Kenneth Bromberg – City Of Angels

‘City of Angels’ by Kenneth Bromberg is a crime thriller set in the 1920s in Los Angeles.

It follows Sam Lacy an LAPD detective, a man who is against racist attacks, murder and attacks against women. He doesn’t mind being a thug hired to strong-arm his way through a situation though. His partner is Lonnie and he also uses a brilliant man, Edward Bixby to get results when he knows forensics won’t cut it. The biggest issue for Edward and Sam is that Edward is black and the F.B.I wouldn’t hire him, so he works on the hush, hush for Sam. Sam’s sister works in the police records department and also helps him when she can, between these people and his rule-bending from time to time, Sam usually gets a job done.

Sam is called out to a dead woman’s body found in a rent by the hour hotel, when he sees her he realises she is an ex-girlfriend of his. He is determined to discover what happened.

The story is narrated uniquely. We get to know the characters as we go, each one offering their back story. I enjoyed this, as it gave every character their distinct personality, voice and I felt like I knew them. The biggest theme that ran through this story was the amount of corruption. Everybody who is anybody in L.A. does as they want, the movie stars, policemen, politicians any of the very wealthy men, the lot. There are parts of this book that made me angry reading them as a woman now.

Sam has his methods as I said but they do work and as the story unfolds, the various things come together and the bigger picture emerges. Although I was angry at times this story is a great depiction of the time. It is almost a historical thriller with the amount of research used to create this book. Most of the characters will stay with me for a while I enjoyed reading about them all, wouldn’t mind another instalment with Sam and ‘the gang’.

Thanks to Random Things Tours and Flame Tree Press for the copy of the book so I could write my review for today.