The House That Buff Built

"A Chinese American woman fears for her life in her first night in in the house she's bought in an all-white suburb. The only one who'll help her kung-fu Maoist daughter protect her is a low-rent private dick, Harry Palmer. Dennis Broe's newest meta-noir drops his shamus into the corruption and racism of 1950's L.A. real estate. It's a heady trip among a galaxy of career lowlifes with delirious prose framing this metamorphosis of fact and fiction through a lost and insidious history." –David James, USC Professor of Film and Television and author of Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance With Popular Music.

"Dennis Broe's latest is a farrago of invention not just about Los Angeles in the 'urban removal' era but about the corporate politics behind that same process in every major American city in the postwar period. Another triumph linking the criminal underworld to villainy in the suites." —Eric Gordon, LA Progressive

"Harry and Crystal's dogged pursuit of the truth leads to an exposing of the double dealing that underlies the effusion of corruption which engulfs LA society in one of the darkest periods of its history. The House That Buff Built examines the real estate industry whose pillaging led the city to its current housing crisis"--Crime Time    

In The House That Buff Built, detectives Harry Palmer and Crystal Eckart expose the crime lurking not just on the seedy backstreets of LA but also on the gleaming main streets of the real estate paradise of suburban boom towns in the early '50s. Everywhere they find dispossession in the Mexican, Negro and especially Chinese communities, all of which may be sparked by land holding interests tied to major media outlets. The trail is perilous and leads both of them to question how they can live and love amid so much corruption and double dealing.