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You reach a point in your life you know your soul isn't charmed - only some days, for Jack Liffey, the rough-edged L.A. private-eye who's made a calling of his compassion for the city's lost youth, it feels like he's holding up the sky. Twice divorced, short of cash, delinquent in child-support payments for his delightfully precocious daughter Maeve, and now driving a lamentable old VW, Jack has got his burdens. And in City of Strangers, he's also got an exceptionally troubling case that confronts youthful idealism with the apocalyptic fervor of fundamentalism.
Hired by an old college classmate to track down his rebellious runaway daughter, before long Jack finds himself searching for her boyfriend, the bright, earnest Fariborz Bayat, as well. Coincidentally, it appears, he too has gone missing, with three other Persian-American boys from their elite L.A. high school, and joined a cell of Arab Islamic terrorists. Liffey's investigation thrusts him into the restive ethnic mix - Muslim, Jewish, Baha'i, Christian, and secular - of the Persian-American communities in Los Angeles, but his leads take him south, to Mexico, where once more fortune betrays Jack and he's abducted by two corrupt cops working for a sinister four-hundred-pound drug lord.
Soon it is Fariborz who is rescuing Jack. A grisly, nightmarish journey through the noisy border town of Tijuana gets the two of them illegally back into California, only to land them on the brink of deadly disaster - unless they can thwart the cell's plot to set off a dirty bomb full of radioactive waste over L.A.
Genre: Mystery
Hired by an old college classmate to track down his rebellious runaway daughter, before long Jack finds himself searching for her boyfriend, the bright, earnest Fariborz Bayat, as well. Coincidentally, it appears, he too has gone missing, with three other Persian-American boys from their elite L.A. high school, and joined a cell of Arab Islamic terrorists. Liffey's investigation thrusts him into the restive ethnic mix - Muslim, Jewish, Baha'i, Christian, and secular - of the Persian-American communities in Los Angeles, but his leads take him south, to Mexico, where once more fortune betrays Jack and he's abducted by two corrupt cops working for a sinister four-hundred-pound drug lord.
Soon it is Fariborz who is rescuing Jack. A grisly, nightmarish journey through the noisy border town of Tijuana gets the two of them illegally back into California, only to land them on the brink of deadly disaster - unless they can thwart the cell's plot to set off a dirty bomb full of radioactive waste over L.A.
Genre: Mystery
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