The Goodbye Coast by Joe Ide (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99)
Joe Ide’s first series featured the Sherlock Holmes-like Isaiah Quintabe. Now comes a contemporary reimagining of Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe. Ide’s creation shares a name, a job description and a location with his literary progenitor, but has a deal more backstory – including a failed police career and a complicated relationship with his LAPD veteran father – and a deal less alcohol (although Dad makes up for that). When obnoxious film star Kendra Jones hires him, he assumes it’s to solve the murder of her director husband, shot dead some weeks earlier on the beach in Malibu, but she wants him to find and return her 17-year-old stepdaughter. Cody, who believes that Kendra had her father killed, refuses to come home; the truth, of course, is far less straightforward and a lot more dangerous. To complicate matters further, Marlowe falls for a desperate mother whose young son has been kidnapped by his father … The shift away from Chandler’s tight first-person focus risks diluting the whole, but The Goodbye Coast is a terrific read – pacy, with tension, pathos, wonderful descriptions of LA and some lovely one-liners.
