The Midnight Promise
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One PI. Ten crimes. “Stylistically reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill. An exciting and original debut” (The Hoopla Literary Society).
A literary detective story ingeniously told in ten cases. John Dorn is a classic gumshoe. His woman has left him, he lives in his office, and he drinks too much. His one friend, a lawyer named Demetri, hands Dorn an infinite supply of hopeless cases and lost causes, to which Dorn, ever the champion of the underdog and the oppressed, is drawn to “as a sledgehammer is to a kneecap.” A superlative work of hardboiled literary detective fiction, The Midnight Promise wonderfully evokes the underbelly of contemporary Melbourne, its battlers, its hard men, its victims, and its ill-fated heroes.
“[A] powerful hard-boiled debut . . . The cases get progressively more disturbing, both in terms of their subject matter, which include gruesome torture, and their impact on Dorn, a classic world-weary narrator.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Lovitt has a neat way with a yarn. . . . And just when you think he is going to stay close to a kind of downbeat realism, there is a slide into something a little thrillerish and action-packed.” —The Sydney Morning Herald
“[An] artful, Down Under nod to the hard-boiled private eyes of Chandler and Hammett.” —The Christian Science Monitor, “10 Excellent International Thrillers”
“Lovitt is sure-handed in sketching characters, and he laces Dorn’s cases with sardonic humor and prodigious bits of human frailty. . . . Fans of international crime fiction will enjoy Dorn and his milieu.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Melbourne PI John Dorn declares, in the prologue of Australian author Lovitt's powerful hard-boiled debut, "You don't make promises to do what I do." He goes on to do just that over the course of 10 chapters, each involving a separate case. The cases get progressively more disturbing, both in terms of their subject matter, which include gruesome torture, and their impact on Dorn, a classic world-weary narrator ("I was parked in a narrow, forgotten kind of alley that's really an abyss between tall buildings, where it's still raining 20 minutes after it's stopped everywhere else"). The title refers to a kind of promise, according to Dorn's mother, "made to get what you wanted, not one you actually ever kept." For Dorn, the promise is that his crime stories not be about him, and it takes until the very end for the reader to assess what he wanted in making it.
