PUBLISHERS WEEKLY -- Ghosts of the 1960s and '70s haunt this
bruising second entry in Brubaker and Phillips's bloody-knuckled
L.A. noir series. It's 1985 and ex-FBI agent and current paladin
for hire Ethan Reckless is grinding through private-eye cases,
mourning his father, and losing himself by watching old sitcoms at
his shuttered movie theater office. Falling hard for Linh Tran, a
tough-as-nails library clerk, he agrees to help find her sister
Maggie, who vanished into the Hollywood fleshpots years before.
After spotting Maggie in the background of a crummy exploitation
flick, Ethan begins pulling at the tangled threads of a seedy
operation and unravels a tale of the city's fall from hippie
optimism, with movie producers taking advantage of
fresh-off-the-bus ingenues, an Aleister Crowley meets Charles
Manson cult, and Nazi skinheads (“for some reason, there always had
to be skinheads”). Ethan pursues his leads doggedly but with a
baked-in cynicism, knowing that after solving the case he and Linh
would just “wait for the truth to destroy us.” The art is varied,
richly colored, and grittily textured as old film stock. Despite
the series' dour lead, the sharp cultural references, bone-deep
knowledge of the Southland, and pulsing through line of righteous
heroism will make readers eager for Ethan's next reluctant
adventure. (May)
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