The Forgotten Addiction

In Lion’s workmanlike follow-up to 2009’s The Butcher’s Granddaughter, Joseph Saroque hires the fixer Bird—not a PI, not a cop, not quite a crook, but very much a gumshoe in the Philip Marlowe mold—to find his missing 21-year-old daughter, Allison, a student at UCLA Bird roams through recognizable L.A. landmarks, from Sam Johnson’s Bookshop in Venice Beach to the Hollywood Strip, as Lion shoehorns in every scenario imaginable: beatings, college kids and roofies, a suspicious shrink named Braudel, a mob payoff, police forensics, a blackmail scheme plucked from ’50s noir, an interview with a maniac in an insane asylum. Soon Bird finds himself waist deep in victims sleeping the big sleep. While the explanation for Allison’s disappearance lacks the necessary pop (“It’s not Chinatown, Jake”), the streets are real, the going fun, the final showdown tightly written. (Nov.)