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Get Off at Babylon is one of Marvin Albert's Pete Sawyer Riviera novels, a small underrated series about a half-American, half-French PI working out of Nice. Sawyer takes a case that starts with an apparently straightforward missing-art investigation and turns into something more dangerous involving the Marseille underworld and a piece of recovered Nazi loot.
Albert writes the French Riviera with the kind of texture you get from years of residence there. The geography of the coast, the racial and class politics of late-80s Nice, the way a mistral can change a week, all play roles. Pete Sawyer himself is the kind of competent honest hard-boiled hero that the era was producing fewer and fewer of.
Four stars. A small French-set series that deserves more readers. Recommended to fans of Manchette and the better mid-80s American PI novels.
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