The midnight promise : a detective's story in ten cases /

Although he calls himself a private inquiry agent, John Dorn is a shamus in the classic mold. He's lovelorn, taciturn, drinks too much, and lives in his shabby Melbourne office. Beautiful, dangerous dames don't arrive at his office; he subsists, barely, on jobs handed to him by his only friend, criminal defense attorney Demetri Stafiakopolous. Initially, The Midnight Promise seems to be a series of short stories, but in time a story arc emerges that concerns Dorn's nearly suicidal bid for personal redemption. Lovitt is sure-handed in sketching characters, and he laces Dorn's cases with sardonic humor and prodigious bits of human frailty. Melbourne and for many U.S. readers Australia in general offer an intriguing setting, at once familiar and exotic. Most of Dorn's Melbourne has been kneecapped by governmental deregulation of business the same free-market ideology that has proven a disaster worldwide and the inevitable Bernie Madoff wannabes; once modest but solid Melbourne houses are now slumped against each other like penguins in the Antarctic. Fans of international crime fiction will enjoy Dorn and his milieu.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist

Melbourne PI John Dorn declares, in the prologue of Australian author Lovitt's powerful hard-boiled debut, "You don't make promises to do what I do." He goes on to do just that over the course of 10 chapters, each involving a separate case. The cases get progressively more disturbing, both in terms of their subject matter, which include gruesome torture, and their impact on Dorn, a classic world-weary narrator ("I was parked in a narrow, forgotten kind of alley that's really an abyss between tall buildings, where it's still raining 20 minutes after it's stopped everywhere else"). The title refers to a kind of promise, according to Dorn's mother, "made to get what you wanted, not one you actually ever kept." For Dorn, the promise is that his crime stories not be about him, and it takes until the very end for the reader to assess what he wanted in making it. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.