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Chargement... White Heatpar Paul D. Marks
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Private Investigator Duke Rogers finds himself right in the middle of the 1992 race riots after the beating of Rodney King by police officers was caught on tape in Los Angeles. He's already doubting himself after unknowingly tracking down a woman's address for a man who stalked and finally murdered her. Living is dangerous and even more so when civility is tossed out the window. It's 1992 and the decision about the Rodney King case is about to become public. P.I. Duke Rogers is asked to find an address for a lost classmate for a new client. He gets the address and learns that the so called classmate was a black TV star and the client was a stalker who just murdered her. He feels obligated to find the woman, Teddie Matson's killer but it's hard to go to a black neighboorhood and ask questions when racial tensions are so intense. Then, another woman is being bothered by a stalker and asks for Duke's help. Laurie Hamilton can't get any help from police because they are so busy with the riots. The author tells an interesting story. I would have liked more character development but this story is a good read. The dialog is well done and fans of Elmore Leonard should enjoy this novel. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la sérieP.I. Duke Rogers (1) Prix et récompenses
PI Duke Rogers finds himself in a combustible situation in this racially charged thriller. His case might have to wait. The immediate problem: getting out of South Central Los Angeles in one piece during the 1992 "Rodney King" riots ... and that's just the beginning of his problems. Duke finds an old "friend" for a client. The client's "friend," an up and coming African-American actress, ends up dead. Duke knows his client did it. Feeling guilty that he inadvertently helped the killer find the victim, he wants to track down the client/killer. He starts his mission by going to the dead actress' family in South Central L.A., and while there the "Rodney King" riots ignite. While Duke searches for the killer he must also deal with the racism of his partner, Jack, and from Warren, the murder victim's brother, who is a mirror image of Jack in that department. He must also confront his own possible latent racism -- even as he's in an interracial relationship with the dead woman's sister. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyÉvaluationMoyenne:
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White Heat won the Shamus Award for Best Indie PI novel in 2013, and I certainly see why. There are several elements to this book that make it more than just the run-of-the-mill private dick story. Exhibit A: the fantastic descriptions of Los Angeles. Having been to L.A. a total of once, most of my ideas about La-La Land come from TV, movies, and books. Marks does a remarkable job of portraying a city in crisis, a portrayal, I might add, that is more vivid than Raymond Chandler's L.A. and more realistic and complex than James Ellroy's. (Note: I love both of those writers and their books). Exhibit B: the palpable tension running through the narrative. Stalking is a big theme in this book, and as I read, I felt the fear, anxiety, and paranoia gripping me. Throughout the novel, there are italicized sections of inner monologue that serve to put the reader inside Rogers's head and in the belly of the riots. Exhibit C: the commentary on race. It's damned hard to successfully weave social and/or political commentary into a novel without coming off as preachy, but Marks pulls it off.
Bottom line, I've come up with a simple question for determining if a book is really good or not: how many hours of work and/or sleep did you lose because you couldn't stop reading? Let's just say I have a stack of ungraded essays on my desk, and my eyelids are very heavy. Cheers to the author of White Heat for that. ( )