A Jack Liffey mystery

2 primary works • 9 total works

The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

Published 8 January 1999

Her name is Lori Bright. You might remember seeing her in "A Week in Palm Springs," lounging enticingly in the bathtub while and aging and flustered Cary Grant tries to find her a suitably revealing towel. Jack Liffey remembers, and even now he can't help but fall for her just a little. The problem is that she's paying him good money to locate her missing daughter--a case that's about to get Jack stuck between the seedy violence of the old City of Angels and the new gleaming bloodlust of today's L.A

The Devils of Bakersfield

by John Shannon

Published 17 April 2008

The seemingly sleepy oil town of Bakersfield has a long and grim history of hostility towards outsiders, be it the “Okies” during the Depression, African-Americans, or labor organizes. When Jack Liffey and his daughter Maeve end up in Bakersfield as a respite from their life in Los Angeles, they find that the town has cast its paranoid fears on a group of rebellious teenaged girls alleged to be Satanists. As hysteria mounts, there is a mammoth book burning and a police raid on all people they deem unsympathetic to their evangelical cause. In the chaos, Maeve disappears and Jack is racing against the clock to find her and save the girls from the town’s “exorcism.”

The Dark Streets

by John Shannon

Published 1 December 2006

The Dark Streets takes private investigator Jack Liffey to LA's glitzy, exotic Koreatown, where a young film student, Soon-Lin Kim, has apparently gone missing. Early in his search for her, Jack learns that Soon-Lin has been tangling with a giant Korean conglomerate.

Again, as in all the Liffey mysteries, the superbly-crafted action that makes John Shannon one of the most exciting detective-fiction writers on the California scene envelops Jack, and ultimately he finds himself under torturously intense interrogation at the secret compound of a private security agency—and for a climax as explosive as the violent lightning storm in the desert sky.

Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

Published 16 April 2002

Jack Liffey - the rough-edged, brave, compassionate private detective who garners more enthusiastic reviews with each new case - once again searches the volatile ethnic communities buried in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles for another of the city's mysteriously lost. This time, Liffey is looking for Amilcar Davis, the adopted son of a prominent black 1960s civil rights campaigner. Both Amilcar and his white girlfriend from Simi Valley have gone suspiciously missing from their small suburban college in the wake of an unsettling run-in with a motorcycle gang at a local jazz club. The whole city is unsettled, in fact, as a new wave of racial unrest is brewing over the choke-hold death of Abdullah-Ibrahim - a black Muslim and the Dodgers' new ace spitball pitcher - at the hands of the LA police. In the course of his investigation, Liffey runs afoul of skinheads, white supremacists, the Christian Right, and black separatists.
He also confronts his own latent racism before the city's ethnic tensions erupt into full-fledged riot that a bloodied, unconscious Liffey - by the will of his teenage daughter and the ingenuity of a gifted elevn-year-old black girl with a wheelbarrow and a pair of roller skates - only barely escapes with his life.

The Concrete River

by John Shannon

Published 1 April 1996

Dangerous Games

by John Shannon

Published 10 May 2005

The Orange Curtain

by John Shannon

Published 13 March 2001

Jack Liffey, a decent guy, compassionate and brave, again finds himself on a case that turns familiar city streets into dangerous war zones. Liffey's city is greater Los Angeles, his turf the forgotten suburbs, run-down neighbourhoods, and volatile ethnic communities. To the anguish and despair of parents and protectors a city like LA holds lots of places for sons and daughters to hide, or be hidden. Liffey understands loss. First he lost his job in the aerospace industry, then he lost his wife and daughter. In his unerring ability to track down missing children, however, he has found his true calling. His newest case takes him deep into Los Angeles' Vietnamese community, where a beautiful young woman, Phuong, has disappeared. But the exotic realities and complex alliances of Little Saigon are not all that Liffey has to contend with as he uncovers the corporate fraud and feuds surrounding plans to develop a new airport at El Toro Marine Base.

City of Strangers

by John Shannon

Published 13 April 2003

The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

Published 10 April 2000