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Booklist, May 1, 2010
On the Nickel, , Jul 2010. 272 p. Severn House, hardcover, $28.95. (9780727869036).
Previous episodes in Shannon’s consistently engaging Jack Liffey series have moved about California, but this time the “finder of lost children” stays put—literally, at least in the beginning, as the trauma of being buried alived in a mudslide (Palos Verdes Blue, 2009) has left him without a voice and unable to use his legs (doctors feel the symptoms have a psychological basis). As in previous episodes, though, Jack’s highschool-age daughter, Maeve, steps in to help her dad (without telling him, of course). This time the case involves the disappearance of teenage boy, Conor. Maeve tracks him to a flophouse in downtown L.A.’s notorious skid row (the “Nickel”). Unfortunately, Conor picks a flophouse that is due for renovation once some curmudgeonly residents can be convinced to leave. The owner has hired two loose-cannon enforcers to handle the evictions, and Maeve and Conor wind up in the crossfire. Shannon again writes about society’s disenfranchised with great power, but he never slights human relationships in the onslaught of shocking sociological detail. A couple of plot developments on the way to setting up the final confrontation strain credulity, but the finale itself is an edge-of-the-chair corker. Another winner in an outstanding series.
The Rap Sheet, June 1, 2010, by Dick Adler
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in my review of Gar Anthony Haywood’s Cemetery Road that his fellow Southern California author, John Shannon, has a new Jack Liffey detective novel due out from Britain’s Severn House. That book, On the Nickel, should arrive in stores next month--and it is one of the very best entries in a terrific series.
Without giving away too much of Shannon’s great plot, I can say that it involves the search for a runaway 16-year-old, greedy downtown developers, and the conflict between Skid Row habitués who don’t have much money and thugs who haven’t much sympathy.
As usual, Liffey’s relationship with his daughter is a thing of beauty and anxiety--even though, throughout most of this new yarn, he can communicate with her only by the means of laborious printing.
Jack Liffey pointed to WHO CALLED on his master list. “Nothing important, Dad,” Maeve said. “You gotta get over thinking I’m always up to something.” It took him a while to scribble WHEN DID THE POPE STOP WEARING A DRESS?
To explain his new novel’s title, Shannon writes: “L.A.’s Skid Row is known locally as The Nickel because its east-west axis is Fifth Street. It’s a roughly fifty-block area of warehouses, missions, and nondescript brick buildings that in the late afternoon finds itself literally in the shadow of the modern glass-and-steel eighty-story skyline on Bunker Hill half a mile west. The Nickel has the largest concentration of homeless people in the United States: between 8,000 and 11,000 souls live here, many of them scrambling nightly for charity shelters, single-room-occupancy hotels or makeshift tents, plastic lean-tos and refrigerator boxes ...”
You can discover much more about this sad quarter of Southern California’s largest city, and about Liffey and his daughter, by taking a flyer on On the Nickel.
Poisoned Pen Magazine, On-line Issue No. 6, by Patrick Millikin
Shannon, John. On the Nickel (Severn $28.95 signed). Patrick says, “I just got my clutches on a copy of Shannon’s brand new Jack Liffey novel as we were going to press (metaphorically speaking), but I’ve been looking forward to it for months. Shannon’s obscenely neglected books are among the finest ever written about Los Angeles, and this latest installment takes us down into the heart of the city – skid row. I’ll have a full report very shortly, but don’t delay on ordering your signed copy as Severn House has notoriously miniscule print runs…”