Review Summaries

• Readers praise the 1960s Los Angeles atmosphere, the way jazz and crime are woven together, and the sense of payoff as the series concludes. Some also note that it works best with the earlier books in mind.

Reviews

• This is the first book by Ray Celestin that I've read, so I'm just realising what I've missed. This is one of the best crime novels I've read in a long time. At times the plot filled with corrupt policemen, agencies and politicians seemed wildly implausible, until I read the author's afterword, and you realise that it may not be so far from the truth. This is America after all, and recent events show that surely anything is possible there. The city of Los Angeles comes to life in a way that reminds me of Michael Connelly (albeit some decades earlier than in Connelly's novels), and that is high praise. This book is a thrilling read, well plotted and with excellent complex characters whose stories interlink. It is written in a style that conveys the sense that the author is reporting on actual events rather than conjuring them up from his own imagination (a characteristic of all good fiction). I will definitely be going back to read the earlier books in the quartet. Highly recommended.

• Alles bestens

• SUNSET SWING was the winner of both the CWA Gold Dagger and the CWA Historical Dagger in 2022, yet it has not been a “hit”. The setting is Los Angeles in 1967 and thus this is considered “historical fiction”. This backdrop is especially appealing to me because I lived in Los Angeles from 1959 to 1963. Many of the locales described are familiar to me—they hadn’t changed that much between 1963 and 1967. (They would be unrecognizable now, but live on in my memories.) SUNSET SWING begins by following three different POVs: (1) Ida Young, age 67, is a retired detective, trying to write her memoirs but restless; she is secretly happy to be called to consult on the latest murder scene of the Night-Slayer, a serial killer who is terrorizing the city—he appears to select innocent victims randomly and his killing scenes are chaotic and horrifying. (2) Kerry Gaudet is in her early twenties, an army nurse whose face and body have been scarred by a traumatic encounter in Vietnam. She is using her week’s R&R leave to search for her young brother who arrived in Los Angeles several months earlier after running away from the group home in Louisiana. She is desperate because the last letter she received from him suggested that he was involved in a dangerous enterprise. (3) Dante Sanfillipo is a mob “fixer”, looking forward to retiring at a newly acquired vineyard in Napa Valley, unhappy about being summoned by the head of the local mafia for a “last” job—find the mob boss’s son, a bail jumper, who may be dead. If dead, Dante is tasked with finding his body. Initially, the pursuits of these three characters appear to be unrelated. The only thing in common among the three story lines is that each character listens to Chet Baker singing ‘Alone Together’ on the radio. For readers who know about Baker’s history of heroin abuse, this provides a clue to the direction that overall scenario will take. While Kerry searches for her brother, Ida analyses the Night-Slayer’s reasoning, and Dante tracks down the boss’s son (or his body), their stories slowly intersect, with suggestions of one big conspiracy. The action occurs midst the mayhem that is occurring during a Santa Ana fuelled fire—very relevant during this summer when wind-fuelled fires are taking place throughout the world. There is a fourth POV that occurs sparingly, that of Louis Armstrong. I am always hesitant when a ‘real’ person is placed in a fictional context, particularly when the story contains imaginary thoughts and actions of that ‘real’ person. The author handled this fairly well, not steering far from known facts about Armstrong, who plays a very minor role in the plot. I loved this one because of its historic description of Los Angeles, the interspersing of jazz into the theme, and its portrayal of three strong women—Ida, Kerry, and Dante’s wife Loretta. It includes revelations about the role of sacrosanct U.S. government agencies in drug smuggling, which may have made it unpopular in the U.S. This is the final book in Ray Celestin’s City Blues Quartet. I haven’t read the first three novels but this one can be read as a standalone. I was lucky to pick up SUNSET SWING on sale in Kindle ebooks section. It is still currently on sale if you hurry.

• I have enjoyed reading this series. This final book wraps up the narrative very satisfactorily. The history of these books combining with excellent story telling is very fun and interesting. The characters are well flashed out and I found myself caring about them even though at the start some were unlikable. Well worth the cost of the books.

• In Las Angeles, 1967, December, Kerry Gaudet, an army nurse, is on leave and is desperately trying to locate her brother. A cryptic message has made her fear for his safety. She has obtained a small arsenal and is somehow trying to get a lead to follow. Ida Young is recently retired PI who is informally asked to assist a police detective in trying to capture a serial killer roaming the city randomly attacking victims in their home. Dante Sanfellippo is about to retire from the mob when he is asked to find out what happened to a mob boss’s son. It is one last favor requested of him. These three separate investigations eventually collide together causing great danger to these individuals. This is the fourth book and supposedly final book in what is called the City Blues Quartet. I have read three of them. The books are very well written and give a feel for the time period the author is writing about. They have spanned New Orleans in 1919, Chicago, 1928, New York in 1947 and now Los Angeles in 1967. As someone who has a home there and knows New Orleans well, the depiction of the city in the first book, THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ, was so incredibly generic that I questioned whether the author ever actually visited the city. I strongly feel he just researches the locales on the internet. So, his depiction of the locale is always suspect to me. This book is no exception. The description of Las Angeles is so detailed, that I really don’t trust it as authentic. However, this is fiction, and, if the author paints a picture of a setting and does so as vividly as Ray Celestin, I have to accept it. My second issue with this author is that they are incredibly over written. With a good editor, the book should have been trimmed down from 550 pages to 350 pages. Instead, the book reads as if it were endless. The writing is superb and the characters so real. (I am not sure whether Louis Armstrong as a character was truly necessary) This book should be worthy of an A rating on the writing and the compelling plotlines. The extraneous material makes this overwrought novel a B and a mild recommendation. It is a bit of a shame.

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