The Orange Curtain: A Jack Liffey Mystery [Hardcover]

John Shannon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2001 | Series: Jack Liffey Mysteries

If you've not met Jack Liffey -- and every mystery lover should -- here's your chance. This taut new novel featuring author John Shannon's "brave and decent" hero also offers you the perfect opportunity to get hooked on this much-admired mystery series. Liffey's turf is the sprawling, deceptively open cityscape of greater Los Angeles with its forgotten suburbs, its volatile communities, its dangerous neighborhoods. To the anguished despair of parents and protectors, it's a city that holds lots of dark, secreted places for sons and daughters to hide. Or be hidden. Jack Liffey may have lost his job in the aerospace industry but he has found his calling -- tracking down lost children. His case in The Orange Curtain takes him deep into the Los Angeles Vietnamese community, where a beautiful young woman, Phuong -- her name means Phoenix -- has disappeared. The exotic realities and complex alliances of Little Saigon are not all that Liffey has to contend with, however. Beyond its boundaries there's a sad young man named Billy. Billy likes to watch people, and he has a relationship with his mother as strange as any in Hitchcock.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers who like gritty noir leavened by genuine heart and a healthy dollop of erudition a 93-year-old Phillip Marlowe makes an appearance will love Shannon's fourth Jack Liffey mystery (after The Poison Sky). Shannon returns to a Los Angeles the Hollywood types don't even drive through. Jack Liffey, who hunts missing kids, lost his once comfy life in the aerospace bust. The job, wife and custody of his beloved daughter are gone. What he's got is a jealous girlfriend, a junker car, a disconcerting fear of death and a sentimental bent toward trying to protect the innocent. He crosses the "Orange curtain" between the random craziness of L.A. and Orange County's Little Saigon to search for Phuong Minh, a Vietnamese bookseller's daughter. The compassionate, intelligent sleuth is just beginning to pick his way through gang clashes, county politics and successful comes-ons by Phuong's mentor, lovely, aggressive businesswoman Tien Joubert, when Phuong's body is found in the hills. She was shot, apparently the victim of a serial killer. From the start, Shannon has given readers an uneasy idea of who that killer might be. Young Billy Gudger's story unfolds alongside Jack Liffey's and an obsessive, lonely, frightening story it is. When the parallel lines meet, Shannon delivers a tour-de-force climax, with the action believably, and beautifully, driven by each character's needs. There's nothing super-heroic about Jack Liffey, but he's an unusually decent and interesting guy. (Apr. 1)Forecast: Relatively unknown, Shannon could break out with this book, rights to which have already been sold to the U.K., Germany, France and Japan.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

LA's Jack Liffey tracks down missing children for a living, but, try as he may, he cannot find Minh Trac's college-aged daughter. Beautiful, extremely bright, and highly motivated, the young woman has vanished until she turns up dead, the latest victim of the "Sagebrush Killer." Liffey toils on, though, despite being mugged by a Vietnamese gang, detoured by a controversial regional airport development scheme, and initially evaded by the murderer in question. Wry humor and a brilliant collection of bizarre characters will endear this fourth novel in the Jack Liffey series to many. Highly recommended.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf; First Edition edition (April 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078670876X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786708765
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,027,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waaaaay Better Than Your Average Mystery, April 22, 2001

By 

Llonald L. King "LLon King" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Orange Curtain: A Jack Liffey Mystery (Hardcover)

I'm not normally much of a mystery reader. I guess I'm a bit of a prose snob. I confess. For my taste, mysteries tend to be a bit insipid. Characters are too often one-dimentional: overly described and under-developed. Plots may be clever but are so totally predictable. Atmosphere is too often written in little florid slashes, in a kind of straight-jacketed prose brought in specially just to set the scene.

Not so with John Shannon's Jack Liffy series. Wow. These books rock. This man can write. His sentences are beautiful and thought-provoking, yet he can slash through a scene, leaving you breathless and needing more, as well as anyone I've read. And Shannon gives the reader real characters and a true sense of place, not just walking cartoons and specially engineered atmospherics.

This new book, The Orange Curtain, may be the best yet in the Jack Liffy series, but all of Shannon's Jack Liffy mysteries have been well done. The first book, Concrete River really captured for me a section of the slimy underbelly of Los Angeles. No mystery writer since Chander has sliced LA open and spilled out its guts as compellingly as Shannon has. LA is a huge place. There are lots of corners to explore. This new book, The Orange Curtain, takes in, among other things, Orange County and its huge Vietnamese population. It's a great book, whether you want to disappear into it on the coast-to-coast airliner or want to take it in over several days and savor its wonderful prose and interesting characters. It's a great book, and this is a series that just keeps getting better.

There is plenty of punch in this book for you mystery addicts, plenty of hard-boiled sentiment and riveting, page-turning action. But between the lines--in the lines--there is also some superb writing.

I can't wait for the next one.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!, June 30, 2001

By 

Charlotte Vale-Allen (CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Orange Curtain: A Jack Liffey Mystery (Hardcover)

The Orange Curtain was my introduction to John Shannon. I am now going to read the previous titles. Here is a writer with remarkable skills, both in narrative and in characterization. As well, his hero Jack Liffey is a man of such thoughtful intelligence that he stands well above the usual macho-jock types who play leading roles in so many series. The creation of Billy Gudger is something rare: a fully rounded view of loneliness personified and of how cruelty and isolation can shape a killer. Unlike the two-dimensional bad guys with incoherent rationales who kill people from some warped sense of personal satisfaction, Shannon has, in Gudger, drawn a portrait of a sad, even forgivable, young man with no social skills, and a deep and terrible thirst for knowledge and for friendship. It is to the author's credit that the exchanges between Liffey and Gudger are sadly revealing of the souls of both men; and the final section of the book is a fine example of how tension can be tightened, then tightened some more, then more, before something finally snaps.

Here is an author to watch; he is an extraordinary writer, with insight, wisdom, and great feeling for his characters.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I've discovered Jack Liffey!, May 14, 2002

By 

"mystery395" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Orange Curtain: A Jack Liffey Mystery (Hardcover)

This is the first of John Shannon's Jack Liffey mysteries I've read, though I see it's the fourth book in the series. It gave me a fascinating glimpse into the Vietnamese community of Orange County, LA, as well as introducing me to a central character I immediately want to more about. Jack Liffey is no super-hero, but a decent sort of guy trying to do his best in a crazy world (and some aspects of Liffey's LA are definitely crazy!). John Shannon is a great writer who keeps the reader interested throughout, and I can't understand why he isn't much better known. 'The Orange Curtain' is highly recommended.