Customer Reviews

City of Strangers: A Jack Liffey Mystery (Otto Penzler Books)

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What is notable about John Shannon's Jack Liffey series is the author's depth of feeling and respect for young people. What is also of signal importance is the author's talent for creating thoroughly believable characters--even the villains. Take, for example, the fat man so immense that he requires two chairs to accommodate his width. In anyone else's hands, this creature would be a blob of amorphous evil--intent purely on doing his motiveless bad deeds. But with Shannon at the helm, we're presented with a history that makes the character so real that his behavior is genuinely shocking because we don't want to think that someone thoughtful and articulate can, given his intimate first-hand acquaintanceship with pain, proceed to inflict that same pain (literally) on someone else. Yet he does. And it feels very real; the reader shares Liffey's injuries--both physical and psychic. The same skill is at work in defining the young people in City of Strangers, especially the exquisitely drawn Fariborz who is a living, breathing portrait of internal conflict--a good soul on a crusade to awaken people to the wrongness all around them.

As always, when Liffey ultimately makes contact with the young people he's been hired to find, there are deeply thoughtful exchanges. Never condescending, never patronizing, always self-deprecating, yet always sensitive to their struggles--whether real or imagined--Liffey enters into their lives offering his battered heart and body as support for their sorrows. No one I've read has such a profound grasp on the issues that are central to the lives of youngsters approaching the treacherous border of adulthood. Liffey is a good man whose empathy is a poultice for the injured young, drawing out their pain and taking it into himself--like the archetypal sin eater.

Then, gleefully, there are the apocalyptic views that are sprinkled throughout every Liffey adventure. This time out, sadly, there are no little rat-like dogs to be hated. But there is a billboard advertising Drive-Through Hi-Colonics. Relief Without Waiting. (Hilarious!) And there are a couple of bemasked individuals on the street, holding up a banner that says, "Open Up Area 51, Display the Alien Remains."

Finally, happily, Jack has connected with the redoubtable Miss Rebecca Plumkill. And there are bits of a shredded foam pillow littering the bedroom. Now how, we have to wonder with amusement, did that happen? And aren't we glad that some warm light has managed to filter through the gloom of Jack's sorrows!
My highest recommendation.

Here's another great book from John Shannon! It's full of contempory issues such as dirty bombs and Arab Islamic terrorists. As well as covering Los Angeles scenes, which Shannon does better than anyone else I've read, he takes us across the border for a danger-filled visit to Mexico, complete with a vicious drug lord. Jack Liffey gets pretty beaten up this time, but he encounters a couple of interesting new women to ease the pain. He survives it all with courage and integrity intact and with a little help from his daughter Maeve, who seems to be more involved in keeping him alive as the books go on. It was such an engaging story that I could hardly put it down! I'm eager for the next book so I can find out which little corners of L.A., ethnic groups, and social issues, the multi-dimensional Jack Liffey will deal with as he and "Sancho Panza" Maeve drift around my city.

For several years now, John Shannon's series of Jack Liffey mysteries has provided us not only great reads but a social history of Los Angeles, one neighborhood at a time. "City of Strangers" explores Southern California's Iranian community against a backdrop of drug dealing and terrorist plots. At the heart of it is a nightmare journey through the slums of Tijuana and across the border that viscerally recalls scenes in Richard Ford's "The Ultimate Good Luck." This comparison isn't forced; Shannon is a thoroughly literary writer, and Liffey, his detective, isn't a crime-solving automaton but a human being, weary but dogged, flawed but admirable, a religious unbeliever who can't stop grappling with the fundamental questions.
"City of Strangers" has a thriller ending, in which Islamic extremists plan to detonate a "dirty bomb" over that capital of hedonism and excess, West L.A. It's important to note, though, that Shannon's attitude toward the Iranian teen-agers caught up in the plot is a sympathetic one; he's trying to use the scariness of the genre to open our eyes, not harden our hearts.
In time, surely, the Liffey novels will get their due and become national best-sellers. For readers new to them, however, "City of Strangers" is a good place to start.

I recently reviewed John Shannon's book "Streets on Fire" rather negatively. I want to go on record as saying that I just dislike the *book*, not the character or the author. This next entry in the series, Jack Liffey's sixth adventure, is called City of Strangers, and though I was at times a bit annoyed with the author's attitude towards Muslim extremists, I found the plot very believable, and the ending satisfying.

This time around, Jack's been hired by a college roommate who's now a shrink. The shrink has a daughter who's 17 and who's vanished without a trace. The only real clue is that she had an Iranian boyfriend, who dumped her after converting to a more radical version of Islam. When Liffey interviews the boy's parents, it's immediately apparent that things aren't what they seem, and the story takes off.

Shannon's made Liffey into an interesting character. He's sort of the prototype of the old-fashioned private eye. If he gets into a fight with the bad guys, he *might* win if there's only one guy to fight. Two, and he'll probably lose. If they shoot at him, he ducks, runs, hides, whatever, and gets hurt more often than not, winding up in the hospital. And of course the women enjoy him a great deal, and he winds up in bed with 1 or 2 per book.

I enjoyed this entry into the series a lot more than the last one. The author didn't try quite as hard to make LA look silly, and the plot was more satisfying. Recommended.

Since losing his job as an aerospace engineer, Jack Liffey has become something of a specialist in finding missing children. So, when an old school acquaintance asks him to find his missing daughter, Liffey is happy to help out--even if the acquaintance insists on reports and psychological analysis (he's a psychologist). The missing daughter was associated with four Persian-american high school boys, also missing. It doesn't seem like an especially difficult case, although the arrival of an FBI agent gives Liffey a hint that things are going to get difficult.

Liffey's investigation takes him from Los Angeles to Mexican border towns, involves Arabic terrorists, terrorizing Mexican drug dealers, and layers of government corruption, lies, and secrets. As always, Liffey finds a portion of what he is looking for--and a lot more. Persian-American student Fariborz Bayat plays a major role in helping Liffey and, through Liffey, gains a deeper understanding of his humanity, his relationship with Islam, and his moral senses.

Author John Shannon has created a powerful and complex character in Jack Liffey. His love for his daughter, philosophical approach to the world, anguish over his erratic sexual performance, and tough moral code make him both admirable and approachable. As a reader, I'm not sure I would like Liffey, but I am sure I would want to have him on my side.

Shannon knows that moral questions can be tough, that an assurance of righteousness is often the mask of evil, and that goodness exists outside of the arbitrary whim of a God--but he conveys his message through story rather than through artifice. CITY OF STRANGERS is a powerful and emotionally moving story. I highly recommend it.

I loved this book! John Shannon combines great plot, great characters, and a social conscience in a thriller noir style mystery. The plot is fairly complex and covers a lot of ground - racism, class bias, the divisions among arabs and persians, terrorism, dirty bombs, drug smuggling, divorced parenting, car trouble, and raising a teenage girl. Some diaglogue borders on didactic, but still engrossing. The setting is LA grungy, very realistic. If you like your thrillers with some gravity to them, you'll like this book. I can't wait to read the next one.