, November 1988. Paperback reprint, November 1989. The same cover art was used on both editions.

      From the back cover:

OBEDIENCE

   Andy Flanagan is an angry man. A one-armed veteran of the Vietnam war, he lives on a leaky boat at L.A.’s Old Fleet Marina. Now the marina is to be sold, and Flanagan — along with a hundred others — is to be ousted, with no place to go.

   His protests ignored, he phones the marina’s wealthy owner, an importer named Le Van Minh, and arranges a meeting. But Le never shows — until Flanagan stumbles over his corpse on the dock and is arrested fro murder.

   Public Defender Tracy Davis thinks Flanagan is innocent, and hires Dave Brandstetter to find the real killer. Brandstetter soon finds himself on the unseen border where American and Asian cultures meet and clash. Other wealthy Vietnamese have met violent ends recently. What role does the gang lord Don Pham play? What did a black street runner see that he shouldn’t? What angry secret do the young people of Le’s family share between them?

   Obedience is a story of ancient verities trashed by 20th-century greed and corruption. Never before has Dave Brandstetter ventured into so alien a world, and rarely has his dogged search for the truth put his life in such danger.

    “Excellent.”       —  Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

    “Fast paced … Hansen readers should delight in it.”       —  Publishers Weekly