Blurb...... About as noir as it can be…excellent’ Frances Fyfield, Daily Telegraph
The city is Los Angeles, the birthplace of the
American dream, a city that has come to symbolize both heaven and hell. Billy
McGrath is an enigma, half American, half English, who once dreamed of pursuing
a career as an academic philosopher, but for the last fifteen years he’s been a
homicide detective – one of LA’s best. He knows the rules, and understands a
justice system that punishes the underprivileged and lets the rich go free.
He’s an unhappy man, divorced from the wife he still adores and separated from
a daughter for whom he’d willingly die. If he hasn’t yet thought of suicide, he
soon will.
McGrath is called to a crime scene – a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city’s seamiest neighbourhoods, an apparently routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman’s son is LA’s biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name of the killer. Making the wrong choice for what might be the right reasons, McGrath initiates both his own fall from grace and, as he strives to redeem himself, a series of wild and furious actions that hurtle him through the many identities of corrupt Los Angeles.
In McGrath, Rayner has created a sympathetic everyman who becomes both victim and victor. Set against a bleak cityscape, Murder Book is a dark, violent and sexy thriller that is impossible to put down.
McGrath is called to a crime scene – a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city’s seamiest neighbourhoods, an apparently routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman’s son is LA’s biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name of the killer. Making the wrong choice for what might be the right reasons, McGrath initiates both his own fall from grace and, as he strives to redeem himself, a series of wild and furious actions that hurtle him through the many identities of corrupt Los Angeles.
In McGrath, Rayner has created a sympathetic everyman who becomes both victim and victor. Set against a bleak cityscape, Murder Book is a dark, violent and sexy thriller that is impossible to put down.
I bought
this when it was first published back in the late 90’s having been drawn by the
LA Times remark on the cover of my copy.....”Neo-neo-Noir”........hell, not
just Noir but Neo-neo-Noir!
I tried
reading this some years ago, but as often happens to me the book you pick up at
the time doesn’t suit your mood, so quickly gets returned to the shelf, whilst
something more suitable steps up in place.
Well this
time around I was maybe 40 pages in and thinking.........hmmm, not too bad, and
then it died on me. I must have spent a week persevering through the next
100-150 pages at which point the pace picked up again and maintained until the
end.
Okay-ish, in
a sort of I don’t care too much what happens manner.
Beginning - good, long, long, middle -total grimness,
last section - alright.
Conclusions:
Neo-neo-noir
is some horrible 90’s inferior version of noir and if I ever pick up another
title recommended by Francis Fyfield it will be because I’ve suffered amnesia
probably after being hit round the head by a box full of remaindered copies of
Rayner’s other books, if this one is anything to go by.
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