NO CLEAN HANDS

Cosgrove’s offbeat investigative thriller features a goofball hero.

The author follows up his novel The Meridian Job (2026) with another adventure featuring hapless private investigator Marv Slocum. At the outset of this installment, Marv is looking to hire a new assistant for his Los Angeles office; the interview process is not going well. (One woman is even killed when her car explodes in the parking lot.) Then, June Park walks in; she’s a no-nonsense woman who spent four years in military intelligence. June is hired, and Marv gets a client—a woman named Catherine Ashworth, who needs help obtaining a manuscript created in the 12th century called the Meridian Codex. The Codex is currently in the hands of a Mexican cartel run by one Rafael Coronado. The Codex is worth some $40 billion because it holds the secrets to money that’s been “hidden for centuries”; its retrieval will be no easy task. Naturally, Catherine is not the only one trying to get her hands on something so valuable; enter Miguel Espinoza, aka El Cuervo. Miguel is a former history professor whose life was turned upside down after his family was killed in connection to the Codex; he’s spent the last six years seeking revenge. He’s happy to help Marv if it means he can finally have, as he puts it, Rafael Coronado “dead at [his] feet.”

Marv provides plenty of comedy as he stumbles his way through dangers big and small. One foe describes him as “This man who destroys everything he touches.” Whether he’s attempting to enjoy some high-end Scotch or inadvertently starting a conga line in a nightclub, half the fun of the story comes in seeing what Marv might do next. Fine comedic details add to the appeal: When Marv drinks the Scotch, the “liquid hit his tongue like liquid smoke, peat, and what he could only describe as ‘angry ocean.’” His eyes water, the drink seemingly a “substance that was actively hostile to human consumption.” As playful as such passages are, much of the humor is dark, as when Marv’s actions result in 13 people being killed in “eleven minutes.” No matter how silly some of the developments are, this is by no means a cozy mystery. In one shootout, someone takes a hit “that severed the carotid artery,” which sprays blood across “Italian Marble in an arc.” The narrative has quite a few moving parts; it’s not always easy to keep track of everyone as various characters are shot and betrayed and new figures enter the fray, such as a woman who starts murdering people and leaving Hebrew letters on their bodies. Add to the mix a corrupt federal agent and an eccentric electronic musician with ties to organized crime, and you have an extensive cast indeed. Still, even if readers are occasionally lost, Marv is always around the corner with some amusing new chaos to unleash.

A delightfully funny, playful, and bloody LA noir novel.