Tue 19 Aug 2025
Archived PI Review: ROBERT J. BOWMAN – The House of Blue Lights.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
ROBERT J. BOWMAN – The House of Blue Lights. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1987. No paperback edition.
It took me a while to decide what Cassandra Thorpe’s occupation is at the beginning of this book. She is not a private investigator, but rather an investigator for the public defender’s office. (A public investigator?) City: San Francisco.
More specifically: the unappetizing skid row district south of Market. Her clients: winos, derelicts, and a crazy man who writes notebooks full of code in colors and ends up dead. It’s a busy kind of story, and not a very comfortable one. Maybe it was just me.
— Reprinted from Mystery.File.4, March 1988.
August 19th, 2025 at 9:21 pm
Robert J. Bowman wrote one later mystery, a book titled The Screaming Buddha (1994), featuring a con-man protagonist in San Francisco named Jack Squire.
The House of Blue lights was nominated for both the Shamus and the Anthony awards in the First Novel categories.
UPDATE: The years of publication for these two books are now correct.
August 23rd, 2025 at 3:21 am
Sounds a bit as if the author had been in some area of social work.
August 23rd, 2025 at 12:00 pm
I guessed something like that myself. FWIW, though, I have found one note from Bowman online:
https://blcklst.com/profile/bob-bowman
“I am a professional business journalist as well as the author of two published mystery novels, The House of Blue Lights and The Screaming Buddha (St. Martin’s Press).”