Back in 2017, Springfield, Missouri, native Jordan Harper made his debut as a novelist with a thriller titled “She Rides Shotgun.” The Post-Dispatch review (written by me) gave it a thumbs-up and urged Harper to stay behind the keyboard.
He did, now giving us “Everybody Knows.” The New York Times just gave it a thumbs-up. But at the Post-Dispatch, this reviewer’s thumbs move between up and down — up on the characters, kind of down on the complicated plot.
Harper gives the starring roles to two people:
• Mae Pruett, who works as a publicist tasked with keeping bad news about her firm’s clients out of the papers and off the TV newscasts.
• Chris Tamburro, once a deputy in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and now a “fist” — a tough guy for hire.
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The two once had a flingette. But that was long ago, at about the time Pruett was recruited by Mitnick & Associates, a “black-bag” public relations outfit in Los Angeles. Here’s the spiel she got:
"Black-bag PR is a rush. We don’t get the good news out — we keep the bad news in. It’s like James Bond, Hollywood sleaze edition. You’ll go places nobody else in the world gets to go. You’ll know things that nobody else in the world will know. You’ll do ugly things for ugly people — but, hey, the pay is commensurate. You’ll get a peek behind the curtain. It will scare you. But it will buzz you, too.”
Tamburro comes across as a mixed bag. Early on, author Harper tags along with Tamburro as he waits in the apartment of a man Tamburro has been hired to hurt:
“He tosses the apartment to kill time. He searches it the way they taught him in the academy — marking a grid in mind, working top to bottom. Cop habits die hard.
“He finds a salad of pills in a sandwich baggie. He finds an 8-ball of fish-scale cocaine hidden in the couch. He finds a mirror frosted with coke residue. He finds sex toys and coconut oil in the nightstand. … He finds a stack of hundred-dollar bills in a suit pocket in the closet. He pockets the cash, the coke, and the pills.
“Cop habits die hard.”
That complicated plot of “Everybody Knows” starts grinding with the seemingly random murder of a colleague of Pruett — a man with a conscience. Then it takes a sharp turn into a hookup with a 14-year-old girl impregnated by a big-name Hollywood executive.
Pruett and Tambarro team up again, battling bloody violence on the outside and wrestling with their emotional attachment on the inside.
Harper tells much of the story through the dialogue and thoughts of his characters. Some readers may be put off by the obscenity that spews out — even from that pregnant 14-year-old.
Harper also uses insider slang. For example, he describes some advantages of life as a cop: “Food on the arm and badge bunnies lurking at cop bars.” That translates to “free food and willing women.”
And like a few other thriller writers living in Los Angeles, Harper insists on giving readers linguistic maps of the routes his characters drive. A sample:
“She takes Sunset over to Fountain, through Silver Lake, past the good vegan self-serve place, past the Trader Joe’s where the cops shot that cashier, to the Hyperion Bridge, passing over the 5, the Verdugo Mountains smog-blurred to the north. She glances down to the LA River, this wide concrete canal with a broad, shallow current running through it.”
In the end, things finally get wrapped up, more or less. But Harper succeeds in stripping Los Angeles of its Hollywood-style glamour. His tale makes humdrum flyover St. Louis seem snug and cozy.
Harry Levins of Manchester retired in 2007 as senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.
