One O'clock Jump
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4.0 • 8 Ratings
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
“Dorie Lennox is a humdinger of a private eye” — Sue Grafton
“Wonderful… a richly detailed story that quite simply gets to your heart” — Michael Connelly
“An excellent historical series, with evocative period dialogue and a story line full of surprises” — PW
Halfway around the world, war has begun, but for Dorie Lennox, a newly-minted private eye on her first tail, danger is more immediate. The dark streets of Kansas City of 1939 offer swing music, fast cars, gangsters, and the chance to forget about the Depression and her own murky past. But first she must conquer her fears and save a woman on a bridge high above the muddy Missouri. Dorie is thrown into a quickly unraveling scam that offers salvation to few — and misery to plenty — in the high stakes world of machine politics and desperation deals.
With vivid prose and sharp dialogue, the world of Dorie Lennox comes alive, behind the wheel of her Packard, into the packinghouses, race tracks, and mansions of jazz-age Kansas City.The landscape of America and the homefront of World War II are evoked in a thoughtful mystery that lingers for the force of characters and keen sharpness of a slice of history seen through the perceptive, compassionate eyes of Dorie Lennox.
Read about Dorie’s next adventure in Sweet and Lowdown.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Segueing neatly from the ski slopes of contemporary Wyoming (1999's Nordic Nights) to the Kansas City of Count Basie and FDR's fireside chats, McClendon debuts an excellent historical series, with evocative period dialogue and a story line full of surprises. Iris Jackson is a woman with a secret, but not for long. PI Dorie Lennox, hired to tail the meatpacker's "bar girl," thinks her first solo job is over when Iris jumps into the Missouri River, but this is just the beginning. Background on Iris is hard to find; rummaging through her few belongings yields scant information. Frustrated, Dorie picks up the investigation her partner, a WWI vet suffering from mustard gas poisoning, was working on when he was hospitalized centered on the new racetrack outside Kansas City. With little to go on, Dorie follows what leads she has straight into a web of false identities, cover-ups and fraud. Everyone seems to have at least one secret the crooked lawyer who instructs her to pursue the trail, the meatpacker, the silent partners in the racetrack, even Dorie herself. Layers of lies, pretext and disguise must be peeled back to solve an old mystery before thugs succeed in doing more than simply beating her up. After a somewhat sluggish start, the pace accelerates rapidly, as Dorie moves from hospital to racetrack, to jazz clubs, wisecracking all the way. With a blurb praising Dorie's appeal from Sue Grafton, McClendon (author also of the Alix Thorssen series) seems well poised to make this new series a hit.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful world
The word picture of the age was wonderful, some characters were beautifully portrayed, but the plot was lacking in pace, cohesion and overall flow.