Smoke and Bourbon

The rain in L.A. didn't clean anything. It just moved the dirt.

He's a detective with a badge and a bottle, paying a debt in blood for a moral compromise he made back in '46. For Jack Delaney, the ringing in his ears is the echo of the Pacific, and the roar of artillery fire in his skull is the only honest thing left in a city built on a lie.

Under the thumb of Lieutenant Briggs, Delaney has been keeping his own hands clean by signing the lies that keep the department dirty. But when his partner, Sal, starts sniffing around a starlet's 'suicide'-a case bought by studio cash and buried by Delaney's signature-the debt comes due in a wet alley.

Now, with his marriage a ghost and his life dissolving into bourbon, Delaney must fight the system that owns his badge and the trauma that threatens his sanity. Los Angeles is a cold machine, but Detective Jack Delaney is about to discover that the only way to stop the gears from turning is to get his hands covered in oil and blood.

M.G. Phillips is a devotee of the American hardboiled tradition, channeling the bleak fatalism of Dashiell Hammett and the poetic cynicism of Raymond Chandler. An exhaustive study of 1940s Los Angeles-its architecture, its politics, and its raw desperation-serves as the grim backdrop for his debut novel, Smoke and Bourbon. He specializes in the kind of shadows the city refuses to acknowledge.