Boystown: A Jack Liffey Mystery

Shannon’s lackluster 15th outing for Jack Liffey (after The Chinese Beverly Hills) finds the L.A. private eye recovering from a stroke and heart surgery. While he’s sidelined, Jack’s daughter, UCLA art student Maeve, enlists his help with her own case: her girlfriend’s 19-year-old activist brother has gone missing. But a much larger, more complex plot kicks off when racist thug Zeke Tomlin, while poaching deer with his buddies in the Eastern Sierras, wounds Petro Pogorelets, a butterfly collector and philosophy instructor from Ukraine. This random act of violence escalates into a hard-fought war in West Hollywood, pitting the vengeful and resourceful Pogorelets against Tomlin and his crew. While the title nods to West Hollywood’s gay population, Shannon’s focus is primarily on the neighborhood’s rough-and-ready Ukrainian and Russian expats, including a ruthless firebomber and a former special-ops agent. As always, Shannon makes great use of his gritty L.A. setting, but the through line connecting the missing brother to Pogorelets and Tomlin’s guerrilla war grows more tenuous as the novel progresses, with opaque allusions to past Liffey novels and excessive exposition shoehorned in to fill in the blanks. This misses the mark. (Dec.)