CASE PENDING

A follow-up to a case he shelved as unsolved six months ago sets the LAPD’s Lt. Luis Mendoza on the trail of a double murderer in this reprint from 1960.

This first procedural from the prolific and multibylined Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988), the pioneering writer who first brought a woman’s eye to the genre in volumes published under her own name and the pseudonyms Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, and Egan O’Neill as well as Shannon, kicks off with waitress/seamstress Agnes Browne’s discovery of a corpse in a vacant lot at the corner of Commerce and Humboldt. The victim, Elena Ramirez, has been strangled and battered so savagely that she’s lost an eye—a detail that forcefully recalls the similar bludgeoning of hotel chambermaid Carol Brooks six months ago in East Los Angeles. Cursing himself for his failure to solve the earlier case in time to save her life, Mendoza is determined to close this one. But the challenges are serious. Agnes Browne is hiding a secret she’s afraid to share; so is 13-year-old Martin Lindstrom, whose father is only the latest Angelino to desert his family; and Dick Morgan, another good cop, is being squeezed so hard by a blackmailer that he’s seriously contemplating a murder of his own. The author dexterously solicits your sympathy for them all as she follows the natty Mendoza, who’s beginning his long-lasting romance with Alison Weir, from one dead-end neighborhood to the next. Editor Leslie Klinger supplies a judicious introduction and a series of footnotes that explain period details, gloss Mendoza’s sometimes fractured Spanish, and incongruously compare Mendoza to Klinger’s deepest love, Sherlock Holmes.

For all its limitations, fans and completists will find Shannon’s debut novel unmissable—or well worth reading again.