The Orange Curtain — John Shannon

Jack Liffey is a decent guy who drives a beat-up car. Still, the 1979 Concord gets him around. It takes him into LA's massive metropolitan sprawl … into the city's forgotten suburbs, derelict neighborhoods, and volatile ethnic communities that hold lots of secret places for runaway sons and daughters to hide. Or be hidden.

This time out, Jack Liffey, the former aerospace engineer who has found his true calling in his uncanny ability to track down missing children, he finds himself deep in the local Vietnamese community. There, to the anguish and despair of her parents, the beautiful young Minh Phuong, a recent university graduate, has mysteriously disappeared.

The exotic realities and complex alliances of Little Saigon with its rival gangs and extortion rings are not all the Liffey has to contend with, however … not when he begins uncovering the corporate fraud and feuds surrounding plans to develop a new airport at El Toro Marine Base, and not with a serial killer brutally on the loose.

Then, too, there's Billy Grudger. A sad and lonely man, Billy lives inside a world of fragmented arcane and a relationship with his mother, the palmist and bibliomancer named Sonya, as strange as any in the work of Alfred Hitchcock.