"A remarkable update on the Chandler knight-errant. Shannon matches the master."—Dick Lochte, Los Angeles Times

Her name is Lori Bright. You might remember seeing her in A Week in Palm Springs, lounging enticingly in the bathtub while an aging and flustered Cary Grant tries to find her a suitably revealing towel. Jack Liffey remembers, and even now he can't help but fall for her just a little. The problem is that she's paying him good money to locate her missing daughter—a case that is about to get Jack stuck between the seedy violence of the old City of Angels and the new gleaming bloodlust of contemporary Los Angeles....

In the latest Jack Liffey novel, L.A.'s most famous child-finder finds himself enmeshed in a race-fueled turf war on the Palos Verdes peninsula. Barely recovered after nearly loosing his daughter to religious fanatics in what could only be termed a "witch-hunt" in Bakersfield (The Devils of Bakesfield, 2008), Jack is hired to find another girl, Blue, the missing teenage daughter of his ex-wife's best friend.  The investigation leads him to discover an intense turf war on L.A.'s posh Palos Verdes peninsula. The Bayboys, rich teenage surfers, routinely vandalize cars and terrorize outsiders to enforce a strict locals-only policy for their own Lunada Bay. They have also started terrorizing the Mexican day laborers who camp in the ravines between the mansions where they work as gardeners and houseboys.

When one stubborn Mexican boy decides that he wants to learn to surf the waves of Lunada Bay, the feud turns violent, drawing in arsonists, angry bikers, racist border vigilantes, and Jack's daughter Maeve, who once again puts herself at risk to help her father. ....

The seemingly sleepy oil town of Bakersfield has a long and grim history of hostility towards outsiders, be it the “Okies” during the Depression, African-Americans, or labor organizes. When Jack Liffey and his daughter Maeve end up in Bakersfield as a respite from their life in Los Angeles, they find that the town has cast its paranoid fears on a group of rebellious teenaged girls alleged to be Satanists. As hysteria mounts, there is a mammoth book burning and a police raid on all people they deem unsympathetic to their evangelical cause. In the chaos, Maeve disappears and Jack is racing against the clock to find her and save the girls from the town’s “exorcism.”
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The seemingly sleepy oil town of Bakersfield has a long and grim history of hostility towards outsiders, be it the “Okies” during the Depression, African-Americans, or labor organizes. When Jack Liffey and his daughter Maeve end up in Bakersfield as a respite from their life in Los Angeles, they find that the town has cast its paranoid fears on a group of rebellious teenaged girls alleged to be Satanists. As hysteria mounts, there is a mammoth book burning and a police raid on all people they deem unsympathetic to their evangelical cause. In the chaos, Maeve disappears and Jack is racing against the clock to find her and save the girls from the town’s “exorcism.”
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