Customer Reviews

In La La Land We Trust

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Los Angeles based Private Investigator, Whistler, is the modern day version of Mickey Spillane's hero, Mike Hammer, short, only moderately good looking but with the cocky, slick dialogue of a street smart good guy. He happens to be at the right place at the right time when a headless female corpse slides out of the back of a mortuary station wagon, after an accident involving a well known TV actor. Whistler's friend,an L.A.P.D detective, tells him that a female head was found by a lake near New Orleans and that the body is that of a Vietnamese prostitute who was forced into making pornographic movies for a known producer of "snuff" movies in N.O. The story then moves back and forth between the two cities with gruesome details of the seamy and frankly evil business of child pornography and movies where women are killed as a finale. It's a terrifying look at a side of life of which, thankfully, most people are not aware. For all its horrors, this book is written in a wry fashion, glossing over the seaminess with clever dialogue...I'll be looking forward to meeting Whistler again in another book.

Robert Campbell's Whistler series is a sort of combination of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy--PI tales that are darker than noir.

When a bodiless head is found in New Orleans and a headless body turns up in LA, Whistler gets drawn into a case involving kiddie porn, snuff films and the seamy underbelly of both LA and the Big Easy. Campbell, like Elmore Leonard, is especially strong on dialogue and he introduces many memorable characters. A very good entry in the Post-Modern private eye genre.

GRADE: B

N.B.--These books are not recommended for the squeamish.