What's in this book
- Timothy Hallinan's 2013 Junior Bender novel - second entry in the Los Angeles burglar-detective series
- Canonical contemporary American comic crime fiction; Hallinan's most-recommended series
- 320 pages of close-first-person Junior Bender narration across his second PI investigation in Hollywood-area Los Angeles
- Series continues across The Fame Thief, Herbie's Game, King Maybe, Fields Where They Lay
- Peter Berkrot audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of the broader Junior Bender series, the Poke Rafferty Bangkok series, and canonical American comic crime
Buy this book
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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.
Related reads
If you liked Little Elvises
Crashed
by Timothy Hallinan
The first Junior Bender novel. Timothy Hallinan writing an LA burglar-turned-investigator with a stolen-art crisis and a teenage daughter. One of the most underread comic-crime debuts of the 2010s.
The Fame Thief
by Timothy Hallinan
The Fame Thief by Timothy Hallinan review. The 3rd Junior Bender LA comic-crime novel. A 1950s Hollywood blacklist mystery, an ensemble of nonagenarian Mafia, the series at its absolute peak.
Herbie's Game
by Timothy Hallinan
Herbie's Game by Timothy Hallinan review. The 4th Junior Bender comic-crime novel. Junior's mentor Herbie Mott dies. Hallinan's most emotionally weighty entry yet.
The Fear Artist
by Timothy Hallinan
The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan review. The 5th Poke Rafferty Bangkok thriller. A travel-writer father, a dying CIA contact, and the Thai military police as the antagonist. Genuinely terrifying.
For the Dead
by Timothy Hallinan
For the Dead by Timothy Hallinan review. The 6th Poke Rafferty novel. A stolen phone, a dead Thai colonel, and Miaow at the center of the crisis. The series in family-thriller form.
The Lincoln Lawyer
by Michael Connelly
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly 2005 review. Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles defense attorney who works out of the back of a Lincoln Town Car, takes a case that pulls him into something larger. The novel that launched a series and a film franchise.
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