Editorial Content for L.A. Burning

I don’t read thrillers, and that goes double for thrillers with a detective as the main character. But a friend introduced me to David Taylor, who had written NIGHT LIFE, which is about my double least favorite genre. Of course I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. And I was thrilled for my new discovery when NIGHT LIFE was nominated in the Best Novel category for an Edgar Award and won the Nero Wolfe Award for 2016. [To read my review of NIGHT LIFE and buy the book from Amazon, click here.]

I was exceedingly impatient for NIGHT WORK, Taylor’s next thriller. Same detective, different problem. And a beginning that commands your attention: “The dead man sat on a wooden kitchen chair just inside the 72nd Street entrance to Central Park.” [To read my review of NIGHT WORK and buy the book from Amazon, click here.]

As the author of L.A. BURNING, David Taylor writes as D.C. Taylor. He’s fooling no one. It begins: “No one oversleeps the day they come to release you from prison.” The guard escorting the prisoner “pushed his groin against me and ran his hand over my ass.” That’s when I realized the prisoner is female. Cody Bonner. 26. She’s served her full five-year sentence. She’ll leave prison with $320 and a ticket to the county where she was arrested. She’s not going there. She’s going home.

"[T]here are sentences that remind you the author is as gifted a stylist as he is a plotter."

Not so fast. At the bus station she’s accosted by a janitor and his skeevy friend, who has “a bone for you you’ll never forget.” He’s unaware that she’s practiced half-speed strikes and sparring in the prison yard. He finds out. She leaves with $480 from his pocket and takes a cab to the airport.

Looking down on Los Angeles, she knows her sister’s killer is down there. “Who was he? Where was he? Could I find him? What if I did? What would I do then?”

Cody is a twin. Her sister Julie was a lawyer, as straight as Cody was bent. So how did she end up dead on a beach at the Malibu Colony, with bruises on her torso, signs of strangulation and a broken nose?

Consumer warning: There is considerable violence in this book, all directed at women. Exploitation is routine. There are men whose kink is beating women, and women who are paid to endure that. To read these scenes is to be nauseous. This may not be a book you can stand to read.

Small world? Some of the characters are familiar to Cody. Her first suspect, Harry Groban, is so twisted he makes Harvey Weinstein look innocent --- and, oh, he’s the agent for her mother, a four-time Academy Award nominee and winner of one. She reconnects with high school classmates who are now in the film business. She gets involved with Curtis Whyle --- in school, her sister nicknamed him Wile E. Coyote. And she is being tracked by Detective Aaron Steckley, who believes she robbed two banks for which she wasn’t charged — he’s obsessed with sending her back to jail. One more plot twist: Cody pursues Harry Groban, Steckley pursues Cody. And because fire is a season in L.A., there’s a fire that burns hundreds of acres.

Along the way, there are sentences that remind you the author is as gifted a stylist as he is a plotter.

“The valet took Curtis’s Porsche and parked it in a corner where it wouldn’t embarrass the really expensive cars.”

“We had been in his pool and lying naked on pads, absorbing a dose of cancer.”

And this, about the blurring of fantasy and reality in L.A.: “...a place where people living in a desert imported snow for a child’s birthday party, where movie stars insisted I do my own stunts, where a girl who 'had everything' could wake up one morning and decide that a robbing bank was a good idea.”

I hated this book. I loved this book.