to realize his dream of becoming, if one can imagine, the next Phil Spector. locales and the diverse characters who call the city home, including Skeleton Tat, Amelia’s would-be abductor, a man who loves mixing sounds and beats as much as killing people and who emigrated from Tkibuli, Georgia, to L.A. Along the way, readers are treated to the author’s trenchant descriptions of L.A. To answer these questions, Rush goes on a breakneck tour of the Southland, from Bel Air to the Venice Canals, Manhattan Beach to downtown, in his 1966 Pontiac GTO, the ultimate muscle car for a muscle kind of guy. Is it a suicide, as Amelia and Stanley Trask contend, or was it murder? Could Steinkellner be to blame? And what does any of that have to do with the Russian mafia threats against Amelia? Steinkellner is now on parole, and Walter Trask, co-founder of GlobalInterLink and Stanley’s brother, has been found doing the dead man float in Stanley’s pool. Chief among them: Rush’s stepbrother, Zerbe, a hacker on parole who’s confined to Rush’s apartment with an ankle monitor Victoria Donleavy, a feisty ex-cop and owner of Tigon Security, the private security firm hired to protect Stanley Trask and Bob Steinkellner, a failed magi-holic who didn’t realize “performing magic tricks actively repels members of the opposite sex.”Ī perpetual loser, Steinkellner got suckered into one of Stanley Trask’s early swindles and tried to kill the media mogul years before in the debacle involving Rush, Guzman and Donleavy. It might be helpful to keep this bare-bones plot in mind, because Sutton embroiders the story with a rogue’s gallery of Rush’s friends and villains who entertain as well as serve to misdirect the reader’s attention. Now Amelia is Rush’s client, and she needs his protection from the Russian mafia and his help in finding Tony Guzman, Rush’s friend and colleague who worked the elder Trask’s security detail. Rush’s subsequent entanglement in Amelia’s life and welfare reconnects him to “filthy rich, arrogant” Stanley Trask, president and CEO of GlobalInterLink, “who a whole lot of people probably wanted dead.” Rush had made that assessment some seven years before when he worked on a security detail protecting Trask that went terribly wrong. But that’s nothing compared with the butt-kicking he must do when a black Lamborghini roars up to the Nocturne out of nowhere, its skeleton-tatted driver and his Russian henchmen intent on snatching Amelia off the street. It soon becomes clear that Rush’s “slash” includes bodyguard and all-around protector of women: In one night he stops a fight over one woman, then thwarts a group of would-be date rapists of another.

The formidable Rush is a bouncer at the Nocturne, a Hollywood nightclub where his friend Catherine Gail is a bartender-slash-tae kwon do master. Summer reading guide: The 136 books you’ll want to read

Phoef sutton janet evanovich