by Richard Aleas
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A real page turner, 2008-11-19
I couldn't put this book down. The story was exciting and well-crafted. The characters were fun. This is one of the best Hard Case Crime books out there.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Bitter and damaged investigator , 2008-10-09
This second outing for John Blake, following on from `Little Girl Lost', is the first Aleas book I've read. I was put off by the cover of the first - that girl's leg is way, way too long!
Blake teaches creative writing in New York, having retreated from PI work after getting a woman killed and another seriously wounded. Clearly, he's not particularly good. Unfortunately for him, one of his students takes his heart and bed and then her life. He - and her mother - are convinced it was murder. So he sets out to discover the truth.
In his search for answers, he delves into the sleaze and dirt of the sex industry, well manipulated by the Internet. There's a dark heart in the Big Apple - and probably most cities these days. Corruption, protection and drugs - the usual, but uncomfortably realised by Aleas.
His bitter and damaged investigator Blake is out of his depth and seems to carry death around like an evil aura. The ending is, as the publisher's blurb states, shocking in more ways than one.
One annoying aspect is the back references to the earlier book. Even so, Aleas has well captured the mood and tone of the lone investigator. I felt, however, that Blake himself would have excised a number of echo word repetitions; but for that I could not fault this dark brooding tale with no happy ending.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Songs of Darkness, 2008-07-01
Songs of Innocence is perhaps the most striking "mystery" novel I've ever read. It's obvious from the open paragraphs that Aleas (Adai) has developed his style: darker, more introspective. From there, the novel begins its accelerating descent into darkness, as much tragedy as mystery, flirting a bit with absurdity as the story progresses, but moving through that, gathering momentum for the finale, a finale which has haunted me for the several days since I read it. Wow.
I'm a big fan of Michael Connelly, but after reading Songs of Innocence, Connelly is going to seem light & fluffy in comparison. I wish I had another Aleas to read. Instead, I'm moving on to sample some of the other authors in the Hard Crimes series.
I view a "4-star" rating as an excellent book, "5-star" as worthy of teaching in a class on the genre. There's some serious "grade inflation" in Amazon reviews, an inflation I try to resist. But by any such standard, this one gets 5.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 Not an admirer, sorry, 2008-05-11
The Hard Case Crime line has been a great gift for the hb field, so it feels more than a little churlish to crack on Mr. Ardai's own efforts, but I didn't like either this one or its immediate predecessor, LITTLE GIRL LOST.
The plot is gimcracked together and the big reveal reminded me alot of the big reveal in Spider Robinson's classic SF short story "God is an Iron", although I think Robinson handled it better. I could live with that -- what "Aleas" gets praised for, though, is I think the biggest problem. I didn't care much for the writing.
In particular, this feels to me like "James Lee Burke disease", ie an ambitious but wrongheaded attempt to impose poetry on the material. Underneath it's rough setting and (nicely done, to be fair about it) downbeat finale, this is as melodramatic as all get-out. I mean, really. Hookers with hearts of gold? An essentially callow youth as her protector/avenger? Impassioned noirish poetry spouted at convenient moments? I found it difficult to take seriously.
That's not to say very melodramatic scenarios don't work in hb fiction, obviously they do. But all this hysteria doesn't seem organic to the story, in a way that it usually does in Spillane, say. It seems tacked on, almost as though the story is an excuse for the emoting.
Nice cover, though.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Groundbreaking., 2008-05-04
Richard Aleas' second John Blake mystery, Songs of Innocence, follows the same formula as the first, Little Girl Lost. In Little Girl Lost, Blake undertakes a quixotic mission to find out who killed his ex-girlfriend, a stripper named Miranda Sugarman. In Songs of Innocence, he again investigates an ex-girlfriend's murder. This time it's Dorrie Burke a practitioner of sensual massage.
When Blake, now no longer officially a private investigator, finds Dorrie's lifeless body, he's convinced she's been murdered even though all the evidence point to an open and shut case of suicide. His subsequent investigation, most of which he must carry out even as he himself is being hotly pursued by the authorities, takes him deep into the sad, slimy world of New York's massage parlor industry.
Aleas has written Songs of Innocence using a very gritty and compelling style. He skillfully touches all the requisite bases readers of hardboiled crime have come to expect. But this book is not just an example of competent, workmanlike writing. With Songs of Innocence, Aleas has modernized and elevated the hardboiled genre well beyond its mid 20th century roots. The unexpected ending is highly effective and serves to validate everything that has preceeded it, including the events described in Little Girl Lost. An enthusiastic 5 stars.
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