Title: The Butcher’s Granddaughter
Author: Michael Lion
Cover Artist: Aaron Spong
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: New Pulp Press
Publication Date: June 15, 2009
They call him Bird. He makes his living by understanding how Los Angeles operates after the sun goes down. When a French-Vietnamese transplant named Li Nguyen approaches Bird and asks him to protect her sister Song from a jealous boyfriend, Bird reluctantly agrees. But it doesn’t take long for Bird to realize that Song’s troubles go much deeper than a little domestic dispute.
The hero of Michael Lion’s The Butcher’s Granddaughter is a fucking snitch.
Okay so Bird wouldn’t call himself that. He’d tell you he’s in the business of information – trading the dirt on whoever to well, whoever – cop, criminal or square. And in mid-90’s L.A., there’s plenty of shit to dish out to parties willing to pay.
The Butcher’s Granddaughter starts out with Bird being asked by Li, the girl of his dreams, to help her sister Song out of a jam. Song is shacking up with a violent car thief named Jay who has just found out that Song has been cheating on him. Bird swoops in (sorry) and defuses the situation, gets Song out of Jay’s apartment and into her sister Li’s. Bird figures he’s scored some points with Li and calls it a night, wipes his hands of the whole fucking mess. But soon enough Song and some another pretty young girl turn up dead, both killed the same way.
At the same time he’s taken a job from his PI buddy Rick Cane involving a yacht docked in Newport that lets rich dudes fuck under-age girls out on the Pacific. If you don’t think these two cases are connected, rent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang toot-fucking-sweet – that ought to lay the rules out for your ignorant ass quick enough.
The Butcher’s Granddaughter is a big complicated trip through the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles, where everybody’s on the take and everybody’s got some dark shit to hide. Bird is great guide, a mysterious young man with a motorcycle and countless contacts. Lion’s decision to keep Bird so mysterious would be an odd one if it weren’t so clear that Bird could easily carry a number of sequels, hopefully with numerous appearances from the great supporting cast Lion has assembled around Bird.
But the problems with The Butcher’s Granddaughter are ones the Nerd has with countless private eye novels, from Chandler to the present. Though Bird is resourceful and knows almost everybody in the underworld, a great deal of this fucking epically labyrinthine plot happens without Bird’s involvement, leaving much of the events to be explained away by Bird and folks he interrogates through dialogue. And I mean great deals of the plot, folks. The last thirty pages had me carefully reading and working shit out in my head and doubling back over pages and just generally struggling to keep all that shit straight.
I know lots of private eye/mystery readers are used to that shit (the Marlowe books almost always wrap up that way), but the Nerd likes it best when such information is spread out throughout the book, when the reader has been set up enough that there’s just a couple of details to be sorted out by the last act, the rest of the shit going down being action, decisions, violence – the fun shit. I mean, we’re to believe that Bird knows his shit about his town, but then all this shit goes down that he has to sort out through talking to dudes that aren’t even major players in said shit that’s going down. It’s pretty fucking frustrating, to be perfectly fucking honest, dear reader.
Bird does reveal himself to be a pretty badass hero, making the “tough choices” in the end in the tradition of the truly hard-boiled dicks (there’s an image) before him, but it takes a lot of work and backstory and explaining to get there. And yeah, the Nerd realizes he’s being vague but shit, that’s because this bitch is a PI novel and what’s the fucking point of reading a PI novel if you know the specifics, right?
And if you like PI shit, The Butcher’s Granddaughter is definitely worth a shot. Because despite my reservations – about the book specifically and the Marlowe-style PI novel in general – I’d definitely give Bird another chance. I mean, the dude is cool-as-all-hell and his world is an exciting place. Lion’s LA is genuinely fucking diverse and our man Bird can hang with the OG’s in South Central just as easily as he can with the Goths at the basement nightclubs. So in the end, the Nerd would gladly step into this time and place once again, he’s just got his fucking fingers crossed that the next time around the plot is more thriller than mystery.
Fun review for a fun sounding book.