Boystown — John Shannon

After an eleven-year hiatus, Jack Liffey returns in Boystown, the fifteenth installment of author John Shannon’s celebrated mystery series. As Jack faces down a changing world, his brazen daughter, Maeve, enlists him to help find Benjy — a young, gay social justice activist. Meanwhile, a needless act of violence sets off an urban range war between a group of gun-happy poachers and former Soviet paramilitary soldiers in Boystown, a famously gay West Hollywood neighborhood. Jack, weakened by his surgical recovery, must save the day before the entire community goes up in flames. John Shannon’s Los Angeles belies the myth of constant sunshine and Hollywood glitz. With hundreds of communities, ethnicities, religions, classes, cultures, subcultures, and microcultures all vying to occupy the same space, conflict is the only constant. Jack Liffey, a former aerospace professional, finds himself pushed into a second career as a private detective specializing in finding young missing people. With Jack’s complicated relationship with the bottle, his internal demons, and his beloved daughter, Maeve, interjecting herself into his cases, Liffey’s world is a dynamic but dangerous place.