
The Lyft-driving rookie private investigator Adam Zantz, who made his first appearance in Daniel Weizmann’s Los Angeles noir novel The Last Songbird, returns for Cinnamon Girl. We find him still a sharp-thinking soul, close to penniless yet altruistic and trying to do the right thing in a city shrouded equally in glitz and danger.
Zantz gets a call summoning him to visit his old piano teacher, Charles Elkaim, who is dying. There’s a case dating back to the early 1980s when Charles’ son Emil was on the cusp of recognition as a musician until suspected of murdering a local gangbanger, then meeting his own sticky end whilst in custody. Charles wants to prove Emil’s innocence and find out what really happened to him before he too goes to his grave.
Maybe some answers can be found with the mysterious Mr Hawley, who has visited the retired teacher professing to know what happened to his son – or Emil’s then-girlfriend Cynthia, aka Cinnamon. Zantz starts digging around for clues that take him on a journey to the heart of LA’s dangerous, dark and nefarious underground entertainment world, one inhabited by some seriously twisted characters.
Cinnamon Girl is a fast-paced slice of noir, but crucially one with a heart: as a result, and perhaps on account of the novel’s modern-day LA setting, Zantz is less hard-boiled than Raymond Chandler’s private investigator Philip Marlowe. A thrillingly impressive follow-up to The Last Songbird, with a cool playlist to boot.
Cinnamon Girl, Daniel Weizmann (Melville House)
Price: £16.99. Info: here
words DAVID NOBAKHT