Streets on Fire: A Jack Liffey Mystery [Hardcover]

Jack Liffey is an unofficial private detective who specialises in finding missing children. In this case, the plot that has Liffey's attention is an investigation into the disappearance of a black boy and his white girlfriend. There is a strong suggestion that their disappearance may have something to do with an earlier altercation with a bike gang.

In the course of his investigation, Liffey crosses paths with the aforementioned bike gang, has a major run-in with an unusual but extremely dangerous religious group and meets Ornetta, the delightful shining light of the story. Ornetta is an 11-year-old girl who has an incredible gift for storytelling. She steals every scene in which she appears, which is fortunately many.

The wider storyline running in parallel to the Liffey focus is a wave of rioting that has broken out throughout L.A. on the back of the knocking unconscious of a black baseball star by a member of the LAPD. The riots are triggered when the officer involved is acquitted of any wrongdoing. The ongoing riots play a major part in the story as Liffey is caught up in them in a desperate race against time while crossing from one side of the city to the other.

A much larger role in this book compared to earlier books is given to Maeve, Jack's 15 year old daughter. She has been a fringe character up until STREETS ON FIRE, merely providing a poignant side story that highlights their mutual affection for one another. Two events take place that brings Maeve to her father's place and into his investigation. The first is a run-in with her stepfather and the second is the discovery of her mother's old Nancy Drew books. She moves in with her father and gets the idea that she could try her hand at detective work a la Nancy Drew. While the results are predictable, it gives us an opportunity to get to know her better and it cements the bond between father and daughter even more than it was originally.

An instant friendship forms between Maeve and Ornetta that becomes an incredibly strong bond between two the girls who swear blood-sisterhood with each other. I felt their love and friendship was on of the strongest parts of the book, providing a counterpoint to the hate that Jack Liffey was fighting. It was inevitable that the girls are involved in the climax to the book, giving us someone to care about and then putting their lives at risk.

From a quiet start, this story builds in intensity as the unrest around the city grows and finally explodes cutting across the investigation that Jack Liffey conducts. The ending is highly charged, heart in mouth action. Overall, it's a detective story that takes us deeper into the personal life of Jack Liffey causing me to care about him and his family even more.

Michael Connelly's best-selling L.A. cop is named after painter Hieronymus
Bosch, but Shannon's backgrounds are straight out of Goya: savagely sardonic
comments on the quirks of life. Watching a parade of blacks protesting police
brutality, Liffey is amazed to see the marchers suddenly break step and execute
a perfect pair of Zulu war kicks. "Even here in the world of cell phones and MTV,
the Zulu strut carried a kind of bizarre menace, as if thrusting onlookers into a
dimension where ordinary defenses might not work."

Liffey, who specializes in finding missing children, knows from the start that the
two lost young people he has been hired to trace this time are almost certainly
dead: The black college student and his white girlfriend have disappeared after a
run-in with a racist motorcycle gang called the Bone Losers--so far down on the
mental food chain that they can't even spell their chosen name right. But the
young man is the adopted, much-loved son of a famous activist couple in South
Central, and Liffey's detective friend Ivan Monk (on loan from Gary Phillips'
excellent series) recommends Liffey for the job.

The search is anything but straightforward, especially when another adopted
child--heartbreakingly lonely and articulate--points out to Liffey that the missing
white girl might be the key. Shannon steers his detective through minefields of
Christian white supremacists and black nationalists with a great deal of angst but
also a surprising amount of wry humor:

"He didn't think he had ever before gotten himself into a situation quite as
ludicrous as this: a white man in an old VW with Rustoleum red fenders parked in
the heart of a full-bore riot in a black area to defend a black man from other white
men who were--perhaps--sneaking up on the neighborhood. It was like zebras
trying to slip into the middle of a high school prom to stage a duel."