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Jim Sader Mystery #2
Sleep With Slander
It started out as just another job for Long Beach private eye Jim Sader. Some old guy had spun him a story about his daughter's illegitimate child, who had been secretly adopted five years ago. Now an anonymous letter suggested that the boy was being brutally mistreaed. Sader thought he knew all about the self-deception and cruelty of the human heart, but nothing had prepared him for the sight of a starved and terrified five-year-old with whip-marks on his back.
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First published January 1, 1960
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About the author
Dolores Hitchens
69 books31 followersJulia Clara Catharine Dolores Birk Olsen Hitchens, better known as Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death. She also wrote under the pseudonyms D.B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley and Noel Burke.
Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective, and also branched out into other genres in her writing, including Western stories. Many of her mystery novels centered around a spinster character named Rachel Murdock.
Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964).
Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective, and also branched out into other genres in her writing, including Western stories. Many of her mystery novels centered around a spinster character named Rachel Murdock.
Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964).
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
May 26, 2021
Dolores Hitchens is yet another one of those underrated crime writers who seems to be primarily forgotten in today’s literary world. The number of women crime writers of the forties and fifties is small in number, particularly those who wrote under their own names. Hitchens wrote some forty novels between 1938 and 1973. Of particular importance here is that she published two private detective novels featuring California private eye Jim Sader: Sleep With Strangers (1955) and Sleep With Slander (1960), which are being re-published by the Library of America.
Sleep With Slander is the second book in the crime-fiction duo, published five years after the first book in the series. Hitchens really should have turned this into a lengthier series. Sader is a fascinating character and Hitchens writes about him so well. Sader is an older private eye, about fifty, and is based in 1950’s/1960’s Long Beach, California. Hitchens is quite familiar with the area and writes about the jets taking off from Los Alamitos Airbase.
As often happens with these private eyes, they are engaged by the wealthy and often under mysterious circumstances where the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not readily revealed. Thus, operating with one hand tied behind their backs, they try to ferret out the truth. The hiring interview is odd, with Gibbings telling Sader he has to have “a certain kind of man. A certain touch. I need a weasel, an opportunist, somebody with the mind of a shakedown artist. A corner-cutter. Even … you might say … a kind of pimp.”
Here, a wealthy architect, Gibbings, informs Sader that his daughter, who is not to be bothered under any circumstances whatsoever, gave birth to an illegitimate child and that child was given away. Now, five years later, the adoptive parents have died and it is not clear what happened to the baby except that Gibbings has now gotten letters claiming that the child is being abused.
Of course, the first thing we would do nowadays is search the internet for information. Sader strangely enough in 1960 does not take advantage of that cascade of information and has to do it the hard way by actually talking to people and interviewing them, including the men who were with the adoptive mother (Tina Champlain) when she drowned off Catalina Island. The father long since died in an air crash.
As is typical in these things, nothing really adds up or makes sense and Sader suspects he is being played for a fool and, in fact, told that in so many words. And, Sader goes to the adoptive mother’s last house, but it has been condemned like so many others to make way for a new freeway extension in Santa Monica. This gives Sader an “ominous, lurching sense of a loss of footing.” It seems that “Everywhere he turned in this thing, he ended in a blind alley.”
As Sader treks back and forth from Orange County to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica, he offers us a parched, windswept Southern California. He has given up drinking although he has to frequent bars to meet witnesses and to entertain the kind of gadflies who know all there is to know about anybody in high society. Sader has a partner, but the partner is out of town, never to be seen. In the end, Sader is not as money-grubbing as the lone detective persona would leave you to believe, but a crusader for justice. Cynical, older, always ending up eating burgers in drive-ins with carhops, Sader’s stories take us to a world that no longer exists.
Hitchens is quite a writer and her descriptions create pictures in the reader’s minds with just few words. Wanda Nevins, who comes as close to a femme fatale as anyone in this novel, lives in a house on a hill in Laguna Beach, had “fair clear skin, the kind of skin the old-fashioned songs always compared to rose petals” and “tawny and insolent eyes that looked directly into Sader’s face.” Sader looks at her and thinks she’s been spoiled good cause “For years and years people have stared at her because she’s beautiful, and kowtowed t her and run themselves ragged trying to please her – men especially – and now she has the manners of a bitch.” In a few short phrases, Hitchens does not just describe Nevins, but gives a whole history or at least the kind of history people come up with when they first meet someone and imagine they know who that person is and what they have experienced to become the person they appear to be.
It may also be as a woman writer Hitchens could write a hardboiled novel but explain things a little differently than a man could. Instead of simply going on about the curves on the architect’s receptionist, Hitchens notes she “had lavender lips, silver fingernails, a size thirty-nine bust, nice dimples, and she was pretty.” Then, Hitchens reminds the reader that “Her blonde hair needed touching up at the roots but on her it looked intriguing.” These little touches in the descriptions give the characters quite a bit of depth.
Overall, this novel is quite an impressive foray into the world of hardboiled private eyes. It stands up well to the test of time and still feels fresh sixty years later. While I cannot say with any certainty whether the rest of Hitchen’s extensive catalog matches up to this novel, the second in the series of two novels, there is definitely enough here to make a reader want to view more.
Sleep With Slander is the second book in the crime-fiction duo, published five years after the first book in the series. Hitchens really should have turned this into a lengthier series. Sader is a fascinating character and Hitchens writes about him so well. Sader is an older private eye, about fifty, and is based in 1950’s/1960’s Long Beach, California. Hitchens is quite familiar with the area and writes about the jets taking off from Los Alamitos Airbase.
As often happens with these private eyes, they are engaged by the wealthy and often under mysterious circumstances where the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not readily revealed. Thus, operating with one hand tied behind their backs, they try to ferret out the truth. The hiring interview is odd, with Gibbings telling Sader he has to have “a certain kind of man. A certain touch. I need a weasel, an opportunist, somebody with the mind of a shakedown artist. A corner-cutter. Even … you might say … a kind of pimp.”
Here, a wealthy architect, Gibbings, informs Sader that his daughter, who is not to be bothered under any circumstances whatsoever, gave birth to an illegitimate child and that child was given away. Now, five years later, the adoptive parents have died and it is not clear what happened to the baby except that Gibbings has now gotten letters claiming that the child is being abused.
Of course, the first thing we would do nowadays is search the internet for information. Sader strangely enough in 1960 does not take advantage of that cascade of information and has to do it the hard way by actually talking to people and interviewing them, including the men who were with the adoptive mother (Tina Champlain) when she drowned off Catalina Island. The father long since died in an air crash.
As is typical in these things, nothing really adds up or makes sense and Sader suspects he is being played for a fool and, in fact, told that in so many words. And, Sader goes to the adoptive mother’s last house, but it has been condemned like so many others to make way for a new freeway extension in Santa Monica. This gives Sader an “ominous, lurching sense of a loss of footing.” It seems that “Everywhere he turned in this thing, he ended in a blind alley.”
As Sader treks back and forth from Orange County to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica, he offers us a parched, windswept Southern California. He has given up drinking although he has to frequent bars to meet witnesses and to entertain the kind of gadflies who know all there is to know about anybody in high society. Sader has a partner, but the partner is out of town, never to be seen. In the end, Sader is not as money-grubbing as the lone detective persona would leave you to believe, but a crusader for justice. Cynical, older, always ending up eating burgers in drive-ins with carhops, Sader’s stories take us to a world that no longer exists.
Hitchens is quite a writer and her descriptions create pictures in the reader’s minds with just few words. Wanda Nevins, who comes as close to a femme fatale as anyone in this novel, lives in a house on a hill in Laguna Beach, had “fair clear skin, the kind of skin the old-fashioned songs always compared to rose petals” and “tawny and insolent eyes that looked directly into Sader’s face.” Sader looks at her and thinks she’s been spoiled good cause “For years and years people have stared at her because she’s beautiful, and kowtowed t her and run themselves ragged trying to please her – men especially – and now she has the manners of a bitch.” In a few short phrases, Hitchens does not just describe Nevins, but gives a whole history or at least the kind of history people come up with when they first meet someone and imagine they know who that person is and what they have experienced to become the person they appear to be.
It may also be as a woman writer Hitchens could write a hardboiled novel but explain things a little differently than a man could. Instead of simply going on about the curves on the architect’s receptionist, Hitchens notes she “had lavender lips, silver fingernails, a size thirty-nine bust, nice dimples, and she was pretty.” Then, Hitchens reminds the reader that “Her blonde hair needed touching up at the roots but on her it looked intriguing.” These little touches in the descriptions give the characters quite a bit of depth.
Overall, this novel is quite an impressive foray into the world of hardboiled private eyes. It stands up well to the test of time and still feels fresh sixty years later. While I cannot say with any certainty whether the rest of Hitchen’s extensive catalog matches up to this novel, the second in the series of two novels, there is definitely enough here to make a reader want to view more.
February 20, 2022
This is the second book with private eye Jim Sader after Sleep with Strangers and is even better. A compulsive read, it is not as dated as the previous one and the mystery really pulled me into the story. Sader is hired by a rich man, Gibbings to find a child after he’s received a letter telling him the child is being abused. It’s a twisty tale and Sader is a great, genuine character, very human and makes this an excellent hardboiled thriller.
March 13, 2023
Sleep with Slander effectively establishes a sense of urgency about a missing child and the wall of secrecy around him from the first page that carries through to the last. The second (and final) novel in the Jim Sader series follows the earlier Sleep with Strangers (1955), but here his partner is out of the picture, he doesn't fall in love, and at 50 years old everything is just that much more difficult than before. Sleep with Slander is just as good and maybe a bit better than the first novel. Again there are surprise twists and turns, bodies appear unexpectedly, and every character introduced seems suspect and untrustworthy (though interesting and well-sketched). The witnesses often have competing motives, Sader hits many dead ends as the frustration and urgency mount. As in the first novel, it's only dogged persistence that pays off, though here there's an even heavier emphasis on artful psychological elements. Sleep with Slander would've made a good movie. As good as they are, the two Sader novels just don't have the existential dread and ennui of the best noir fiction, though they had the makings of an excellent series of detective novels, if we'd just had the chance to see where Dolores Hitchens might've taken her ideas. [4★]
March 29, 2022
Very good mystery, about a private eye looking for an abused adopted child. The writing is crisp and there are several memorable and touching scenes and paragraphs about motherhood and sacrifice. These themes, however, never detract from the mystery/investigation.
For an excellent review, providing keen insights into how the gender of the writer likely influenced this rather hard boiled story, see
https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2...
For an excellent review, providing keen insights into how the gender of the writer likely influenced this rather hard boiled story, see
https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2...
August 5, 2021
I liked it. But this is not a good pick for dog lovers, I'll warn you about that. (And why twice? Really??)
I'm primarily rating this high, based on the story. This hard-boiled missing-child book does not ride on a style reminiscent of Chandler or MacDonald - it's a bit plain - and yet, in a way, I almost feel the book is the better for it. I mean, before I knew it, I had got to the end and felt that a lot of people had done a lot of terrible things, and revelations confirmed that, but she didn't dress it up. Some cynical shamus didn't have to assess everything with perfect, jaded turns of phrase, and hand me the skinny on all the reprehensible human behavior. It's just...a bleak story, involving troubling crimes - many stemming from the covering up of an illegitimate baby because of what society will think. People doing the wrong thing in the shadows, even though they mean well...until several years later the real predators swoop in.
Sader turns out to be a detective you can really root for, especially when he disobeys orders to just drop the whole thing. By the time that's the message, he's too invested, and not willing to leave an innocent lost in a wilderness of cruelty, for the potential dry-up of a paycheck to turn him off. He's more plain guy, than memorable social critic with a sly wit, because that's the way the book is written. And here maybe it should be said that although the understated nature of the style seems, at least for me, to make developments that much more shocking because of the matter-of-fact, "well of course this sucks that bad" writing, I did feel Sader himself perhaps could have stood out a bit more in his own story. Plain style, but also a more dynamic sleuth? - I think that could have been done. But, I'll take what I got.
There is an earlier book in the Sader series - by series, I mean two books, or at least that's my strong impression - that precedes this one, but even though I think the starter came back in print almost at the same time as this one, for some reason Sleep With Slander was so much easy to browse out of the spines and pick up. But I'll look for Sader's first case.
I'm primarily rating this high, based on the story. This hard-boiled missing-child book does not ride on a style reminiscent of Chandler or MacDonald - it's a bit plain - and yet, in a way, I almost feel the book is the better for it. I mean, before I knew it, I had got to the end and felt that a lot of people had done a lot of terrible things, and revelations confirmed that, but she didn't dress it up. Some cynical shamus didn't have to assess everything with perfect, jaded turns of phrase, and hand me the skinny on all the reprehensible human behavior. It's just...a bleak story, involving troubling crimes - many stemming from the covering up of an illegitimate baby because of what society will think. People doing the wrong thing in the shadows, even though they mean well...until several years later the real predators swoop in.
Sader turns out to be a detective you can really root for, especially when he disobeys orders to just drop the whole thing. By the time that's the message, he's too invested, and not willing to leave an innocent lost in a wilderness of cruelty, for the potential dry-up of a paycheck to turn him off. He's more plain guy, than memorable social critic with a sly wit, because that's the way the book is written. And here maybe it should be said that although the understated nature of the style seems, at least for me, to make developments that much more shocking because of the matter-of-fact, "well of course this sucks that bad" writing, I did feel Sader himself perhaps could have stood out a bit more in his own story. Plain style, but also a more dynamic sleuth? - I think that could have been done. But, I'll take what I got.
There is an earlier book in the Sader series - by series, I mean two books, or at least that's my strong impression - that precedes this one, but even though I think the starter came back in print almost at the same time as this one, for some reason Sleep With Slander was so much easy to browse out of the spines and pick up. But I'll look for Sader's first case.
July 6, 2021
The second of the author's two novels featuring PI Jim Sader, first published in 1960. This edition has good biographical information and an assessment of the author by novelist and critic Steph Cha.
I was wowed by the earlier "Sleep With Strangers" but this was even better. The writing, plotting and characterisation are all as fine as before but here the emotions and tensions are heightened as Sader searches for a a disappeared and abused child.
I was gripped throughout. Here every detail was telling, and the plot twisted from surprise to revelation.
Highly recommendable. Another must-read.
4.5 stars.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital review copy.
I was wowed by the earlier "Sleep With Strangers" but this was even better. The writing, plotting and characterisation are all as fine as before but here the emotions and tensions are heightened as Sader searches for a a disappeared and abused child.
I was gripped throughout. Here every detail was telling, and the plot twisted from surprise to revelation.
Highly recommendable. Another must-read.
4.5 stars.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital review copy.
April 6, 2022
Excellent genre fiction, a big step up from the first Sader book, Sleep with Strangers. Consistently intriguing and entertaining mystery with a Lew Archeresque approach (though the Sader character is less distinctive than Macdonald's gumshoe).
July 29, 2024
3.5 stars rounded down.
No less an authority on mysteries than Bill Pronzini has called this novel the finest mystery ever written by a woman. It is unquestionably a fine effort, although I think Leigh Brackett's works surpass it in panache if not plot.
The hero of the book, Sader, is a PI in the Marlowe tradition, a single, good-hearted but tough, world-weary man given to smoking and thinking when not peering into keyholes. And the feel of the book is pure Ross Mac, as Sader is hired to locate a missing boy by a pompous rich man hiding more than a few skeletons in his family closet. Sader doesn't like the man, but agrees to take the case because of the boy. (And perhaps, just perhaps, because the man annoyed him by wanting to know if Sader was any good at his job.)
No one wants to seem to level with Sader, the trail is much colder than it should be, and then the one woman who may have been persuaded to help is killed before she can.
This is as sad a tale as anything in detective fiction, with humor in one character for a couple of pages, then a return to all gloom and foreboding (which is not necessarily a criticism). It's about murder, dirty secrets, child abuse, insanity, hidden identities, drunkenness, accidental drowning and dog-napping, among other things. After its twists have been straightened, it is neither about what nor whom it started out being about; you may guess whodunit, but not how or why. The fractured family situations and tortuous, tortured plots of Ross Mac have nothing on Hitchens' here.
Still, something is missing. I was recommended this book as an able substitute for Chandler and Howard Browne, and while it somewhat fits that bill, there are certain attributes I expect from a book being given such a comparison, which Sleep With Slander does not provide. Despite all the hard-boiled elements of the Chandler idiom (minus the first-person narrative) being firmly in place, there is an indefinable softness to the work which holds it back.
Hitchens scribed primarily feminine gothics, so this foray into PI-land might seem an inauthentic pastiche. A further detriment is the lack of perspective. This sort of thing seems to demand the intensely personal glimpses into battered souls only first-person writing can really achieve.What may be most damaging is the lack of any real style, or distinctive voice, to Hitchens' writing. There are none of the wisecracks of Chandler or Browne, little humor like Latimer or Davis would have injected, no explosive brusqueness as per Hammett. It is gracefully generic, somehow self-conscious prose, hung over the formidably crafted plot like loose skin.
All these comments may make it sound as though I had an unfavorable impression of the book, and that's not true. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. But it does not reach the status of a masterpiece, as I had been led to believe.
No less an authority on mysteries than Bill Pronzini has called this novel the finest mystery ever written by a woman. It is unquestionably a fine effort, although I think Leigh Brackett's works surpass it in panache if not plot.
The hero of the book, Sader, is a PI in the Marlowe tradition, a single, good-hearted but tough, world-weary man given to smoking and thinking when not peering into keyholes. And the feel of the book is pure Ross Mac, as Sader is hired to locate a missing boy by a pompous rich man hiding more than a few skeletons in his family closet. Sader doesn't like the man, but agrees to take the case because of the boy. (And perhaps, just perhaps, because the man annoyed him by wanting to know if Sader was any good at his job.)
No one wants to seem to level with Sader, the trail is much colder than it should be, and then the one woman who may have been persuaded to help is killed before she can.
This is as sad a tale as anything in detective fiction, with humor in one character for a couple of pages, then a return to all gloom and foreboding (which is not necessarily a criticism). It's about murder, dirty secrets, child abuse, insanity, hidden identities, drunkenness, accidental drowning and dog-napping, among other things. After its twists have been straightened, it is neither about what nor whom it started out being about; you may guess whodunit, but not how or why. The fractured family situations and tortuous, tortured plots of Ross Mac have nothing on Hitchens' here.
Still, something is missing. I was recommended this book as an able substitute for Chandler and Howard Browne, and while it somewhat fits that bill, there are certain attributes I expect from a book being given such a comparison, which Sleep With Slander does not provide. Despite all the hard-boiled elements of the Chandler idiom (minus the first-person narrative) being firmly in place, there is an indefinable softness to the work which holds it back.
Hitchens scribed primarily feminine gothics, so this foray into PI-land might seem an inauthentic pastiche. A further detriment is the lack of perspective. This sort of thing seems to demand the intensely personal glimpses into battered souls only first-person writing can really achieve.What may be most damaging is the lack of any real style, or distinctive voice, to Hitchens' writing. There are none of the wisecracks of Chandler or Browne, little humor like Latimer or Davis would have injected, no explosive brusqueness as per Hammett. It is gracefully generic, somehow self-conscious prose, hung over the formidably crafted plot like loose skin.
All these comments may make it sound as though I had an unfavorable impression of the book, and that's not true. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. But it does not reach the status of a masterpiece, as I had been led to believe.
April 14, 2025
Had read a couple of her cat mysteries, which were reissued in the American Mystery Classics series, but had no idea she'd also written mainstream 50s PI novels--along with what the biographical epilogue notes were some railroad police procedurals, mention of which I took a photo of to see if I can find any of them. (Just ILL'd one of those as well.) This was mentioned in Sarah Weinman's Times rundown of classic PI novels, many of which I'd already read. Which also reminded me how great those Stephen Spotswood novels are; need to catch up there. Not sure I would move from this to Stephen Mack Jones--the line of descent from Mosley is just obvious there, though from this one Weinman recommends a Leigh Brackett novel (she really did write something in every field, didn't she?) that is apparently available now only in a shoddy OCr'ed version that costs like $17. Boo. And apparently not obtainable in book form from either SFPL or the Link+ extension where you can get loans from California libraries. Guess I can try getting an ILL; Worldcat says that's actually easy.
Anyway, this is pretty solid. Not sure how I feel about Hitchens's mimicking some of the sexist tropes of the period, but she depicts women with a whole lot more sympathy and empathy than you usually see from the Chandlers, say. The sense of pained family dynamics reminds me of Ross Macdonald, who was still approaching his peak writing about Southern California suburbia in 1960, though without his sense of its betokening a larger social breakdown. Instead, this is a humane take on tangled family dynamics with an astute understanding of frustration and failed relationships and what feels like a feminist subtext about the double bind women face. On the surface, it's a departure from her spinster-with-cat novels, which I guess people think of as cozy because, spinster with cat, but the two I've read share that dark vision of human frailty and misrule.
Anyway, this is pretty solid. Not sure how I feel about Hitchens's mimicking some of the sexist tropes of the period, but she depicts women with a whole lot more sympathy and empathy than you usually see from the Chandlers, say. The sense of pained family dynamics reminds me of Ross Macdonald, who was still approaching his peak writing about Southern California suburbia in 1960, though without his sense of its betokening a larger social breakdown. Instead, this is a humane take on tangled family dynamics with an astute understanding of frustration and failed relationships and what feels like a feminist subtext about the double bind women face. On the surface, it's a departure from her spinster-with-cat novels, which I guess people think of as cozy because, spinster with cat, but the two I've read share that dark vision of human frailty and misrule.
April 7, 2025
Dit boek werd aangeraden door de New York Times. Waarom? Omdat het door een vrouw is geschreven. Op de cover staat een aanbeveling die daarop betrekking heeft: 'The best private eye novel written by a woman'. Had ik daardoor gewaarschuwd moeten zijn? Het is een nogal middelmatig verhaal waarin detective Jim Sader vooral bezig is met heen en weer te rijden tussen de plekken in de regio Los Angeles waar hij informatie denkt te kunnen opdoen. Een onwaarschijnlijke plot met onder andere een verdronkene waarvan het lijk nooit is gevonden en die dus ... je raadt het al. Bepaald geen aanrader dus. Een misdaadverhaal van een andere vrouwelijke auteur dat ik onlangs las (Edwin of the Iron Shoes van Marcia Muller) vond ik een stuk beter.
September 10, 2025
Serviceable, but forgettable. Lacks the wit and snappy dialogue of Rex Stout, Chandler, or Hammett. There were a few ridiculous plot points, and repetitive conversations, not much action until halfway through the book. The PI was unoriginal: recovering alcoholic, etc. The ending was a mess, which I’ll address below.
Spoilers ahead:
Why does the PI fight off a vicious dog (who is also threatening a child), when all the while he has a gun in his car and could have just shot the dog? And why is he so keen on the invalid spinster he has never met? Where was the child for three years? Why does the PI take the child to his client (who he hates) and not to the police? Why doesn’t the boyfriend expose the killers, but flee for Mexico instead?
Spoilers ahead:
Why does the PI fight off a vicious dog (who is also threatening a child), when all the while he has a gun in his car and could have just shot the dog? And why is he so keen on the invalid spinster he has never met? Where was the child for three years? Why does the PI take the child to his client (who he hates) and not to the police? Why doesn’t the boyfriend expose the killers, but flee for Mexico instead?
September 5, 2021
Another great classic mystery from the Library of America. I love that these are getting published, and introducing new readers to these great novels. I've been lucky enough to read four of these, and will have to pick up more. Can't believe I would have never read these if not for Library of America. This one had a great plot that was fun to read along and figure out. #SleepwithSlander #NetGalley
November 11, 2021
This highly-lauded (in certain circles) PI novel delivers the goods. This hunt for a missing, possibly abused child in Long Beach and LA succeeds on most levels, including avoidance of clichés. Well paced, atmospheric, evocative, and surprising, in only stumbles in the psychological "explanation" for the solution. You may call it unlikely, I call it idiotic. But this small black mark should not deter an enterprising reprint publisher from exhuming this one.
April 1, 2025
The first Dolores Hitchens noir I've read and it didn't disappoint. Jim Sader goes about his tasks methodically, digging and grinding until he sees the case though to the end, never letting go of his moral compass. Intricately plotted, the story takes Sader through Los Angeles in search of an abused child, and as he uncovers the clues, deals with duplicitous characters, some less savory than others.
April 7, 2022
How hard can it be for a PI to find a missing child? PI Jim Sader expects a quick and easy trace to find the boy. Instead he walks into a mystery of twists and turns. Evil nasty people are involved in hiding the boy. A good story full of lies and half truths from so many of the characters. I thought it was a pretty good story.
December 22, 2017
This was headed all the way to a 4plus rating until the resolution of the murder mystery in the final two chapters. It has an overheated blurb, plus gets highly regarded by my favourite mystery site. I would have been better off doing what I normally do which is read the goodreads rating first.
November 18, 2021
Better than the first, for some reason I can't define clearly. The story just seemed to flow better. Could not figure out who did it before the author wanted me to know which is a novel writing skill. I especially enjoy the flapper era slang.
May 15, 2025
The plot
Plot is complex and is invariably dated being based on outdated societal expectations. Nonetheless, the plot could be modified to fit today and be credible so if you’re tired by endless explosions then this may be for you .
Plot is complex and is invariably dated being based on outdated societal expectations. Nonetheless, the plot could be modified to fit today and be credible so if you’re tired by endless explosions then this may be for you .
April 14, 2025
I loved this old school private eye mystery written with a woman’s touch.
October 13, 2025
A real noir treat.
January 7, 2016
An excellent mystery.
April 24, 2017
Really a 3*, but gets a bump because I really liked the writing. Very sharp, clean, and easy to read.
However, the plot felt like a bunch of scenes from other stories I've read put together. The protagonist is a bit dense sometimes and seems to know it, but it sure is frustrating when there's an obvious phone call he should make to an off-screen character, who is only brought in at the end to confirm the solution.
It will be interesting to re-read some of his earlier interrogations in light of knowing the ending.
However, the plot felt like a bunch of scenes from other stories I've read put together. The protagonist is a bit dense sometimes and seems to know it, but it sure is frustrating when there's an obvious phone call he should make to an off-screen character, who is only brought in at the end to confirm the solution.
It will be interesting to re-read some of his earlier interrogations in light of knowing the ending.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews