Losers live longer (Russell Atwood, 2009)

Similar to Little Girl Lost, but not as good. Again, we are in the present time in NYC with a lonesome PI on the case. His name is Payton Sherwood, and he’s a washed-up investigator waiting in his shabby office without furniture and a slow dial-up internet connection, waiting for the clients that never come. He used to work for some big detective agency under the mentorship of his friend Matt, but was fired a few years ago after fucking up a simple surveillance job. The number of detectives involved rises to three immediately in the first chapter, because there is also legendary old school sleuth George “The Owl” Rowell, who wants to employ our hero for the simple job of “flushing a tail out into the open”. But the detective count is quickly restored to two because Owl is killed (as he is no loser, it is probably from here that the title comes), even before he can fully brief Payton about the job. But he smells big money and has no other work anyway, so fun can begin.

We find ourselves in the usual hard-boiled underworld of film stars, drugs, corporate crime, child trafficking and femme fatales. And it’s all happening rapidly, as everything takes place in one day. The story gets quite complicated quickly, and there are some plot holes, but they are not too big, and the whole impression is still okay at the end. 

There are some other flaws. The biggest one is the total absence of police. At the end, the body count rises to nearly 10, and in all this time, there’s no sight of the NYPD, which seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? The second one, maybe even more important, is the lack of motive that drives our hero so hard. He wasn’t even a friend of the dead detective, hadn’t received any money for the investigation, and yet he let himself be beaten, chased and so on.

Another thing I’ve found a bit annoying is authors' near obsession with New York. There are just too many of those “I went to street X along venue Y crossing park Z,” and there’s even a short paragraph about 9/11 (fortunately not related to our story; the war on terror doesn’t take place here). It probably makes reading more interesting for residents of the Big Apple, but I’m certainly not intrigued enough to search these places on Google Maps.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 

Payton Sherwood, PI

Location: 

New York

Body count: 

8