Jordan Harper

Real Rating: 4.4* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic crime novel tells a story of Los Angeles power brokers and those at the edge—and a single shattering incident that threatens to bring it all crashing down.

Los Angeles, right now. America with its back up against the wall. This Frankenstein's monster of crimes and lurid dreams sewn together into something like a city.

A city ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested, and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A show more young woman goes missing—and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime...

JAKE DEAL is a gonzo live-streaming nightcrawler, beaming the city's chaos straight to his audience of blood-hungry subscribers, giving them the view from the top of the mushroom cloud—until a job he can't refuse drags him back into his old life of Hollywood glamour, drugs, sex and sleaze. Armed with cameras and hidden mics, he'll infiltrate private clubs, gather high-class dirt—and stumble onto a conspiracy woven into the center of LA's most powerful men, who call themselves "The Kids in the Candy Store."

DOUG GIBSON is a street lawyer, who fights for his clients against the army of cops, prosecutors and judges—he is the knife they bring to the gunfight. But when he's hired by a Hollywood pedophile ready to sell out his friends for a chance for freedom, he'll take on a fight bigger than he could have imagined. And when his client "commits suicide" in prison, Gibson will have to stop being a weapon—and become a warrior.

KARA DELGADO works for an underground private concierge company—a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich. She scores drugs, makes connections, and plans multi-million dollar sex parties. She has learned the secret truth of this world: there are no rules, only prices. Her best friend Phoebe has gone missing, and Kara's the only person who knows that Phoebe's place was wiped clean of evidence by men in black rubber gloves. But when she begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to Phoebe, and its connection to the killer known as the LA Ripper, it will drag her into the dark heart of the city.

As Jake, Doug and Kara all investigate these crimes, they'll encounter ketamine-addled sitcom stars, bloody riots, homeless gangsters, a killer cop on death row, secret vaults in Beverly Hills, tech-bro orgies, medical cannibals, true crime junkies, private security wet-work teams, reality shows, street takeovers, car chases, coyotes, a sadistic Tarzan, and a three day, fifty million dollar wedding, before everything is revealed and they must each make their choice about how to fight back in this violent world before the bloody, blazing conclusion.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A violent fever dream of a novel ripped from the fact-fueled fantasies of the next cult leader who will go about preying on bewildered, enraged, left-behind stooges. Nothing in this awful tale of those who serve the dreadful scum that has risen to the top of LA's heap as threats to their lives, their power, their money mount is ever clear. And each is more obviously from within their "charmed circle" than the last.

Author Harper's triumvirate of Jake, Doug and Kara each work on a corner of the to-them invisible puzzle of who threatens the elite, why, and work out what to do about it, they all draw more and more into one another's direct orbits. By the time Jordan Harper brings them together, the reader thinks "I am ready for the end to come."

No you are not.

If you have a trigger, you are warned. If you want to be ignorant of how very much misery the powerful feel entitled to inflict on others purely for their own amusement, you are warned. If you aren't willing to sit, slack-jawed and glassy eyed with horror, while brutality is described to you, you are warned.

Let the tumbrils roll. show less

IN A NUTSHELL
'She Rides Shotgun’ is an astonishingly good debut novel - no wonder it won the Edgar Award For Best First Novel (2018). It’s propulsive, violent, and engaging. The writing is fresh and effortlessly accomplished. The plot delivers an escalating threat, leading to a crescendo of violence, yet it avoids being a celebration of violence, keeping it always as a tool to be used with control and purpose, rather than surrendered to. This novel is structured as a bildungsroman with a show more twist. It focuses on how her experience of violence shapes who eleven-year-old Polly McClusky, the girl with the gunslinger eyes and the watermelon hair, will choose to become.

‘She Rides Shotgun’ initially seemed to be an outlaw-on-the-run story, with one violent criminal with a price on his head being hunted by well-connected gangs of killers. This isn’t a plot I’d normally be interested in. What placed ’She Rides Shotgun’ outside the conventions of this kind of ‘outlaw’ book and made it interesting to me was that it had a child as the central character, a child who, like her father, is marked for death. This changed everything. It raised the stakes on the choices she and her father faced, and it made the options (armed robbery, negotiations with a Cartel boss, gunfights with would-be assassins) more disturbing. I found myself rooting for Polly’s survival even while the cost of that survival mounted with every page.

At the start of the novel, Polly and her recently released from prison father were estranged. They were brought together first by their flight from danger and then by the risks they decided to take to get their death sentences removed. Their growing intimacy was powered by violence that was vividly and realistically described, but which was observed with as little judgment as if it were weather. Polly’s education in violence taught her that: it is better to give than to receive, that inflicting it and surviving it can both be exciting, and that giving in to that excitement, letting violence become a hunger that must be fed rather than a tool to be used, is a path to destruction.

‘She Rides Shotgun’ kept me deeply engaged from the first page to the last. It was a fast-paced, tense, violent thriller. It was also a novel of powerful juxtapositions: fear and excitement, cuteness and violence, grief and joy, riotous freedom and inescapable doom, that I found mesmerising. Most powerful of all was that the story had at its heart a little girl with gunslinger eyes,watermelon coloured hair, an emotional support teddy bear who became braver and more excited by the day, and the unspoken, undoubtable, unbreakable love between the girl and her marked-for-death outlaw father.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘She Rides Shotgun’. David Marantz’s narration was excellent. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.

https://youtu.be/-Owxpke2G10?si=tLtfJ1I4m09riVdp show less

"We are America dreaming itself. We're a fractal of fortunes and crimes, fortunes and crimes. We're cars and guns and land grabs and tacos, money and movies and big tits and death, all served under a dirty sky - please rise for our national anthem, and I right?"

“They serve to reduce the women to objects. A thing with no function but to be destroyed. Misogyny amplified”

"The high desert is Southern California's unconscious. It's where the things we push down go, where the unspeakable show more lives. It's the place we go to go someplace else.”

I have not read a big juicy crime novel in quite some time and this epic, hyper-violent tale certainly fits the bill. It is set in a nightmarish LA and the story is told through three characters- Jake, a live-streaming nightcrawler, who documents the nasty side of the city and feeds it to his subscribers. Kara- a young woman that works for a private concierge company, that caters to the kinky rich and famous. Doug Gordon- a street lawyer, that has dedicated his life to helping the down-out. After a Hollywood big-shot is arrested for child abuse and pornography (this has Jeffrey Epstein written all over it), he threatens to unleash a mountain of files implicating his high-class friends and co-conspirators. On top of this, there is a horrific serial killer on the loose, called the LA Ripper. How these events bring these three characters together is the black heart of this novel. It reads like an adrenaline shot to the heart and for those faint-hearted types, you may want to skip this one. It is not easy to read with your eyes closed. Fans of James Ellroy and Richard Price will love this one. Highly recommended. show less

The weapon is the true American art form. The revolver, the machine gun, the nuclear bomb--all of them invented by American men. We are descended from geniuses of death. This country is a violent masterpiece. It can never be anything else.

Three very different people, a lawyer who mainly works with disadvantaged clients, a YouTuber who chases crimes scenes, and a woman who works for a company that fulfills the wishes of the very wealthy for a high price, all come together in Los Angeles to show more hunt a serial killer and the bigger crime behind the murderer. Jake drives around the city, chasing crime scenes as he airs his opinions about a troubled city on the edge of explosion, saving his goriest pictures for his subscribers. Then a series of similar murders begin, although the police say they are all unrelated--the victims are all physically very similar and the way they are killed is an escalating version of the same method. Kara's best friend and the woman who got her this job disappeared and when Kara went to her apartment, she saw something. Now she's just trying to keep herself together, with the help of an impressive collection of drugs, as she does her job of keeping the worst men in LA happy. As the number of murders increase, she notices that the victims are all so similar to her missing friend. And Doug is busy trying to negotiate his clients slightly smaller sentences. He's currently trying to help a homeless woman stay out of prison, but he's hampered by having to find her in a city where the government razes homeless encampments. He's never defended a guy like the Hollywood bigwig accused of pedophilia, but too many people are telling him not to for him not to at least look into the case. As they each work on the edges of a very large crime, they eventually come together, but this one is too big for even these three wary and street-hardened characters to handle.

So this is a noir on the very gritty side of the spectrum, the characters all engage in questionable behavior and there's a large amount of often graphic violence. Harper knows the genre, from a mean streets version of Los Angeles, to the damaged characters inhabiting it. He's created a plot that, if this book had been published a decade ago, I would have found unlikely in the extreme, but today it looks far too plausible. He's also done a spectacular job with the three characters at the center of the book, each is nuanced and complex, if not always likable, and how they come together is carefully constructed. If you like your noirs grim and shiny, you'll love this one. show less