The Big Switch: A Brian Kane Mystery

The setting is Hollywood, the year 1951. Camel smoking, scotch drinking, skirt chasing, PI Brian Kane, is hot on the trail of a cheating Hollywood bigshot.Things get messy when the trail becomes cluttered with dead starlets. Things get personal when Kane's sexy, sassy girlfriend, Kitty, is threatened by the killer. Things get dicy when the murders lead to him.Kane finds himself in a race against time. He has to corner the killer before Kitty becomes the next victum, and he takes the fall.

The Big Switch is a traditional mystery -- there's a murder, a somewhat hard-boiled private eye (Brian Kane) who sets out to solve it, and a number of suspects and theories he has to consider. When the killer tries to scare Kane off, he just digs in deeper. But there are two things that set this book apart from the crowd: the setting, 1950's Hollywood, which you can see and hear and feel as you read; and the role of sex, to which Kane is addicted. That he cares deeply about a call girl named Kitty -- who loves him, too, in her own way -- is fitting and often touching. But Kane and Kitty are not the only ones with an itch. The stars and starlets of Movieland are nothing if not prurient in their tastes, and a quality that could conceivably undo Kane in a different setting actually becomes an investigative asset here. In short, The Big Switch is a fun diversion into a setting which -- despite its rather loose social mores and the crimes that make this book a murder mystery -- seems a lot more innocent than our world today.

This novel takes place post WWII in Hollywood. Movies are rolling off the line as fast as they can be produced. Rivers of money and glamour flow. Everyone wants a piece of the action. Beautiful women are plenteous, waiting to be discovered like Lana Turner in the soda fountain. These women are giving everything they have in the hopes of becoming a star, their talent, their beauty, their bodies and for some, their very lives.Brian Kane, PI, is drawn into the mystery when hired for a simple and common task in this period of time, to gather evidence on a cheating husband. Very shortly into the job, Kane is faced with lies, murder, and the uncertainty of who it was that hired him. While in the midst of dealing with the perplexities of the job, Kane is personally drawn into the murders when someone involves Kitty Chaney, the love of Kane's life, though neither he nor Kitty will speak of it aloud. The author does an excellent job keeping up the action and providing the clues. The details are descriptive and concise, allowing the reader to experience the atmosphere that surely permeated this era of Hollywood. The sex scenes are detailed in such a way that the intensity is enough to curl your toes, and yet without intruding on the story line. It was difficult to put the book down, until both Kane and I had some answers.

Jack Bludis' The Big Switch is a new, dark, and riveting mystery set in early 1950s, era of the Hollywood B-grade movies. Brian Kane is a hard-boiled private eye who must unravel the scheme behind the deaths of starlets, while toughing it out among the seamy underside of show business and the wrong side of the law. The Big Switch a dizzyingly fast-paced read, filled with action and surprises.

It seems lately that too many mystery writers are asking me to like characters who are stuck on themselves and their own wealth, totally obnoxious and ugly to even their friends-- or both! Not so with four terrific mysteries I've read in the last month: "The Big Switch" by Jack Bludis; "All White Girls" by Michael Bracken; "Voodoo That You Do" by Richard Helms; and "Pilikia is my Business" by Mark Troy."The Big Switch" brings noir back in style with Brian Kane, Camel-smoking PI who's been hired to take photographs of Lester Randolph participating in one of his many extra-marital affairs. By page 25, Kane's discovered that his client is an imposter, the gun he took away from her had probably been used in a murder (but it doesn't matter, because someone's already stolen it from him!), and besides a cheating husband, he has to find a killer, because one-by-one, the young women linked to Randolph are winding up dead. A hard-boiled detective with a soft spot for young starlets? That's Kane, on the job until all the questions are answered.