John Shannon Books In Order

Jack Liffey Books In Order

The Concrete River (1996)
The Cracked Earth (1999)
The Poison Sky (2000)
The Orange Curtain (2001)
Streets on Fire (2002)
City of Strangers (2003)
Terminal Island (2004)
Dangerous Games (2005)
The Dark Streets (2006)
The Devils of Bakersfield (2008)
Palos Verdes Blue (2009)
On The Nickel (2010)
A Little Too Much (2010)
Chinese Beverly Hills (2014)

Novels

Broken Codes (1986)
The Taking of the Waters (1994)

Jack Liffey Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

John Shannon Books Overview

The Concrete River

‘John Shannon’s literary mysteries deserve a much wider audience. They are tough, wry, graceful, humane, deeply engaged with the world. The Jack Liffey series is a major re imagining of Los Angeles.’ Los Angeles Times Book ReviewJack Liffey’s lost everything: his job, his lovely wife, his daughter. His first case as a Los Angeles child finder becomes a fight for redemption and for life itself, as he’s swept into a world gone mad around him.

The Cracked Earth

‘A remarkable update on the Chandler knight errant. Shannon matches the master.’ Dick Lochte, Los Angeles TimesHer name is Lori Bright. You might remember seeing her in A Week in Palm Springs, lounging enticingly in the bathtub while an aging and flustered Cary Grant tries to find her a suitably revealing towel. Jack Liffey remembers, and even now he can’t help but fall for her just a little. The problem is that she’s paying him good money to locate her missing daughter a case that is about to get Jack stuck between the seedy violence of the old City of Angels and the new gleaming bloodlust of contemporary Los Angeles.

The Orange Curtain

If you’ve not met Jack Liffey and every mystery lover should here’s your chance. This taut new novel featuring author John Shannon’s ‘brave and decent’ hero also offers you the perfect opportunity to get hooked on this much admired mystery series. Liffey’s turf is the sprawling, deceptively open cityscape of greater Los Angeles with its forgotten suburbs, its volatile communities, its dangerous neighborhoods. To the anguished despair of parents and protectors, it’s a city that holds lots of dark, secreted places for sons and daughters to hide. Or be hidden. Jack Liffey may have lost his job in the aerospace industry but he has found his calling tracking down lost children. His case in The Orange Curtain takes him deep into the Los Angeles Vietnamese community, where a beautiful young woman, Phuong her name means Phoenix has disappeared. The exotic realities and complex alliances of Little Saigon are not all that Liffey has to contend with, however. Beyond its boundaries there’s a sad young man named Billy. Billy likes to watch people, and he has a relationship with his mother as strange as any in Hitchcock.

Streets on Fire

In the gripping fifth novel of what the Philadelphia Inquirer calls a lean and literate crime series, Jack Liffey the rough edged, compassionate private detective who garners even more enthusiastic reviews and fans with each new case once again searches the volatile and dangerous ethnic communities buried in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles for another of the city’s mysteriously lost. This time out, Liffey is looking for a prominent 1960s civil rights campaigner s adopted son, who has gone suspiciously missing in the wake of an unsettling run in with a motorcycle gang at a local jazz club. The whole city is unsettled, in fact, by the choke hold death of Abdullah Ibrahim a black Muslim and the Dodgers new ace spitball pitcher at the hands of the L.A. police. In the course of his investigation, Liffey runs afoul of skinheads, white supremacists, and black separatists. He also confronts his own latent racism before the city erupts into the full fledged civil riot that could cost Liffey his life.

City of Strangers

In the sixth novel of this best-selling private-eye series, Jack Liffey probes the complex ethnic mix-Muslim, Jewish, Baha’i, Christian, and secular-of the Persian communities in Los Angeles. A gripping tale that confronts youthful idealism with perfervid fundamentalism, it lands bright, earnest Fariborz Bayat, who has gone missing from an elite L.A. high school with three other Persian-American boys, in a cell of Arab terrorists. Hired to find the boys, Liffey finds himself in a nightmare, unless he and Fariborz can thwart the cell’s plot to set off a dirty bomb full of radioactive waste high over L.A.

Terminal Island

Terminal Island is the latest book from top mystery writer John Shannon. While detective Jack Liffey is convalescing from a collapsed lung from his last case, he is called to his hometown of San Pedro, shipyard to Los Angeles, where an inexplicable string of mysterious accidents have befallen local residents; a child turns up missing, a fishing boat sinks, a life’s work is destroyed and Japanese playing cards with cryptic notes are left at the scenes. At the same time, Jack begins to read snatches from the diary of Joe Ozaki, an enraged Japanese American ex Green Beret who has vowed to avenge U.S. misdeeds against his father and other Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Eventfully Jack crosses paths with Joe Ozaki, when the Green Beret targets the detective’s own father. The showdown between Jack and Ozaki comes to a head on a sealed off Terminal Island, where escape is difficult and the final outcome anyone’s guess.

Dangerous Games

Jack Liffey’s new girlfriend, Gloria Martinez, a police sergeant of Paiute Latino heritage, talks him into looking into the disappearance of her beautiful 18 year old niece, Luisa, from a tiny reservation in the Owens Valley. To escape abuse, the girl had threatened to run away to L.A. s po*rn industry, and in fact does become caught up in the phone sex business, then hostessing, and finally the trashy business of videotaping the homeless engaged in wildly dangerous stunts. Luisa is fought over by a motley band of lowlifes and would be rescuers, including the Jamaican Trevor ‘Terror’ Pennycooke, whom Jack knows from an earlier case. The hunt for Luisa comes together in the Malibu Hills, where a bumbling army of suitors and rescuers touch off a gun battle and dangerous firestorm that sweeps Jack and everyone else ahead of it down the Malibu Hills toward the ocean.

The Dark Streets

The detective the Chicago Tribune declared ‘the most interesting since Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins’ himself goes missing. The Dark Streets takes private investigator Jack Liffey to LA’s glitzy, exotic Koreatown, where a young film student, Soon Lin Kim, has apparently gone missing. Early in his search for her, Jack learns that Soon Lin has been tangling with a giant Korean conglomerate. Again, as in all the Liffey mysteries, the superbly crafted action that makes John Shannon one of the most exciting detective fiction writers on the California scene envelops Jack, and ultimately he finds himself under torturously intense interrogation at the secret compound of a private security agency and for a climax as explosive as the violent lightning storm in the desert sky.

The Devils of Bakersfield

The seemingly sleepy oil town of Bakersfield has a long and grim history of hostility towards outsiders, be it the Okies during the Depression, African Americans, or labor organizes. When Jack Liffey and his daughter Maeve end up in Bakersfield as a respite from their life in Los Angeles, they find that the town has cast its paranoid fears on a group of rebellious teenaged girls alleged to be Satanists. As hysteria mounts, there is a mammoth book burning and a police raid on all people they deem unsympathetic to their evangelical cause. In the chaos, Maeve disappears and Jack is racing against the clock to find her and save the girls from the town’s exorcism.

Palos Verdes Blue

In the latest Jack Liffey novel, L.A.’s most famous child finder finds himself enmeshed in a race fueled turf war on the Palos Verdes peninsula. Barely recovered after nearly loosing his daughter to religious fanatics in what could only be termed a ‘witch hunt’ in Bakersfield The Devils of Bakesfield, 2008, Jack is hired to find another girl, Blue, the missing teenage daughter of his ex wife’s best friend. The investigation leads him to discover an intense turf war on L.A.’s posh Palos Verdes peninsula. The Bayboys, rich teenage surfers, routinely vandalize cars and terrorize outsiders to enforce a strict locals only policy for their own Lunada Bay. They have also started terrorizing the Mexican day laborers who camp in the ravines between the mansions where they work as gardeners and houseboys. When one stubborn Mexican boy decides that he wants to learn to surf the waves of Lunada Bay, the feud turns violent, drawing in arsonists, angry bikers, racist border vigilantes, and Jack’s daughter Maeve, who once again puts herself at risk to help her father.

On The Nickel

The new novel in the critically acclaimed Jack Liffey series – Private Investigator Jack Liffey has been confined to a wheelchair, unable to walk or speak, for more than a month, due to a freak accident that may have damaged his spine. So when an old friend calls asking for help in finding his missing sixteen-year-old son, Jack’s teenage daughter, Maeve, intercepts the call and decides to take on the case. But it’s not long before she finds herself in deep trouble, and soon many lives are hanging in the balance…

A Little Too Much

The new novel in the critically acclaimed Jack Liffey series Private Investigator Jack Liffey is hired to find a popular African American actor, Ty Bird, who has disappeared from the set of his new movie. Meanwhile, Jack’s home life is falling apart his daughter, Maeve, has moved out, and his partner, Gloria, is spending less time at home. However, as Jack s search for Bird takes him to some of LA s stranger suburbs, he finds out that someone is coming to seek revenge…