Damnation Street: A Weiss and Bishop Mystery

Dark Passage

The word sleazy shows up several times in Andrew Klavan's Damnation Street (Harcourt), and it certainly has the right address. In this third installment of his Weiss and Bishop series, a prostitute is on the run from both the woebegone obsessive who would be her savior and the artful degenerate bent on loving her quickly to death. The hunt winds through motor hotels on the edge of town, a desert bordello, Reno, and other unwholesome stopping points, and through a family history of drug addiction, blackmail, and parricide. Klavan's confidently wry style keeps things punched up throughout, not least in his fight sequences, which are deliberately as ludicrous as they are violent (here with martial-arts noises):

There was the Fu Manchu guy rushing at him, going hwa hwoo hwee and so on -- and also wielding that goddamned Chinese broadsword Bishop had noticed on the wall … Gripping the broadsword's handle in one hand, he made the wide, curved silver blade spin and twirl through blurring crisscrosses and figure eights. "Hwa! Hwoo! Hwee!" he remarked again. And all the while, the black-and-red scarf flying from the sword's pommel flapped and spiraled, adding to Bishop's distraction.

If having this much fun with a tale of assassination and romantic melancholy is wrong, who wants to be right?

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