By Michelle Mobley, Special to the Signal Tribune
Drawing on a potential terrorist attack on the Port of Los Angeles, San Pedro native Skoot Larson has spun a good yarn of the events leading up to the day that a container holding the dirty bomb floats through the harbor and up to the Vincent Thomas Bridge.
In his debut mystery novel, Larson has taken from his own experiences in the harbor town he has called home for the past decade and before (his Croatian/Italian mother and Norwegian father met and married in WWII San Pedro).
In the persona of jazz musician Lars Lindstrom, the author takes us on a tour of this port town as well as a visit to the port of Oslo, Norway as he chases answers to why the body of a member of Al-Qaeda ended up on the patio of his “penthouse” abode–situated on the rooftop of a flop-house–and subsequently vanishes before the cops get there.
A street level storefront of his “residential hotel” is a popular, however dubious dive. Between gigs as the trumpet-playing leader of a jazz ensemble at the dive, Lars deals with the mixed egos of L.A.’s finest, the feds and the local fuzz of Oslo.
To inject a bit of romance to this page turner, while in Norway, the jazzman falls hard for a red-headed beauty on a streetcar. But that doesn’t get in the way of his ambition to solve the mystery of the dead terrorist, and the subsequent demise of a few key players.
With that, I’ll leave it to you to wonder who the author kills next, just as Lars surmises: “Paranoia is the Hipster’s disease….the eyeball disease….like who’s that, what’s that, who’s out there, what’s that car, who’s in that car, why’s that car there, that car wasn’t there… .once you let your head get a bite of this bitter fruit, you’ve lost control of your cool, like forever and an eight-bar coda.”
In addition to this spell-binding story, Larson provides a Hipster’s Glossary to help you with that odd language that jazz musicians and all hep cats and kittens need to “make the scene,” and to understand some of the “hip-speak” in this book.
Larson will be reading an excerpt from his new novel at 6 p.m. at Shore Books, located at 4270 Atlantic Avenue in Bixby Knolls, as part of the August First Fridays event.
For additional information, contact Shore Books by calling (562) 424-5052.
