Book three of Johnson’s Fog City (San Francisco) noir series starring the hardboiled detective’s equally hardboiled secretary who tries (pretty successfully) to make a go of private sleuthing in an era unfriendly to women stepping out of their place. It’s hard going but she slowly accumulates a set of useful friends such as Dickie Vance (a fabulous foodie journalist Truman Capote clone) and the mostly-closeted, but thoroughly hard-nosed police detective O’Malley. This episode marries the Catholic convent with the Chinese underworld in a (typical, but also pleasantly convoluted) conflagration of power struggles. For whatever reason I didn’t enjoy the actual plot as much as in the first two, but it was still entertaining, and I liked the character development and writing a lot — especially the witty dialog, personal reflections, and philosophy (religious and otherwise).
Books to look forward to ... 