The Black Glove

"During the 1960s Terry Traven had it all. He had a 1941 Buick, wide-lapel suits, spectator shoes, the Black Mask Detective Agency, and an underground newspaper friend who kept plugging him as the hard-boiled reincarnation of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. But that was the sixties ... Now it's the 1980s, and the drugs are hard and the rock is punk. The monied interests have moved in and the dream has gone sour. For Terry Traven, his mortgaged dream is just about to die of starvation when wealthy industrialist Athol Busby walks through the frosted glass door and asks him to find his son Lothar. Suddenly Terry finds himself embroiled in other people's fantasies -- fantasies that have come to life and gone awry in the nightmarish violence of punk life, the glittering, coke-induced visions of Beverly Hills' elite, and, ultimately, in the horrific phantasms of a religious fanatic. Set in Los Angeles, the capital of illusion, The Black Glove is at once a proper homage to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and a taut, sometimes comic but always spellbinding mystery." --