One PI. Ten crimes. โStylistically reminiscent of Quentin Tarantinoโs Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill. An exciting and original debutโ (The Hoopla Literary Society).
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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 โas a sledgehammer is to a kneecap.โ A superlative work of hardboiled literary detective fiction,ย The Midnight Promise wonderfully evokes the underbelly of contemporary Melbourne, its battlers, its hard men, its victims, and its ill-fated heroes.
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โ[A] powerful hard-boiled debut .ย .ย . 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.โ โPublishers Weekly (starred review)
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โLovitt has a neat way with a yarn. .ย .ย . 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.โ โThe Sydney Morning Herald
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โ[An] artful, Down Under nod to the hard-boiled private eyes of Chandler and Hammett.โ โThe Christian Science Monitor, โ10 Excellent International Thrillersโ
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โLovitt is sure-handed in sketching characters, and he laces Dornโs cases with sardonic humor and prodigious bits of human frailty. .ย .ย . Fans of international crime fiction will enjoy Dorn and his milieu.โ โBooklist