Little Ghost
DETAILS: Publisher: Red Dog Press Publication Date: November 25, 2022 Format: eBook Length: 151 pages. Read Date: November 28-29, 2022
I’d enjoyed snooping around people’s lives. Poking at their secrets and unearthing dirty little details that earned me my payday. It wasn’t honest work, but it was fun.
Mostly.
The beatings weren’t, and I’d taken a few in my time.
Asked the wrong question to the wrong person. Asked the right question to the wrong person. Wisecracked at an inappropriate time. My crooked nose and the waxy scar on my cheek would be the lasting reminders.
What’s Little Ghost About?
Irving Ash is a Denver PI on rough times. His divorce is about final, this most recent romantic relationship (note the distinction) is over, and thanks to some recent headlines, he’s having a hard time getting work. He’s about to be evicted from his office, and it probably won’t be long before he’s out of a home, too. On the plus side, his cat, Cleo, seems to like him.
A friend connects him with a job. Well, not really a friend, an acquaintance. Okay, technically the bartender of his regular stop—Ash calls him an “enabler.” This may be out of the goodness of his heart, but it’s more likely that he’d like Ash to be able to pay his growing tab. The job is doing security work for Roxie Pictures—a porn studio (the owner, Gordon Rock, describes their work as “art…Beautifully shot videos, made by passionate people for passionate people,”*). Cleo apparently has some qualms about the job, but the pay is good enough he can’t pass on it.
* That sentence alone gives you everything you need to know about the character. You can feel the sleeze dripping off of him. The next sentence of his description will make you want to wash your hands before picking the book up again.
It’s not too long before Ash finds the studio’s biggest star, Brandi Dyvine, in a confrontation with someone. Then she goes missing, potentially kidnapped. Rock’s in love with her and is willing to fork over ransom money—Ash talks him into trying to buy some time instead. Ash figures finding and rescuing her is far more likely to result in Dyvine and Rock not being killed at the end of the transaction.
Ash starts combing through the details of Brandi’s life—and well, things get messy from there. In the world that Ash finds himself in, women and money are the deadliest combination—and he learns that the hard way.
Brother John
Like any good PI who finds themselves near the morally gray areas, Ash has a friend who is far more comfortable in the gray—maybe even the black. The Hawk/Joe Pike/Bubba Rogowski/Mel Frost role.
For Irving Ash, that friend is a man named Brother John. Brother John is the kind of friend you want when things get hard—he’s resourceful, dedicated, and willing to go the extra mile. I’m unwilling to say more about him because Ash should be the one to introduce him to you (I’d just ruin it). But I couldn’t not say something about him.
So let me say this—I’ll be the first backer for a Kickstarter for a novella or two about Brother John before Ash moved to town (or be the first to pre-order). I don’t see McDonald doing that, but if he did…
Pesky Britishisms
I really hate to pick at these nits. Truly. But my biggest fear when I heard that McDonald was going to write this was that it was going to sound like someone from the British Isles pretending to be an American. Sadly, that fear was realized.
And I get it—we still owe a debt for Dick Van Dyke’s Bert. I’m not sure how much longer we need to atone for this (but it’s a while)—and there are several other lesser offenses we need to make up for, too.
But, no one in the US uses a biro to make notes on pages of A4, gets aspirin from a chemist, or plugs an address into a car’s sat nav. (there are smaller examples, but let’s stick with some of the more egregious ones). Do I—like many/most readers–know what’s being said there? Sure. But when I come across something like that it jars me, takes me out of the moment. And I really don’t like that when I’m enjoying the moment so much. I was in Ash’s head, I was fully invested, and then McDonald slips and throws ice water on my face. Yes, I’m able to get back into the moment, back into Ash’s voice, etc.—but this whole experience would’ve been so much richer if I didn’t have to get back into it, but could’ve just stayed there.
Now, this all goes away if Irving was someone who grew up in England and moved to the States, eventually to Denver, instead of going to University or something along those lines. Then these slips are character moments, not the jarring errors they become as he’s a guy from the East Coast who moved to Denver.
Is any of this that big of a deal? Not really. Is it unforgivable? Of course not. Did I lose some appreciation for the novel because of it? Yes. It’s something that could’ve been explained away, or reduced with another editing pass or two. When the rest of the novel is so good, the tiny flaws really stand out.
So, what did I think about Little Ghost?
‘So, what’s the plan?’
‘Whoever it is has Brandi, I’m sure of that. So, we hit them, and we hit them hard.’
‘Revenge?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I love revenge,’ Brother John smirked.
I know I was supposed to think of classic PI types when I read this novel—and I did to an extent. But really what this made me think of more than Chandler or Hammett was Stephen Mack Jones and Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea.* Both of those were very much in the classic PI mold, but incredibly contemporary, too. That’s what Irving Ash felt like to me, a 21st-Century PI, and regular readers know what kind of catnip that is to me.
* I also want to mention Michael Koryta. I’m not sure why, every example I can think of from Koryta fails to match up. But I can’t shake the feeling that Little Ghost shares some DNA with something he did or would write.
I saw the bigger elements of the final reveal coming—but not all of them, and the ones I missed were the more important and disturbing ones (if you ask me). So I was able to feel good about myself and be taken unawares at the same time. I really can’t ask for more than that. Along the way, McDonald hit me with at least four moments where I couldn’t believe I read what was on the page, and had to go back to verify. After the second moment, it became clear to me that McDonald wasn’t playing around, no punches were going to be pulled here.
McDonald has crafted a compelling story with a central character that will get you invested and hoping he’ll come out on top–even while he’s doing things that most of the time you’d find abhorrent. The writing is crisp and terse–McDonald gets his money’s worth out of each syllable. Ash is a damaged man, and you can sense it–and you can see when it gets worse, just because the text isn’t verbose, doesn’t mean you’re not going to find a lot of emotion and depth in the scenes. McDonald has given us both.
This says something about his talent. If you gave this to me without an author’s name on it and told me it was someone I’d read before, I don’t know that McDonald would be in my first five guesses. I think that’s true of his DI Erika Piper series, too–I wouldn’t have picked the Stonebridge Mystery author for those. So far, that’s three distinct voices and styles he’s displayed in three subgenres. You’ve got to wonder a little what he’s not capable of at this point.
I strongly encourage PI fans to pick this up–and soon. Maybe if enough of us do it, we can convince him to keep this from being a stand-alone.
