{"id":7572,"date":"2018-11-13T07:44:39","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T12:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7572"},"modified":"2018-11-13T08:03:43","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T13:03:43","slug":"broken-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7572","title":{"rendered":"****Broken Windows"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Los

James Gubera, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Paul D. Marks \u2013 Paul Marks\u2019s second Duke Rogers PI thriller is a follow-up to the recently reissued White Heat<\/em>, a Shamus award-winner, recently reissued. Rogers, principal narrator of this entertaining tale, has the sly humor of a modern-day Philip Marlowe and a similar penchant for attracting trouble.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s something about Los Angeles\u2014too much sun, too much tinsel, too many people trying too hard, too much too much\u2014that makes it the perfect setting for so many great noir novels. The prologue describes a quintessential Los Angeles move: the suicide of an aspiring actress who takes a dive off the iconic Hollywood sign. Her death hangs out there, disconnected, waiting for PI Rogers to reel it into the story.<\/p>\n

Rogers is a famous guy around LA, famous for a detective, anyway. He\u2019s the one who solved the murder of up-and-coming starlet Teddie Matson, recounted in White Heat<\/em>. The frequent acknowledgements of his success rub salt in a wound that has not healed. Though he caught Teddie\u2019s killer, people don\u2019t know that it was he who mistakenly told the killer how to find her.<\/p>\n

Out for a stroll with his new dog, Rogers encounters the neighbor\u2019s housekeeper walking her employer\u2019s Yorkies. Marisol Rivera is young, pretty, Mexican, and illegal. And she has a problem. Her brother\u2019s been found dead. The police say un accidente<\/em>, but Marisol believes it was murder. She thinks they\u2019re reluctant to invest time and effort in the case because Carlos, too, was undocumented.<\/p>\n

Eventually Rogers persuades Marisol to let him help her, but wading into a highly charged political swamp is a good way to encounter alligators, and soon there\u2019s a second body to account for\u2014this one a man high in the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church. When he turns up dead shortly after visiting Rogers, the local police figure him a person of particular interest.<\/p>\n

Marks writes with an easy style that carries you through the story and creates engaging characters to spike your interest. His Los Angeles is familiar and believable. He softens Rogers around the edges by giving him a new dog needing care, a friend who has earned and receives unswerving loyalty, and a woman he would like to reconnect with. She\u2019s the sister of the dead starlet Teddie Matson, and his guilt over Matson\u2019s death keep him from picking up the phone. Yet he obsesses about her. Perhaps a bit too much.<\/p>\n

Marks places this story in the broader political context of California Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative aimed at curbing the flow of illegal immigrants into the state and denying them public services. Characters in the story represent various stakeholder groups and positions that resonate with today\u2019s vicious public policy debates.)<\/p>\n

But this is, of course, not a political essay, but a mystery, and, in the quest for Carlos\u2019s killer, Rogers must peel back the masks worn in public by these various elected officials and community leaders. It\u2019s always a treat to see hypocrisy stripped bare, and Rogers finds that what these stalwarts say to their constituents about immigration is more a reflection of self-interest than principle.<\/p>\n

Part of the story is told from the point of view of Eric Davies, a disbarred lawyer whose downward spiral has landed him in a cockroach-infested apartment in Venice, California. He is out of luck and out of prospects unless someone answers his desperate advert saying he will \u201cdo anything for money.\u201d Someone does. The writing of Eric\u2019s chapters is very close in. You are inside his addled, frustrated head, and hope that when the time comes, despite all indications to the contrary, he will do the right thing.
\n<\/a>\"\"
\nAs an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases\u2014a few pennies to put in a jar to pay my WordPress bills. If you want to order this book and you click the photo above to order it, you\u2019ll help me fill the jar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Paul D. Marks \u2013 Paul Marks\u2019s second Duke Rogers PI thriller is a follow-up to the recently reissued White Heat, a Shamus award-winner, recently reissued. Rogers, principal narrator of this entertaining tale, has the sly humor of a modern-day … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****Broken Windows - a thriller that immerses you in Los Angeles, minus the traffic!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,126,32],"tags":[1451,218,307,1450,99],"class_list":["post-7572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-broken-windows","tag-hollywood","tag-los-angeles","tag-paul-d-marks","tag-urban-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Y8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7572"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7576,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7572\/revisions\/7576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}