I always enjoy discovering a talented new crime novelist, so I was fortunate to receive a review copy of Koreatown Blues by long-time travel writer Mark Rogers.
The premise of the story:
Wes is a young man with ambition, but his ambition is small. He just wants to buy the car wash where he has been working as a laborer in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles. But when he finally manages to scrape a down payment together, the deal comes with strings attached: a young Korean wife, a centuries-old blood feud, and a target on his back.
Koreatown Blues is a cleverly-plotted hard-boiled novel with crisp, muscular prose, a feverish pace, a vividly-drawn urban setting, and characters so real that Rudy Giuliani would stop and frisk them.
The novel will be published by Brash Books next February, but it can be ordered in advance here.
