Boystown

PRAISE FOR THE CONCRETE RIVER (#1 in the Jack Liffey Mystery Series)

“Noir master… Shannon tackles a tough social issue with intelligence and a clear moral compass. His spare, noir style and articulate dialog strike just the right balance between thriller and social consciousness. His growing audience will love this. Recommended.” —Library Journal

“Witty, alert, energetic, talented way above the ordinary.” —New York Times Book Review

“The hands-down winner in the long-running ‘Where is the Next Raymond Chandler Coming From?’ sweepstakes… Jack Liffey is the most interesting new private detective since Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins.” —Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

“Shannon has mastered the most essential element of the genre, giving us a guy we want to stand shoulder to shoulder with while we try to make sense out of a senseless universe.” —Booklist [Starred]

“Shannon has written an intelligent, surprising book, found the heart of his working-class characters, and delivered a first-rate thriller in the bargain.” —George Pelecanos

“Liffey is a most unlikely action hero whose feats of intuition, verbosity, and personal empathy make an interesting contrast to the exploits of his hard-boiled peers.” —Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

“Shannon matches the master, Raymond Chandler, in several key areas, notably location, characterization and dialogue.” —Dick Lochte, Los Angeles Times

“The real rewards of this novel are the wounded and searching souls caught up in the madness… and his appealingly thoughtful hero.” —John Koch, Boston Globe

“Southern California has always been fertile ground for crime writers and one of the very best of them has to be John Shannon.” —Denver Post

“The landscape of Los Angeles… has been deconstructed by writers from Chandler to Didion, but never quite as artfully as does John Shannon.” —James Crumley

With a brand new novel, Boystown, the complete Jack Liffey series is introduced to a new generation of mystery lovers.

John Shannon emerged on the literary scene in the 1980s with several well-reviewed novels before introducing his most beloved character, Jack Liffey, in 1996, with the crime thriller The Concrete River. Over the course of 14 books, the LA-set Liffey series hit the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list, and consistently garnered stellar reviews and best-of-the-year mentions in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Washington Post, among many others. 

John Shannon’s Los Angeles belies the myth of constant sunshine and Hollywood glitz. With hundreds of communities, ethnicities, religions, classes, cultures, subcultures, and microcultures all vying to occupy the same space, conflict is the only constant. Jack Liffey, a former aerospace professional, finds himself pushed into a second career as a private detective specializing in finding young missing people. With Jack’s complicated relationship with the bottle, his internal demons, and his beloved daughter, Maeve, interjecting herself into his cases, Liffey’s world is a dynamic but dangerous place. Each book centers around a different Los Angeles community steeped in its own distinct tensions, and each title refuses to let the reader predict the next steps.