Dangerous Games

Jack Liffey #8

by John Shannon

Jack Liffey's new girlfriend, Gloria Martinez, a police sergeant of Paiute-Latino heritage, talks him into looking into the disappearance of her beautiful 18-year-old niece, Luisa, from a tiny reservation in the Owens Valley. To escape abuse, the girl had threatened to run away to L.A.'s porn industry, and in fact does become caught up in the phone sex business, then hostessing, and finally the trashy business of videotaping the homeless engaged in wildly dangerous stunts. Luisa is fought over by a motley band of lowlifes and would-be rescuers, including the Jamaican Trevor "Terror" Pennycooke, whom Jack knows from an earlier case. The hunt for Luisa comes together in the Malibu Hills, where a bumbling army of suitors and rescuers touch off a gun battle and dangerous firestorm that sweeps Jack and everyone else ahead of it down the Malibu Hills toward the ocean.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

John Shannon is a contemporary American author, lately of detective fiction. He began his career with four well-reviewed novels in the 1970s and 1980s, then in 1996 launched the Jack Liffey mystery series. He cites as his literary influences Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Jim Harrison.

Reviews

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

RATING: 4.25
PROTAGONIST: Jack Liffey
SETTING: Los Angeles
SERIES: #8 of 8

It's always nice to see a favorite character embark on a relationship that shows a lot of promise for a good future. After a series of failed attempts on that front in earlier books, Jack Liffey has found a woman with whom he'd like to share his life. Gloria Ramirez is a police sergeant in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, she has a lot of issues of her own and tends to back down from the relationship periodically. Although they are living together, there's not a sense of security based on Gloria's actions.

In his career as a private investigator, Jack has specialized in finding missing children. He is definitely the man for the job when Gloria's 18-year-old niece, Luisa, disappears. Gloria is concerned that Luisa may end up in the porn industry in LA, which is something she has threatened to do in the past. Gloria's instincts are dead on. Luisa begins by becoming a phone sex operative and then moves on to the visual side of the industry. Fortunately for her, she does have some protectors so she is not exposed to the worst that industry has to offer. Although most of these men are lowlifes themselves, they do seem mostly honorable when it comes to Luisa, surprisingly so in the case of Trevor "Terror" Pennycooke, with whom Jack has had bad dealings in the past.

Luisa faces a variety of dangerous situations based on the kinds of people that she meets as she pursues her new "career". Since she has been abused in the past, she doesn't always recognize when a man is a predator. Surprisingly, Terror is her staunchest defender.

A secondary plot thread deals with Jack's teenaged daughter, Maeve, who lives with Jack and Gloria. She is badly injured in a drive-by shooting and has to wear a colostomy bag. She's an incredible character who deals with her situation with grace and wit. Jack and later Maeve find the shooter, and things turn out surprisingly for all of them.

I was slow to become involved in the book. Once I did, however, I found DANGEROUS GAMES to be an excellent read. The resolution is action packed, and the characters come alive through their dialogue. The book comes to a thrilling climax in a luxury home in the Malibu Hills. There is a raging firestorm; and Jack, Luisa and Terror are in a race for their lives.
I liked how the situation between Gloria and Jack played out, and I found the book really came alive when Jack's daughter was on the page. For Jack Liffey, there are no easy answers. His struggles to live and love are very ably documented by Shannon. The biggest question I have is why Shannon is not more widely known, as this series is very well done.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Dangerous Games”, the sixth John Shannon’s novel that I read, is again a disappointing effort for me, although the plot is interesting and the rhythm of events is engrossing. A young Native American woman, Louisa, escapes from a rancheria (a small reservation) in Owens on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in California and moves to Los Angeles where she tries making it in the world of porn. Jack Liffey’s girlfriend, Gloria Ramirez, herself a Native American, is in a certain way related to Louisa and she asks Jack to search for her. A separate thread of the plot involves a Latino boy, Thumb, who is an aspiring artist and an apprentice gang member. In the third thread two young men shoot a series of Dangerous Games videos where they exploit homeless people to do life-threatening and demeaning things on film. Aside from Gloria, Jack’s daughter, Maeve, is involved in the events. Obviously, all these threads merge and culminate in a cinematic, if painfully contrived ending.

Ethnic gangs, employment of clueless young women in porn, and homeless people doing deadly stunts for meager pay are, of course, an everyday norm for California. The background and the premise of the novel are realistic and authentic. Alas, the portrayal of the City of Angels is not as vivid and deep as in Mr. Shannon’s previous novels. Instead of the trademark “weird LA scene” like, for instance, people throwing their possessions into their burning house, there is a lightweight sprinkle of weird moments. Sociological observations are pretty shallow, and the low-level pop psychology is abundant.

The writing in “Dangerous Games” is way below the high standards of the same author’s “The Orange Curtain”. No beautiful, lyrical passages. The philosophical, linguistic, and literary references are gone. Instead, there is a lot of artificially sweet, smarmy political correctness oozing from the pages. The author promotes the issues of diversity, so crucial and so life-and-death in Los Angeles, on the maturity level of an essay written by a middle-school student. The character of Trevor Pennycooke is a cheap and jarring cliché of a Jamaican man. The ending, as cinematic and well written as it is, sounds totally implausible. At least the author is wise enough not to “solve” al threads (as nothing is ever solved in real life).

Two and a half stars.

[Dewayne Stark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another VW doesn't make it. Well they play a game on the freeway with letters and names. Maybe I could start a list of street names placed in the story as triva: PCH 101 Wilshire I-10 Old Topanga Road and on page 94 Hollywood Hills and Woodland Hills. Those are the Santa Monica Mountains as the Hollywood Hills are farther east.

[Jessica]

I rad half of this and then gave up. Just not compelling. I think that's the last Jack Liffey novel for me.