Denise Mina is the first woman to recreate Raymond Chandler's infamous detective: It's early fall when a heatwave descends on Los Angeles. Private Detective Philip Marlowe is called to the Montgomery estate, an almost mythic place sitting high on top of Beverly Hills. Wealthy socialite Chrissie Montgomery is missing. Young, naïve, and set to inherit an enormous fortune, she's a walking target, ripe for someone to get their claws into. Her dying father and his sultry bottle-blonde girlfriend want her found before that happens. To make sure, they've got Anne Riordan on the case, too.
Mina’s evocation of time and place is noteworthy, and her Chandleresque one-liners provoke appropriate amusement ... Her book, with its vivid scene-setting and spot-on dialogue, is perhaps the most pleasing and affecting Marlowe pastiche yet.
Billed as the first attempt by a female author to re-create Marlowe. I guess that’s true ... As literary reincarnations go, Mina’s novel is uneven ... The plot of The Second Murderer doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then neither did the plots of Chandler’s novels ... Mina’s infusion of such enlightened attitudes into Marlowe’s psyche raises the question of just how much his character — and the hard-boiled novel itself — can be revised before it turns into something else. Soft-boiled maybe? Mina’s Marlowe adventure is fine, but it doesn’t leave this reader yearning for more; Chandler’s Marlowe novels always will.
Effortlessly segues into Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles with this perfectly rendered Philip Marlowe noir. She has the world-weary, florid voice of Chandler’s P.I. down pat.
