False Pretenses

Jacob Asch is about as close to Marlowe as it gets. When I read crime fiction (especially first-person stories about private investigators set in LA!), I'm continually making comparisons with Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. So far, I've found two worthy successors to Chandler: Crumley and Lyons.Lyons' execution is nearly flawless. The story never sags, from its opening in which a new client is found dead in Asch's office. The pursuit of the truth about the client, his prostitute girlfriend and junkie crime-partner is wound into a tight, elegant ball of a plot, surrounded by a host of LA police detectives... some cooperative and some downright suspicious of Asch's motives.I encountered and read this book by accident. I will hunt down the other Asch novels for the simple reason that this book is an entertaining, nearly flawless example of LA PI fiction.

Reporter turned private detective Jacob Asch agrees to meet a man on short notice--anything to take Asch from the ennui of tracking down elderly people for conservatorship actions. The man says he suspects his wife of being unfaithful, and Asch takes the case. After a fruitless day of following the woman, Asch returns to his office to find his client murdered. Asch is further confused when the man turns out not to be who he claimed to be. The police are not confused, though. Asch is promptly jailed.When the police verify Asch's whereabouts during the day, they finally release Asch, who vows to solve the mystery of the murdered client. When each lead seems to leave to a corpse, Asch finds himself involved in an even larger mystery and a growing cast of suspects. He finds himself growing increasingly suspicious as he falls into the arms of a gorgeous blonde homicide detective. But can he trust her, her alcoholic partner, the self-centered reporter who did the story on police corruption, the widow of a slain cop, the mechanic who dabbles as a pimp, or any of the other people in the story?"False Pretenses" is a hard-boiled detective story for the '90s, true to the genre's pioneers without being an anachronism. Jacob Asch may not be Sam Spade, but he is not too far removed. The result is a very enjoyable novel.