24th July 2024
It is likely that most people would suspect that, beneath the glamour and opulence of the 5-Star hotels and A-List parties, there is a seedy underworld in Los Angeles. Quite how sordid – with its crime, drugs, violence, prostitution, hangers-on and desperation – is revealed in this fast-paced contemporary thriller.
We identify with two main characters – Amanda Mae Pruett (Mae) and Chris Tamburro.
Mae is employed by Mitnick & Associates – “LA’s pre-eminent crisis management firm” – whose mantra is “We don’t get the good news out, we keep the bad news in”. The reader gets an early illustration of her impressive skills in manipulating the public perception of events when she creates a positive story – duly lapped up on social media – about how a troubled young actress (one of the firm’s clients) obtained a horrendous black eye just days before she was due to start shooting a film.
Chris is a burly enforcer – a “fist” – employed by a dodgy lawyer, Stephen Acker, who, in turn, works for a ruthless security firm, BlackGuard. He had previously been dismissed from the LA Police Department after the FBI caught him in a sting involving confiscated drugs. We learn that “…everybody at BlackGuard is ex-something. Ex-cop, ex-fed, ex-military. Everybody got trained on the government dime”.
It has to be said that Jordan Harper does not portray the official police force at all sympathetically. Corruption, violence and the leakage of information are rife. Moreover, in east LA, the continual battles against the various gangs are conducted by what are effectively gangs within the East LAPD: “…every Dead Game Boy [a police gang] has the same tattoo inked over their heart, where it would always be covered by a uniform and bulletproof vest… A red addition is made after you’ve killed a man in the line of duty”.
The narrative takes a sudden – and shocking – shift when someone whom I had assumed would be another central character is murdered. Mae and Chris join forces to investigate the reasons behind this, she for personal reasons and he when commissioned by Acker and BlackGuard. When their path leads them to uncover more murders – in the plural, this time, a massacre of the inhabitants of a house they had been watching – they realise that their own lives are in danger from the overwhelming forces now being marshalled against them.
Mae and Chris label these forces as “The Beast” – a sinister web of interconnections comprising holding corporations, major property interests, corrupt public officials and compromised media players as well as Mitnick & Associates’ PR empire and BlackGuard’s security forces. (And, at its centre – a la Ian Fleming – a reclusive billionaire). It is here that Harper is drawing on the widespread paranoia within present-day America about the Deep State or whatever other malevolent forces might be in league to keep the Ordinary Joe – you and me – exactly where they want us.
In this case, The Beast’s interests range from the trade in body-parts and the billions to be made from a major property development through to the protection of the reputations of a powerful Hollywood producer and his cronies. When Mae and Chris uncover evidence of a major paedophile ring, their goals become focused on “saving” a pregnant 14 year-old and revealing what really goes on at the producer’s “soda pop parties”.
The author skilfully signals the moral ambiguities that both Mae and Chris recognise within themselves. They see the virtue in attempting to take down – via blackmail and for their own profit – someone who is clearly a nasty piece of work. At the same time, they acknowledge to themselves that – in their different ways – their own careers have been far from unblemished in terms of the work they have done and the ways in which they have gone about it.
At the heart of this is their fatalism about the nature of Los Angeles and the inevitability that the city will always contain its bad guys. As another character recognises, “You can kill an ant, but if you leave the sugar on the floor, more ants will come. It’s the same with people – you can clean out the monsters, but if you leave the money and sex and power on the table, soon enough more monsters will come”.
And the reason for this? That the city is also an overwhelmingly powerful magnet, drawing on the hopes and aspirations of those – particularly the young and naïve – looking to make their names and fortunes. There is “…a web of social media, all these teenage wannabes, all so polished, working on their brand”.
Harper indulges in a certain amount of LA name-dropping – of both people and places – though this is not done to excess. Mae walks past Gary Oldman in the lobby of a plush hotel and, later, sees someone who looks like Natalie Portman eating a chocolate croissant in a French pastry café. It is Natalie Portman. The frequent – and swift – changes in location take us past where John Belushi OD’d and the rapper Biggie Smalls was killed in a drive-by shooting. And, whilst the diets of both Mae and Chris seem to comprise entirely of various types of fast-food, we are also informed about what is available in the more upmarket – if not pretentious – eating establishments. In a restaurant on Silver Lake Boulevard, one of the characters has “a bowl of ancient grains and bison hit with the house-made lacto-fermented hot sauce”; at a nearby table, a little girl has a tantrum, flips her plate and her “Zhug-smudged rock cod goes flying”.
Above all, the reader becomes totally immersed in the furious pace of the city and of the lifestyles – at both work and play – of those who live there. In particular, we are almost overwhelmed by the instantaneous world of social media, not least at Mae’s firm. In the basement “Bunker”, where her colleagues are continually creating or amending accounts on Twitter and Instagram, the access to news feeds and cell phone posts demands immediate reactions and responses in order that the appropriate narrative feeds into the public domain.
Jordan Harper takes us on this hair-raising ride with aplomb. Welcome to modern times. Welcome to Los Angeles.
JR Alexander 