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A stand-alone urban fantasy novel in the City of Shadows series, where hardboiled noir meets a post-WWII Los Angeles shared with vampires, zombies, and demons.
The San Fernando Valley is hot, the money is dry, and private investigator Mitchell’s most frequent companion is an office cat named Old Man Mose. Most calls are a waste of time, but rent doesn't pay itself. When a known prankster with a history named Irv Lipshit dials the number offering a hundred dollars just for an audience, Mitchell takes the deal.
But Los Angeles is changing, and the shadows are getting longer. The supernatural is starting to bleed through the cracks of the noir pavement, proving that ancient hunger and Wild Turkey do not mix well. Mitchell is about to find out that some jobs are priced high for a reason.
- Gritty supernatural noir
- Post-WWII alternate history
- Supernatural detective tropes
Harry Turtledove has spent forty years dismantling reality to see why the wheels come off. Hugo and Sidewise Awards fill his mantle because he breaks facts for a living. Most people call him the Master of Alternate History. That title is just a polite way of saying he is the only man who can make speculative dread feel like a peer-reviewed paper. Now he is applying that same grit to the supernatural. Los Angeles is full of vampires and gremlins. Turtledove lives in the San Fernando Valley and treats these monsters like historical inevitabilities. Ancient demons and the ghosts of history both smell like old paper. Just shadows and copper. This is a pivot by a man who already knows where the bodies are buried. Harry currently lives in Chatsworth, California.