The Orange Curtain

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.