With retirement just out of reach, Dave Brandstetter investigates the killing of a Vietnamese immigrant
As an insurance investigator, Dave Brandstetter has spent his life unraveling suspicious deaths. Now, well into middle age, he has decided to retire for the sake of Cecil, the young TV reporter who loves and cherishes him, and has too often risked his own life for Daves work. But retirement does not come easily.
An old friend in the public defenders office asks Dave to help Andy Flanagan, a shiftless young man accused of murdering a Vietnamese businessman to defend the Old Fleeta shantytown of houseboats that has been earmarked for development. Unable to resist the case, Dave heads to the Old Fleet and begins asking questions. Beneath the surface of this oil-slicked slum lurks an international conspiracy so appalling that Dave will regret postponing his retirement.
Obedience is book ten in the Dave Brandstetter Mystery series, which also includes Troublemaker and The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of.
Review
Fast paced and literate . . . Hansen fans should delight in this latest caper. Publishers Weekly
First-rate . . . No mystery writer is better at evoking the landscape, the light, the architecture and the ethnic diversity of Los Angeles. Time
As always, Hansen continues to write like Ernest Hemingway as filtered through a witty English sensibility. Washington Blade
About the Author
Joseph Hansen (19232004) was an American author of mysteries. The son of a South Dakota shoemaker, he moved to a California citrus farm with his family in 1936. He began publishing poetry in the New Yorker in the 1950s, and joined the editorial teams of gay magazines ONE and Tangents in the 1960s. Using the pseudonyms Rose Brock and James Colton, Hansen published five novels and a collection of short stories before the appearance of Fadeout (1970), the first novel published under his own name.
The book introduced street-smart insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, a complex, openly gay hero who grew and changed over the seriess twelve novels. By the time Hansen concluded the series with A Country of Old Men (1990), Brandstetter was older, melancholy, and ready for retirement. The 1992 recipient of the Private Eye Writers of Americas Lifetime Achievement Award, Hansen published several more novels before his death in 2004.
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