Greed and Revenge in Joe Kozmarski's Chicago
Twenty-something pages into Mike Wiley's first Joe Kozmarski caper, I'm already liking the guy. Joe has just witnessed the first of three murders in the story...a man who ran a store selling hookahs and porn videos. Hey, it was just a favor for a lawyer friend... dunning the shop owner for back child support payments. The private eye business is slow.
The next morning, Joe awakes from sleeping on the sagging couch in his office on South Wabash Street. He glimpses a bit of Lake Michigan out his window, runs around Grant Park without a shirt, and has breakfast at a joint down the block owned by three Greek brothers.
A telephone call and business picks up. A judge kicked off the bench wants a $15k favor. A young Vietnamese-American gal named Hanh has been found at the O'Hare Hilton with her throat cut. The judge's business partner is a suspect.
And so we follow Joe into the mean streets of the Windy City followed by Hanh's revenge-seeking brothers, Chinh and Lanh. To the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where Hanh studied art. To Club 9 where Hanh partied too hard. To a cinder-block $30 a night motel where Hanh modeled a $8,000 blue Chinese ceremonial robe. To her swank apartment with a doorman and purple and chrome furniture.
Wiley has written a "soft" hard-boiled story that was hard enough to be honored with a PWA award in a contest for best first private-eye novel.
Soft? I forgot to tell you about Joe's mother who leaves bigos in the frig of his fixer-upper house, the friendly ex-wife Corinne and a Chicago cop named Lucinda who keeps putting her hand on his thigh.
So come join me after this read at the The Bad Kitty Lounge, the next book in the series. I'm pretty sure the women in Joe's life will be there, too.