City of Fallen Angels by Paul Buchanan

"And what did the crime scene look like?"
"Broken glass in a door," the lieutenant said. He pressed the cold glass to his forehead. "No fingerprints. No footprints. No nothing."
"Sounds like a stone-cold whodunit." Keegan turned his own glass in his hands... "I'm no big-city jack," Keegan said. "But maybe it's the obvious. A break-in that went awry." He turned the Daffy Duck glass in his hand again. "How many times did I type that sentence up for The Times?"

City of Fallen Angels by Paul Buchanan is a terse, elegant thriller, written in the best traditions of the noir fiction. It is very cinematographic in its narrative, style and aesthetics.
Think descriptions of the night, shadowy scenery, booze and guns, stylish femmes fatales, shabby eateries, dangerous attraction, a brutal crime in a quiet location, multiple layers of suspicion and betrayal.

It's a sweltering hot August in LA.
PI John Keegan is nursing a hangover in his late mother's house, where he's looking after Nora the dog and deciding what to do both with the house and the dog.
He calls his secretary to find out that a "foreign-sounding" caller wants to meet him this afternoon.
Keegan became a PI after twenty years of covering crime for The Los Angeles Times. He has a reputation of a most capable detective.

That afternoon he is picked up by a limo with tinted windows. The man inside, Mr Catling, is offering him thirty thousand dollars to locate a young woman. She is somewhere in LA, but the person who wants to hire Keegan doesn't know her name. All he has is a set of black and white photos. Catling needs his "utter and absolute confidence". When asked what he wants with the young woman, he replies: "I'm afraid you will have to refrain from questions. You will be paid amply to keep your curiosity in check".
Keegan refuses to take a job. It sounds too dodgy and unsavoury.

The next day Keegan accidentally meets the mysterious woman. She happens to be a niece of Keegan's mother's next door neighbour, Nigel Ormsby, a B-movie and TV actor:
"Over the years, his mother had kept him abreast of this man's excesses: the boozy soirees, the midnight skinny-dips, the string of leggy "nieces" who stayed with him while lis long-suffering wife shopped her way across Europe..." At first, Keegan is sceptical that Eve is truly Ormsby's niece.

Eve appears to be skittish and highly strung. And then she comes, unbidden, to his doorstep, with a bottle of expensive wine and confesses that she fears for her safety. She seems both weary and wary. She says she hears things out in the garden at night, she finds the footprints in the flower beds, and she is worried being left alone in her uncle's house: "Paranoid as it sounds, I think someone is watching the house".

Keegan offers to keep an eye on the house and also gives her the gun to keep in the house for protection.
Before Keegan knows it, there is a murder next door, and it was committed with his own gun. He acts on impulse, crosses a moral line, and gets sucked into the world of deception. Before long he becomes the prime suspect in the murder he didn't commit. And all the evidence is pointing in his direction. The only way is down, but who has planned it all along?

Keegan is a typical noir protagonist, a dissatisfied soul, with "a failed career, a failed marriage - an uninterrupted cycle of half-hearted striving undone by self-destruction".

The femme fatale is another typical device of the noir genre. She appears to be vulnerable, while manipulating the protagonist to follow her lead. "She's got that wide-eyed Audrey Hepburn thing going. She plays a good innocent, but she's lying about something".

The urban setting adds a sense of despair and loss of identity: "In the harsh light of the day, the gray city already lay under a sepia blanket of haze. the view was nothing like the black-felt jeweller's tray he'd seen glimmering in the thick of the night. This daylight vista looked tragic and tawdry - like seeing the weary starlet, sans makeup, away from the studio lights"

City of Fallen Angels is an atmospheric story of treachery and deceit, set in the 1960s. This gripping page-turner is a first novel in the PI John Keegan series. The second novel, Valley of Shadows, will be released in 2021.

Many thanks to Paul Buchanan and Legend Press for my copy of the book.

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