In 2023, Everybody Knows plunged us head first in to Jordan Harper’s Los Angeles – a neon nightmare of fame, scandal, drugs and depravity, where the rich do as they please and its left for the little people to clean up their mess. It’s a take on the city the author began to shape in She Rides Shotgun and The Last King of California. Imagine James Ellroy’s American Tabloid dragged kicking and screaming in to the 21st century and you’re almost there. Universally acclaimed, it went on to win the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.
A Violent Masterpiece is not a sequel to Everybody Knows but exists in that same milieu. Since nothing succeeds like excess, Harper has ramped up the corruption and depravity. This is a novel that does just what it says on the tin – it’s not for the faint-hearted.
The story is told through the eyes of three people, with chapters from each of their individual perspectives. Initially, they are strangers to one another but as the narrative progresses their stories converge. Let’s meet them.
Jake Deal is first, a mid-20s live-streamer armed with a police scanner, a laptop and video camera, who each night takes his followers on a ‘creepy crawl’, racing against the clock to beat the police and ambulance crews to the scene of the latest murder or armed robbery. It might sound ghoulish and voyeuristic but Jake considers it a step up from his previous job digging up celebrity dirt for the online scandal sheet Truth or Dare.
It’s an exhausting existence, though, and Jake isn’t quite the paragon of virtue he likes to tell himself he’s become. When his old boss calls him up for a special off the books job he accepts. Now he’s digging up dirt on a list of rich and powerful men including biotech entrepreneurs, private security and publicity moguls, and Hollywood royalty. Jake knows he’s working for a blackmailer.
Doug Gibson is a defence attorney who likes to think he’s one of the good guys. He sees his clients as disenfranchised victims of a system that is broken, and himself as all that stands between them and an army of corrupt police, disinterested judges and sadistic prison officers who want to crush them.
The veneer of idealism is wearing thin, and at home his wife, Shelley, is increasingly frustrated with what she sees as Doug’s performative do-goodery. A realtor, she long ago dropped her principles and is now pushing for the clean-up of a local park which houses some of Doug’s homeless clients.
Our third protagonist is Kara Delgado, who is a similar age to Jake, an ex-barista now working for the Sub Rosa concierge agency. Her best friend and mentor, Phoebe, has described the company as Make A Wish for the terminally rich. Phoebe is now missing.
When we meet Kara she’s chasing down a client – a Scandinavian action film star high on who knows what, who’s gone missing with a million-dollar necklace borrowed from a Beverly Hills jeweller. On call 24 hours a day, and balancing a diet of uppers and downers, it’s Kara’s job to organise and facilitate whatever her clients desire, then to be on hand to clean up the mess they leave behind. Without Phoebe by her side, she’s wondering what’s she’s doing in this seedy job.
Doug’s latest client is Eric Algar, a Hollywood producer responsible for discovering some of the most successful child actors this century. There have long been rumours about Algar’s predatory behaviour and now he’s been arrested on sex charges. It’s not the kind of case Doug would normally take and he’s surprised Algar requested him instead of a higher profile colleague.
Intrigued, despite himself, and annoyed at another lawyer’s attempts to get involved, Doug takes on the case. It’s a little Epstein-eque here as Algar won’t say much in his defence but hints that he’s being framed because he knows too much about other celebrities’ discretions. In an act of self-sacrifice, maybe he will take the fall so the others can continue as usual.
Meanwhile, a serial killer is haunting the city’s streets. The LA Ripper targets young women who fit a certain profile; girls that look like a certain young movie star, a star who just happens to be the ex-girlfriend of one of Sub Rosa’s most depraved clients. A man who appears on Jake’s blackmail list, and who is at least a passing acquaintance of Algar’s.
Harper tugs at these narrative threads, gradually pulling the three strangers into each other’s orbit, until they realise it falls on them to stop the brutal murders. What’s at stake isn’t just the lives of more innocent young women, but also their souls.
A Violent Masterpiece delivers on its title. It is superbly constructed. The three protagonists each have their own individual challenges and obstacles, yet the author brings them together seamlessly as the story races to its conclusion. This is writing at the cutting edge of crime fiction, the subject almost transgressive in its brutality and perversity. I get the sense that Harper is just as outraged as the reader by the nihilism on display, and he never forgets the humanity of his characters. One of my favourite aspects of the novel is the way it asks whether it’s possible for his compromised protagonists to achieve redemption.
We can see that A Violent Masterpiece is brave and angry, but like the best writing in our genre it is also ambitious. Harper paints Los Angeles as a microcosm of America, and the West in general, the natural end point of a society divided by privilege, and in which all of us, as consumers, are complicit. In doing so, he pushes against the traditional limits of genre fiction while still delivering everything fans of crime fiction could wish for.
Brave, angry, electrifying. It’s hard to imagine a better novel being published this year.
We interviewed Jordan Harper following his debut back in 2017.
Faber & Faber
Print/Kindle/iBook
£7.49
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
