Jack Liffey Series – serie

As Jack faces down a changing world, his brazen daughter, Maeve, enlists him to help find Benjy — a young, gay social justice activist. Meanwhile, a needless act of violence sets off an urban range war between a group of gun-happy poachers and former Soviet paramilitary soldiers in Boystown, a famously gay West Hollywood neighborhood. Jack, weakened by his surgical recovery, must save the day before the entire community goes up in flames. 

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.

After losing his aerospace job-a casualty of the "peace dividend" brought by the end of the Cold War—52-year-old Jack Liffey still fights his personal wars: with the bottle, his ex-wife, and his loneliness after losing custody of his precocious and beloved daughter, Maeve. Before he can surrender to a life of alcoholic cynicism, an unexpected vocation enters his life when a mysterious woman from Mexico hires Jack to find her missing daughter. 

Suddenly, Jack is dealing with a real estate developer's goons, powerful politicians, and-perhaps most dangerous–his increasing feelings for a former nun who may be the key to the entire case. Armed with a small handgun and unwavering determination, Jack must rescue someone else’s daughter so he can redeem his own sense of purpose and fatherhood. 

The Jack Liffey series takes readers deep into the many unexplored communities, enclaves and cultures of Los Angeles that sometimes co-exist, sometimes clash, but always surprise. Fans of Michael Connelly will fall deep into the fast-paced, unpredictable, and dangerous world John Shannon creates.

Jack Liffey’s reputation for finding missing kids has led to an offer from a lawyer to solve another disappearance, that of Hollywood icon Lori Bright’s rebellious teenage daughter. Jack accepts the job with the promise of a hefty paycheck, determined to catch up on child support and renew visitation rights with his daughter, Maeve. After all, how hard can it be to find a wayward rich kid with no street smarts? 

The arrival of a ransom note changes everything and Jack is pushed into the world of violent skinheads, Jamaican gangsters, and, perhaps worst of all, movie studio executives. His increasing attraction to the iconic actress does not improve matters, serving to remind him that you can’t trust anything in Los Angeles, even the stability of the ground beneath your feet. 

The Jack Liffey series takes readers deep into the many unexplored communities, enclaves and cultures of Los Angeles that sometimes co-exist, sometimes clash, but always surprise. Fans of Michael Connelly will fall deep into the fast-paced, unpredictable, and dangerous world John Shannon creates.

“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]

In the third installment of John Shannon’s celebrated Jack Liffey series, Jack’s transition to the unexpected vocation of private investigator seems complete when a client desperately begs him to find her runaway teenage son. As it becomes clear that the boy has been ensnared in a cult, the client sets a nearly impossible condition: that her estranged husband must not be involved. The case promises to lead to chaos, but Jack is nevertheless compelled to try to get Jimmy Mardesich back, even as a group of thugs, as ludicrous as they are menacing, break into Jack’s condo and terrorize his girlfriend Marlena. 

On the heels of this attack, the private detective is forced to allow his precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Maeve, to tag along. Their search will take them from the machinations of a doomsday cult to the byzantine halls of corporate corruption and, ultimately, a potential environmental disaster of unimaginable proportions. As Otto Penzler noted when The Poison Sky was first published, “Shannon, with his hero Jack Liffey, a knight errant cruising the L.A. freeways and frequenting the less glamorous suburbs, is squarely in the lineage of Raymond Chandler

The Jack Liffey series takes readers deep into the many unexplored communities, enclaves and cultures of Los Angeles that sometimes co-exist, sometimes clash, but always surprise. Fans of Michael Connelly will fall deep into the fast-paced, unpredictable, and dangerous world John Shannon creates.

“Shannon delivers a tour-de-force climax...” —Publishers Weekly

When a bookstore owner’s brilliant daughter Phuong Minh vanishes from Little Saigon, Jack Liffey once again finds himself in familiar territory—being in unfamiliar territory. Leaving LA, Jack crosses into Orange County’s Vietnamese community, where he crosses paths with a troubled cop whose intentions are unclear, and Billy Gudger, a troubled young man who believes he is cursed by an exotic toadstone lodged in his brain.

With the "Sagebrush Killer” on the loose, Jack must face the possibility that Phuong Minh is one of his victims, even as Jack continues to navigate Orange County’s gang culture, and the beautiful mentor of the missing girl, Tien Joubert. As Publisher’s Weekly wrote of Shannon’s fourth installment of the Jack Liffey series, “When the parallel lines meet, Shannon delivers a tour-de-force climax, with the action believably, and beautifully, driven by each character's needs.”

The Jack Liffey series takes readers deep into the many Los Angeles ethnic communities, tribal enclaves, and religious cultures that sometimes co-exist, sometimes clash, but always surprise. Fans of George Pelecanos will fall deep into the fast-paced, unpredictable, and dangerous world John Shannon creates. 

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

“Shannon's spare, noir style and articulate dialog strike just the right balance between thriller and social consciousness.” —Library Journal 

It’s 2002 and Jack Liffey’s just doing a favor for a friend—he thinks. A fellow detective has asked Jack for help with finding Amilcar Davis and his girlfriend Sherry, both college kids. Amilcar is the son of a prominent black civil rights leader with deep roots in the African American community of South LA. The case has gone cold, but the situation is heating up as the community reckons with the choke-hold death of Abdullah-Ibrahim—a black Muslim man who also happens to be the Dodgers’ new ace pitcher—at the hands of LAPD.

Meanwhile, Jack delves into the Davis case, starting with a run-in the missing young couple had with a racist motorcycle gang a few weeks before their disappearance. Running headlong into an urban battlefield of white supremacists and black separatists, Jack must negotiate lines drawn with blood and hate. While LA teeters on the brink of another riot, Jack loses Maeve, his beloved daughter, and (as Kirkus Reviews puts it), “finds her, loses his lover, perhaps permanently, and gets beaten up, chewed on by dogs, and shot, almost fatally.” All in a day’s work for Jack Liffey.

John Shannon’s Liffey series takes readers deep into the many ethnic communities, tribal enclaves, and religious cultures of Southern California, which sometimes co-exist, sometimes clash, but always surprise. Fans of John Lescoart will fall deep into the fast-paced, unpredictable, and dangerous world John Shannon creates.