GOODNIGHT, IRENE

Back in 1955, O'Connor, a dogged reporter for the Las Piernas News Express, took up the case of Handless Hannah, an unidentified corpse he wrote about every year on the anniversary of her death. Now O'Connor's been killed by a bomb; his wastrel son Kenny has been beaten into a coma; and the coroner who never succeeded in identifying Hannah has shot himself. So O'Connor's protÇgÇe, Irene Kelly, quits her p.r. job and goes back to work at the Express, provoking a rash of near-miss attacks on herself (drive-by shooting, car chase, etc.) and more successful assaults on an ill-placed bank officer and Hannah's cousin back in Phoenix, as Irene labors to connect Hannah's murder with a money-laundering scheme in present-day California. Despite some good spadework by the dead O'Connor and consistent doses of violence: mainly a loose, friendly take on the female sleuth, with more violence, threats, and romance (Irene, a cop she once burned for, an ex-hockey player) than detection. First of a series.