Ghosttown (Whitney Logan Series #3)

by Mercedes Lambert, Michael Connelly (Introduction)

Overview

GHOSTTOWN

Still working from a distressed office on Hollywood Boulevard, with ex-prostitute and now legal secretary Lupe Ramos, Whitney Logan is summoned to the LA Criminal Courts Building to defend Tony Red Wolf against one of Division 40’s lesser crimes—drunk and disorderly. But early the next morning, Whitney stands face-to-face with Tony Red Wolf over a trash can that contains the severed head of Shirley Yellowbird on top of a pile of dismembered body parts.

Tony’s only explanation—he had a vision of the murder. Realizing that she may be dealing with a psychopath, but knowing that if Tony is arrested he’ll be assigned a more high-profile attorney, Whitney reluctantly agrees to wait 48 hours before surrendering her client in order to collect evidence that may exonerate him. Whitney may have finally found her chance to be a hotshot criminal attorney. Or be disbarred. Or end up in a trash can like Shirley Yellowbird.

From an occult shop in Hollywood, to a Indian bar where even “half-breeds” are unwelcome, to a fabled “ghost hotel” in Los Angeles, where a medicine man is said to hold all the secrets…Whitney and Lupe are drawn into a mystery so dense that even the edges of reality itself become uncertain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933586830
Publisher:	Stark House Press
Publication date:	02/13/2015
Series:	Whitney Logan Series , #3
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.42(d)

Editorial Reviews

"In this, her third Whitney Logan mystery, Lambert was just hitting her stride with a high-heeled flourish-and at the same time was kicking, elegantly, potently, at the genre's limitations. Ghosttown is the best book in the series. It shouldn't have been her last."-Ariel Swartley, Los Angeles magazine

"Ghosttown is tough and real and entertaining."-John Lutz, author of Fear the Night

"With its memorable characters, sharp dialogue and ever-increasing mood of uncertainty, fear and menace, the narrative builds to a startling and fantastical conclusion."-Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Lambert's powerful third Whitney Logan novel (after 1996's Soultownand 1991's Dogtown) concludes the story of the troubled Los Angeles attorney. Having scrambled for years to get her career off the ground, Logan, thwarted by drink and depression, becomes the court-appointed lawyer for Tony Red Wolf, recently arrested on misdemeanor charges. Logan finds him surly and attractive, and soon has him out on bail. That evening he calls her to a meeting place where he shows her the butchered body of one of his female friends, claiming to have nothing to do with the murder. Unsure whether to believe him, Logan delves into the little-examined subculture of Native Americans living in Los Angeles while slipping ever further into her own dark world of personal demons. With its memorable characters, sharp dialogue and ever-increasing mood of uncertainty, fear and menace, the narrative builds to a startling and fantastical conclusion. Lambert was the pseudonym of Douglas Anne Munson (1948-2003), whose tragic story her literary executor describes in an afterword. Michael Connelly provides an appreciative introduction. (Aug.)

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Publishers Weekly

L.A. public defender Whitney Logan (Dogtownand Soultown) is called in to help Tony Red Wolf out of a drunk and disorderly charge, which soon turns into a charge of murder. To exonerate her client, Whitney gets caught up in the little-known world of the Native Americans who moved to Los Angeles for a better life. Lambert, whose real name was Douglas Anne Munson, died in 2003.

—Jo Ann Vicarel

Library Journal

A final go-round for scrappy subsistence-level L.A. lawyer Whitney Logan and her ex-prostitute secretary Lupe Ramos (Soultown, 1996, etc.). When you're scrabbling for every dollar the court system is handing out, you can't afford to be choosy about your clients, and there's not much to recommend Tony Red Wolf, who's been picked up in an alley and accused of fighting Ernie Little Horse in a battle of honor over Ernie's cousin Shirley Yellowbird. Well aware that her client doesn't like her any more than she likes him, Whitney succeeds in springing him from the lockup anyway. Long past midnight, awakened by Tony's barely intelligible phone call, she runs out to the San Gabriel Mission, where she finds him standing guard over Shirley's dismembered corpse. Of course he didn't kill her, he sniffs; he was summoned to the scene by a prophetic vision. It's the first of many indications that Lambert, who died in 2003 after her publisher had rejected this last novel, has a healthy disrespect for the genre's rules. Readers caught off guard by the mystical ending should remember that when Whitney asks Tony much earlier what he's doing back on the street after his second arrest, he replies that he changed into a cockroach to escape the LAPD, then into a hawk to fly away. Michael Connelly's foreword and the biographical afterword by Lambert's friend Lucas Crown make it clear that her last testament is haunted in more ways than one.

Kirkus Reviews