Private investigator John Blake gets the news that his girlfriend from high school, ten years ago, has been murdered, execution style. He decides he’s got to find out why. And how did she go from a pre-med in college to dancing in a sleazy strip club?

I was pleasantly surprised by this book! I found this on the shelves of our local Dollar Tree store and wasn't sure what to expect. And it's a pretty darn good detective noir! I really liked the imagery of the "...shoddy styrofoam bird in its shoddy wooden cage." Very strongly written! A heck of a bang for my $1.09! (that's with taxes)

"This was the accumulated stuff of a life, left out for any scavenger who saw something he liked and for the garbage trucks that would cart away the rest." ( )

An interesting twist on the format with the "hardboiled" PI being a young wimp. Not sure I'm willing to stick around to find out if he grows up to be a big bad PI by book 7. ( )

I have wanted to try a selection from the HARD CASE CRIME pulp novel series for most of the decade that they have been around. For the uninitiated, this imprint created in 2004 prints new (including the most recent entry by Stephen King) and reprints classic examples of crime thrillers ( so far including Lawrence Block, Earl Stanley Gardner, Donald Westlake, Ed McBain & Harlan Ellison. My first foray into the series was LITTLE GIRL LOST by Richard Aleas who created the imprint. The story moves well and is fairly well populated with interesting characters. The main character is of course a detective but unlike most novels of this genre where virtually everyone is world weary, Aleas’ PI John Blake is still wet behind the ears. His lack of experience is why he takes on a case that more than likely will just lead to heartache. His relative youth allows for the reader and the detective to learn certain life lessons together as the plot unspools. This was played with at first but was not followed up with very successfully the rest of the way. The plot has sufficient twists and turns to keep the pages turning but about half way through I knew who the killer was. Was kinda waiting around to see how the situation would be wrapped up. Some similarity to a classic, THE MALTESE FALCON. On the whole it was a solid read but it wasn’t always the story that drew me back. Sometimes it was just the feel of the book and the lurid quality to the cover. The HARD CASE CRIME series creates original pulp inspired art for the covers…art work that I relish. Even the shape of the book seems smaller on the whole than other paperbacks…a reminder of the basic blue collar ready to discard nature of the books the series wishes to emulate. I will be collecting new covers. ( )

John Blake is in his late 20s and is a private investigator. When he sees in the news that his high school girlfriend, now a stripper, has been murdered, he takes it upon himself to find out what happened. Not just the murder, but how did the girl he once knew, who left to go to school to become an eye doctor (optometrist or ophthalmologist, he couldn’t remember), end up a murdered stripper ten years later?

I really liked this one. There was a personal element to it, so that might be why I liked this more than most “noir” mysteries that I’ve read. But also, I liked John and I liked one of the other characters who was helping him. It crossed my mind at one point (in part) what might have happened, but I had good reason to doubt that, so it only briefly floated through my mind. So, the end wasn’t a complete surprise, though it did have to be explained how that could even be (and it was explained). There is another book in the series, but only one more, so I’m not sure if there will be more or not, but I will definitely read the 2nd one. ( )

This book, Little Girl Lost, is a terrific pulpy adventure. John and Miranda were high school sweethearts. The night before graduation they finally went all the way. She was his first love. Miranda went off
to college, intending to start a pre-med program and eventually become an ophthalmologist. Ten years have gone by and they lost track of each other as often happens.

John is now 29. He is a private eye,working out of a two- man outfit with an excop for a partner. John sees her high school yearbook photo in the newspaper. She's been found dead on the rooftop of a strip club with two hollow point bullets in her skull. John makes it his mission to bring her killer to justice.

The action never stops in this book as baby faced John bounces from strip clubs to drug lords trying to find the answers to who killed Miranda and how she ended up where she did ten years later. Along the way, he's beaten and charged with murder and consorts with all kinds of lowlife scum.
It doesn't matter if you can solve the mystery before the end. In this case, the journey is what's important. ( )