SONGS OF INNOCENCE
Richard Aleas
Hard Case Crime
Mystery
ISBN-10: 0843957735
ISBN-13: 9780843957730

Don't start SONGS OF INNOCENCE by Richard Aleas without carving out enough time to read it twice, preferably in one sitting. And don't let your friends borrow the book. Just recommend it and let them buy their own copy; otherwise, you'll never get yours back. This is unlike any hard-boiled mystery you've ever read.

John Blake, Aleas's unlikely and unlucky protagonist from LITTLE GIRL LOST, returns in SONGS OF INNOCENCE, although not as a private investigator (at least not initially). Still reeling from the events that took place three years previously, Blake has enrolled in the writing program at Columbia University and is working his way through school as a teaching assistant.

When Dorothy Burke, one of Blake's classmates, is found dead as the result of an apparent suicide, he is certain that she was murdered. They were close --- the term currently in vogue that would best describe their relationship is "friends, with privileges" --- and Blake was one of the very few people who knew that Burke had been working at a massage parlor to make ends meet.

Using the skills acquired and honed in his past work as a private investigator, Blake begins turning over rocks and knocking on doors to determine who killed Burke. His quest takes him into the seamy world of the sex trade, which operates on and beyond the border of the law and into the dangerous, twisted world of the Hungarian mafia, even as he leaves a trail of violence and death behind him.

Blake solves the mystery --- and the identity of the person who caused Burke's death will shock readers.

With SONGS OF INNOCENCE, Aleas has accomplished a seemingly impossible task by presenting a new twist in a much-loved but well-treaded genre. Brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed, this may well be the noir novel of the year.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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