THE SECOND MURDERER

The versatile Mina adds still another arrow to her quiver in this authorized pastiche in which Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled private eye searches for a woman who definitely doesn’t want to be found.

In fact, Marlowe’s strong impression is that wealthy LA patriarch Chadwick Montgomery III doesn’t really want to find Chrissie, his daughter and heir; he’s chosen Marlowe’s one-man agency, the narrator/hero decides, to look for her because he wants to keep the investigation under wraps and end in failure. Instead, Marlowe locates Chrissie, who was “easier to find than an optimist in a casino,” in less than a day and then has to decide what to do next. Chrissie would rather work as “Joan Baudelaire” at Peggy Zimmerman’s art gallery than return to the home of her intolerant, abusive father and his enigmatic secretary, Anneliese Lyle. The decision about her fate isn’t Marlowe’s alone, however, since the all-female detective agency headed by Anne Riordan, whom Marlowe met 83 years ago in Farewell, My Lovely, turns out to be on her trail as well. When Marlowe discovers Chrissie—who’s gone to the seedy Brody Hotel apparently to meet a nonexistent fellow named Peter West—standing over the corpse of a man who reportedly died months ago several thousand miles away, the case instantly becomes more urgent. But Mina’s pastiche, less literal than Robert B. Parker’s Poodle Springs (1989) and less glum than Benjamin Black’s The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), is more playful in its early stages, as Mina cheekily piles on Marlowe’s trademark similes, though it darkens considerably as it approaches its fade-out.

Female-forward in all sorts of ways—quite a change of pace for the legendary gumshoe.