Review: Plays my emotions like a violin...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 24, 2014
Rhys Ford, Dirty Deeds4 starsThe fourth of the Cole McGinnis series, Dirty Deeds reminded me why I so look forward to reading Rhys Ford's books. She's a wonderful writer.By the end of the first chapter, my mind had caught up on who all the main players are.  Cole McGinnis, half-Japanese private detective with a dark back story and an unhappy childhood; Jae-Min Kim, Cole's lover, recently disowned by his Korean family; Iricho, Cole's newly-found Japanese half-brother; Claudia Dupree, Cole's office assistant in name, matriarch of a large African-American clan (but really his surrogate mother).These characters and more all jumped right off the page and back into my heart as Ford played my emotions like a violin. The four strings on that violin: humor, joy, pain and love. It was exhilarating to read Ford's writing again, to remember the incidents of past books, to reassemble the complicated and dark back story that has brought Cole and Jae to this point in their lives and their relationship.Los Angeles--the city we don't know--is a central character, with its traffic and sprawling, confusing network of ethnic neighborhoods. The rhythms and textures of the city shape the narrative and color our sense of place as Ford's story unrolls.She's just good. You need to read the three preceding books.This book actually felt like it could be the last in the series; there was a satisfying movement toward closure and resolution--until the last damn line, when she opened another door, making me instantly anxious to read the next chapter.