There’s a reason why I don’t often revisit books I liked once upon a time: they’re probably not as good as I remember. When I reread stuff, it’s usually to either confirm or satisfy some sort of curiosity about the first dance I had with a book. Otherwise, I’d just as soon let it sit in my memory as I’d prefer.
I’ll probably never revisit “Richard Aleas”‘ (Charles Ardai’s) Little Girl Lost. It was one of my favorite books from 2010. I remember it being a thrilling mystery read as a lone detective scours the streets of Manhattan, protecting and defending female/femme sex workers along the way. I recall that I wanted to write books like that.
As much as I continue to try and look at that one through a sepia tone, my views on masculinity and sex work have change the last few years. I now realize that good intentions can still reinforce stereotypes and prejudices. Which is why my subconscious has probably prevented me from reading the sequel, as I’ve owned it for probably the better part of this decade as one in my Hard Case Crime collection.
However, I’m keeping to my once-a-month rule with HCC novels and since I’ve had a recent yen for New York stories, I decided to stop putting this one off.
The results are about what I expected. John Blake is a loner who mysteriously draws attractive women to him. Attractive women who also happen to be sex workers. He gets involved in a case of men doing dirty deeds to these women and needs to avenge them.
The worst version of books like this are the lantern jawed male PI a-holes who treat prostitutes as fallen angels and decry the system that grinds women to such a job without examining the male’s individual complicity in the system. A lot of those books exist.
This is almost the anti version of that, but in a similarly obnoxious way. It’s so try-hardy with how proud it is of its reformed views on sex work that it still can’t really see its female characters as anything more than pawns in a game. Tragedy is drawn to this man who has to do this thing and it involves this woman and blah, blah, blah. It’s better than the book I described in the last paragraph but it’s contributing to the same problem.
Especially with how it’s resolved. Don’t even get me started.
Ardai is a talented writer and there is one twist that happened which I genuinely did not see coming. He gets a lot of grace from me for making Hard Case Crime a thing. The label is one of my great joys as a book reader. But this one is a clunker.