City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton

 

First Lines: January 1933, Phoenix, Arizona. Night folded in early during the winter.

 

A veteran of World War I, Gene Hammons was a rising star in the Phoenix Police Department until he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder in order to protect a well-connected man. Now he's a private investigator whose bread and butter work is finding missing persons, and there are plenty of those during the Depression. However, his normal routine is disrupted when his brother, who is still on the police force, asks for his help looking into the death of a young woman whose dismembered body was found beside the railroad tracks.

 

The sheriff has ruled it an accident, but the carnage is too neat, and the body parts have been staged. Another big question for Hammons is why one of his business cards was in the dead woman's pocket. As he works to discover the victim's identity, he's going to find that the case is connected to some of Phoenix's most powerful citizens-- on both sides of the law. 

 

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City of Dark Corners is an absolute gold mine of Phoenix history, but that's not the only reason to read it. (Although I will say that anyone who thinks that it's too hot for anything to happen here needs to think again.) Readers will also get a good feeling for life during the Depression. For one thing, it never occurred to me that there would be a lot of missing persons during this time, and I felt about as smart as a box of rocks when Talton explained this to me. 

The mystery is a good one, too, which is something that I always expect from Jon Talton, and it has a noir feel that some readers are going to love. If you're not a noir fan, don't roll your eyes and move along. I said a noir "feel"-- a bit like using margarine instead of butter.

As with any mystery worth its salt, there have to be characters that keep my interest, and City of Dark Corners has them. Besides the City of Phoenix, which is a character in and of itself, there is Gene Hammons, the World War I veteran, a former police detective who was Amelia Earhart's bodyguard when she was in town, and now private eye who sings in a church choir to help keep him sane. His love interest, Victoria Vasquez, is a strong, interesting character, too. She's a photographer who often takes crime scene photos for the police department, but she's working toward a career in photojournalism like Margaret Bourke-White's.

 

If you're in the mood for a historical mystery that's a bit gritty, a puzzler to solve, and has two strong characters, City of Dark Corners may be just the thing for you. I'm hoping that it's the start of a brand-new series. If you don't go in for historicals, try Talton's David Mapstone mysteries. They are first-rate.

City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton

eISBN: 9781464213274

Poisoned Pen Press © 2021

eBook, 256 pages

Historical Mystery/ P.I./ Noir

Rating: B+

Source: Net Galley