Little Girl Lost

This entry in the Hard Case Crime series is an original novel by Richard Aleas. It's a tough, gritty story about a murdered stripper and the gumshoe who was once in love with her.

The P.I. is John Blake, and he awakens one morning to read in the newspaper that his high-school sweetheart, Miranda Sugarman, has been murdered, and not only that, she was a stripper. The last he knew she was off to go to college to be an eye doctor. Driven by the need to find the truth, Blake lifts the rock on the strip-club world in New York City and finds all the slimy things wriggling underneath. Eventually this leads him to a crime-boss who has been robbed of half a million dollars.

This novel succeeds best when Aleas gives us a sense of New York in winter, the gray skies and some of the windswept streets of neighborhoods where nice people don't go. He also has a handle on strip-clubs and how they operate, especially the strata that separates the glamorous places from the dives (I say with a perverse sense of pride that at one point I had visited just about every strip-club in Manhattan, so I have some experience in this area). Aleas isn't looking to glamorize the life of the stripper or necessarily to condemn it--in the end, it's just a job.

Some of the drawbacks of this book are the lack of deviation from the usual private-eye template--it seems that every fifty pages Blake gets the snot beat out of him. Also, there was a twist that I figured out about fifty pages before Blake did. I was almost racing ahead to see if I had figured it out correctly, and when I realized I had I kind of smiled in triumph.

All in all, a well-done bit of pulp fiction.