The Orange Curtain: A Jack Liffey Mystery

Rating:
Summary: Waaaaay Better Than Your Average Mystery
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Slow and Methodical
Review: I've enjoyed many detective stories over the years and some of my favourites have come in the little niche of unofficial private detectives. From John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee through Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder and James W. Hall's fly-tying Thorn, they all have the attraction of a certain maverick unconventional quality to them. So when I heard about John Shannon's Jack Liffey series I was excited by the prospect of another fast-paced detective series to add to the list. While it's true Liffey is not hampered by the shackles of pesky rules and regulations, I felt this book suffered from a level of inertia that took a long time to be shaken.

THE ORANGE CURTAIN is the 4th book in the Jack Liffey series. Jack Liffey is an unofficial private detective working in L.A. with a specialty of finding missing persons. He is hired by a Vietnamese man to find his daughter, a girl who has consistently scored top grades at school and had never been in trouble in her life. It's a baffling disappearance that is made more interesting for Liffey because it will take him into a part of L.A. that he has never had reason to go before.

Little Saigon is not a place where Jack Liffey is easily able to blend into his environment and so he is noticed almost immediately upon his arrival be one of the local street gangs. To say they are suspicious of his presence is a major understatement and they are responsible for a string of increasingly intrusive incidents that hamper his investigation.

It's not until Liffey meets Vietnamese businesswoman Tien Joubert, a former employer of the missing girl, that the story begins to crackle. Tien is a forthright, aggressive and beautiful woman who is used to getting what she wants...and right from the off she decides that Liffey would suit her needs as a lover. The dialog between Tien and Liffey is sharp and amusing and thanks to her connections within the Vietnamese community, she helps Jack move his investigation forward.

Running in parallel to Jack Liffey's investigation and his forays amongst the residents of Little Saigon, we are fed brief flashes into the life and thoughts of Billy Gudger, a lonely, rather pathetic man. Gudger considers himself a deep thinking philosopher but in fact is just a man with some very strange ideas about his place in the world. Obviously, the fact that we keep returning to Gudger throughout the story in seemingly unrelated snatches indicates that he will play some sort of major role, the only question is how Jack Liffey and he will cross paths and what the outcome of their meeting will be.

I thought the strongest feature of the book is Jack Liffey. He is an easy-going, likable guy who has an everyman feel about him making him easy to relate to. He succumbs to temptation, he makes mistakes, he loses fights and the thought of dying makes his blood run cold. He has the failed marriage that seems to be de-rigueur for fictional police officers or private investigators and has a 14-year-old daughter (Maeve) with whom he shares a delightfully close relationship.

As I mentioned at the start of this review, the main problem I had with the book was the extremely slow pace in which everything unfolded. This may possibly reflect the cool-headed nature of Jack Liffey, but I found my mind beginning to wander, wondering when we would be getting to the point of the story. Unfortunately, the pace didn't even pick up at the higher points in the story. Instead we had to wade through pages of philosophizing by the antagonist until by the end he had me on my knees begging for mercy.

John Shannon presents L.A. through a rather jaundiced eye, highlighting the more remarkable sights around the city, making them part of a game between Liffey and Maeve. Although this gives the story a rather lighter tone, it actually highlights what a dangerously unconventional place their city can be, where the unexpected has a habit of happening. Liffey is willing to place himself among the unusual and unconventional, so there is a constant undertone of danger throughout the book.

I would be inclined to suggest reading the series mentioned at the start of this review if you are after strong, fast-paced crime novels of a hardboiled nature. Each of them features a protagonist who falls outside of the traditional private detective mold, but the action comes at a much faster rate.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent novel. Great characters
Review: Jack Liffey finds missing children and, in THE ORANGE CURTAIN, he must look into the strange (to him at least) culture of Orange County (formerly a bedroom community to Los Angeles but now a major center in its own right). The Orange County culture he investigates includes the ultra-rich, Vietnamese merchants and gangs, and an insane young man who flirts with genius.

It is the characters that make THE ORANGE CURTAIN stand out although certainly author John Shannon handles adventure well enough (with both physical and psychological challenges to Liffey). Both Liffey and insane Billy Gudger have their own challenges in dealing with others, rendering Liffey the one man who may be able to communicate effectively with Billy.

Shannon's touch for characters also applies to minor characters. Liffey's daughter Maeve, for example, is a delightful 13 going on 30.

THE ORANGE CURTAIN is less a mystery to be solved than it is a set of observations into human nature, the intermingled but distinct societies of Southern California, and the challenges a man must face to stand himself in the morning. Does that sound heavy? In this case, it isn't. The novel is a fast read with several great a-ha moments.

Highly Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: ORANGE YOU GLAD YOU READ THIS?
Review: Moving from mass market paperback originals into hardcover is a tightrope act for mystery writers: on one side lies a chasm of critical preconceptions ("Can this writer deliver quality goods?"); on the other a yawning gap of commercial expectations ("Is this writer worth spending big bucks on?") In recent memory, only Harlan Coben and Laura Lippman have made the transition with ease and grace. Now John Shannon appears ready to join their select company. With THE ORANGE CURTAIN, his fourth book about Jack Liffey -- a rough-edged, shaggy victim of a former economic crash (the one before the current one) who roams the Los Angeles area searching for other people's children -- Shannon pulls off one of those career breakthroughs that make the writing life so interesting. Previous Liffey outings have dealt smartly and originally with most of the L.A. cliches: earthquakes, pollution, old movie stars, wacky religious cults. Now comes the hard part: showing how 30 years of living with the knowledge of our Vietnam failure has shaped the lives of old and new Southern Californians. "What kind of place eat up children like this?" cries a tough, determined woman named Tien as she helps Jack mourn the death of a young girl he was hired to find. "You think it wouldn't be so hard for us, don't you, huh? We all been in wartime and we see many friend and family die in war, but maybe that what make it so bad. We come ten thousand mile. We finally think we okay here and no more surprise dying, all finish, and we relax and learn new business and raise our family and learn to become American, and boom, it all come back with no warn..." The same perfect pitch which captures Tien's speech patterns also makes Shannon's other characters glow with originality and energy: Liffey's prematurely wise teenage daughter, the kind but desperately needy Latina woman he lives with, the Vietnamese gang leader he comes up hard against as he searches for the missing girl, and a very sad and spooky youth named Billy who might easily have slipped into genre grotesque in lesser hands. Let's hope that enough of Shannon's former paperback loyalists will be willing to up the ante and make him the hardcover star he deserves to be.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: The Orange Curtain was my introduction to John Shannon. I am now going to read the previous titles. Here is a writer with remarkable skills, both in narrative and in characterization. As well, his hero Jack Liffey is a man of such thoughtful intelligence that he stands well above the usual macho-jock types who play leading roles in so many series. The creation of Billy Gudger is something rare: a fully rounded view of loneliness personified and of how cruelty and isolation can shape a killer. Unlike the two-dimensional bad guys with incoherent rationales who kill people from some warped sense of personal satisfaction, Shannon has, in Gudger, drawn a portrait of a sad, even forgivable, young man with no social skills, and a deep and terrible thirst for knowledge and for friendship. It is to the author's credit that the exchanges between Liffey and Gudger are sadly revealing of the souls of both men; and the final section of the book is a fine example of how tension can be tightened, then tightened some more, then more, before something finally snaps.

Here is an author to watch; he is an extraordinary writer, with insight, wisdom, and great feeling for his characters.

Rating:
Summary: JUSTICE IS DONE
Review: There was an enormous amount of anger among mystery writers when John Shannon's previous publisher dropped him from their list. We all knew that Shannon was as fine a writer as any of us, and we also knew that Shannon's strongest Jack Liffey novel was next in line for publication.

With THE ORANGE CURTAIN, Mr. Shannon proves his previous publisher wrong and his current publisher the luckiest publishing house on the face of the earth. Shannon has switched publishers, shifted from paperback originals into hardcover, and delivered a masterpiece to the mystery reading community.

Jack Liffey, former aerospace worker, continues his new career of hunting missing children. While his formerly comfortable life is gone, Liffey continues to hold onto his innate humanity. This humanity is one of the ingredients I enjoy most about this series.

In THE ORANGE CURTAIN, Liffey's task is to locate Phuong Minh, a Vietnamese bookseller's daughter. During his search, Liffey finds himself tangling with gang violence, corrupt politics, and the ethnic tranformation of contemporary Southern California. Little Saigon exists in Orange County because of America's Southeast Asian adventure and echoes of that war from a third of a century ago reverberate throughout this novel. During the course of his story, Shannon delivers explosive action, social observations, and humor as he builds to a magnificent climax.

As a mystery writer who deals with similar themes in similar Orange County settings, I can vouch for the fact that John Shannon has mastered his material. He has gotten it right. THE ORANGE CURTAIN will likely be his breakthrough book. Shannon deserves it. His readers deserve it. Justice is done.

Rating:
Summary: Cross-Cultural Clashes
Review: This is the first book I have read by John Shannon although it is the fourth of the Jack Liffey series. I now find myself obliged to backtrack through the earlier stories, which will be no great hardship.

It would have to be a challenge for an author to separate his own life experiences and aspirations from those of his main character. The fact that John and Jack are almost interchangeable names and that Ireland's two best-known rivers are the Shannon and the Liffey is a clear admission by the author of this strong link. Be that as it may, Shannon does develop the character of Liffey cleverly as a regular guy, still reeling from the recent losses of his wife and his job, not to mention the custody of his young adolescent daughter. Jack's skills in tracking down missing children and his war experience on the ground in Vietnam make him possibly an ideal person to help locate the beautiful bright American born, university age, Phuong Minh (Phoenix), the daughter of Vietnamese immigrant Minh Trac.

Set in almost America's heartland of Los Angeles, the main action is centred in the Vietnamese equivalent of China town. Here, gangs of youths roam the precincts, terrorise not just the locals but also any "visitors", and generally rule the roost. Jack Liffey soon finds himself on the wrong end of a gangland beating but has the courage to allow himself to be seduced by the glamorous headstrong Tien Joubert, formerly Phuong's employer. Is it courage or is actually the weakness inherent in almost all males when it comes to resisting feminine charm?

Not long after he starts his search for the missing girl, her body is discovered. Jack's job is over, or is it? Can he really call off his hunt at this stage? Of course he can't. It's not about his fee any more but about getting to the truth.

Shannon's main story has a couple of inner story lines within the frame of the book that add mystery to the possible reasons for Phuong's disappearance. One is that a number of murders have taken place in the area. A serial killer could have perpetrated these. If so, who could that be? Another thread is the story of a sad, pitiable character, a loner and a strange person indeed, whose life is lived in a state of misery, depression and squalor. Could he be the serial killer, Phuong's killer, both or neither? There is a controversial airport development on the drawing board with the usual disparate community extremes surrounding its future. Then of course there is the world of the immigrant Vietnamese who operate in a very different style and culture from the regular American way of doing things.

The tension and thrill of the chase build up, as Jack gets closer to the truth. Inevitably, he once again faces great danger as he closes in on the final acts of this dramatic novel. Amongst the better features of this book is that it doesn't stretch credulity. The violence, characters and story line all ring very true.

Rating:
Summary: I've discovered Jack Liffey!
Review: This is the first of John Shannon's Jack Liffey mysteries I've read, though I see it's the fourth book in the series. It gave me a fascinating glimpse into the Vietnamese community of Orange County, LA, as well as introducing me to a central character I immediately want to more about. Jack Liffey is no super-hero, but a decent sort of guy trying to do his best in a crazy world (and some aspects of Liffey's LA are definitely crazy!). John Shannon is a great writer who keeps the reader interested throughout, and I can't understand why he isn't much better known. 'The Orange Curtain' is highly recommended.