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Little Elvises is the Junior Bender sequel where Timothy Hallinan settles into the form he was setting up in Crashed. Junior is being coerced (again) into doing investigative work for a criminal, this time an aging music-industry promoter who manufactured a series of teen-idol stars in the 60s and has now been accused of a present-day murder. The investigation takes Junior deep into the actual history of LA pop music, which Hallinan handles with the kind of love that the form rewards.
The plot machinery is even tighter than Crashed. The senior-citizen Mafia ensemble is genuinely wonderful (one of the gangsters, a retired hitman named Wattles, is one of the funniest minor characters in contemporary crime fiction). Junior's daughter Rina gets significantly more page time, which deepens the emotional ground the series is operating on.
Five stars. The series is one of the cleanest pleasures in modern American crime writing. Read Crashed first.
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