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It's the year Y2K, and Mickey O'Rourke, a seventy-eight-year-old L.A. private investigator, is taking on one last case before retirement. The mystery in question is the disappearance of former porn star Jeffrey Strokes. The client is Bethany Summers, Strokes' former girlfriend and co-worker at MidnightPussy Productions. O'Rourke's leads take him through some seedy scenes of San Fernando Valley and Compton, where he pieces together three different trajectories of perfect strangers that led to Strokes being missing in action.
Elliott's latest novel in his Angel City universe is a crime fiction delight, with wonderful momentum, intriguing characters, and a satisfyingly solved whodunnit. His novel bounces back and forth between the span of 1998 to 2000. It follows the storylines of Jemeka Johnson, a struggling hair salon employee, and Richie (a robber and junkie) alongside Mickey's investigation to paint a complicated picture of desperation, greed, love, and the mistakes that even decent people can make.
The book's characters are as diverse as the cities they live in, and the author does a great job of capturing each character's humanity as well as how their environments have shaped them. Through the author's use of detail, the story refers to both political and pop-cultural moments that impacted America during the late '90s and early 2000s, setting the scene for the hardships Mickey's suspects face. The author manages to keep readers guessing, even as the plots come together in the second act. There's a shift in the story from solving the mystery to uncovering how those involved in the disappearance succeed, and it hooks the reader in, one bad decision after the other.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review