THE DARK STREETS
by John Shannon
In the ninth of this ever-darkening series (Dangerous Games, 2005, etc.), Jack Liffey seeks a lost child.
In order to clear the way for some ritzy redevelopment, the multinational conglomerate Daeshin wants a few elderly Korean ladies out of an apartment building it owns. During WWII, for reasons as complicated as they are shameful, Daeshin saw fit to press into prostitution a steady supply of young Korean women, little more than children. Now that they’ve grown old, the victims of this cruel exploitation are being maltreated once again by summary eviction from their Daeshin apartments. Enter Jack Liffey, who’s promised to search for a lost child named Soon-Lin, a passionate young Korean-American girl whose attempt to stop the conglomerate has been brutally thwarted. Compared to other jobs in his quirky, high-risk private-eye career, Liffey at first considers this one a snap. But more brutality lurks around the corner. Warned off, beaten up and eventually taken prisoner by Kafkaesque captors who either don’t know or won’t tell him what he’s guilty of, Liffey does what he can to maintain sanity and stay alive. In the meantime, his own daughter, 17-year-old Maeve, has found her own way to be lost.
Intelligent, literate, forbiddingly bleak fare for Liffey-lovers.