Dogtown / Soultown
*Starred Review* The mean streets of L.A. have been walked countless times by countless PIs, but few PIs have had a voice as compelling as Whitney Logan, a weight-lifting, wet-behind-the-ears lawyer who learns some hard truths about the city she thought she knew. Introduced in Dogtown (1991), Logan finds herself paired with streetwise streetwalker Lupe Ramos as she attempts to track down a missing woman for a liar of a client. On paper, the lawyer-hooker partnership sounds like a made-for-TV cliché, but in Lambert’s hands, the combination works, both women wary, jostling, and maybe even a little bit attracted to each other as they become embroiled in drug dealing and Latino political activism. Logan’s narrative voice owes more than a little to Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, yet her outlook is both womanly and utterly contemporary. And though the setting would have been unrecognizable to Marlowe—the ethnic diaspora filling in the cracks as Tinseltown is torn down—he would have felt right at home in a city “full of bad characters and quick to punish.” Soultown (1996) reunites Logan and Ramos in the middle of an armed robbery in Koreatown, the aftermath proving a test for their uneasy relationship. The first two books of the eventual Dogtown trilogy earned Lambert (real name Douglas Anne Munson) critical praise and peer respect but, apparently, limited sales. The third book, Ghosttown, was rejected by her publisher and didn’t see print until 2007—four years after the author’s tragic death from cancer at the age of 55. For voice, Lambert compares well to Christa Faust and Vicki Hendricks; for the seedy sense of place, try John Shannon and Gar Anthony Haywood. --Keir Graff