I had read JF Freedman before and remembered that I had really loved his style. Fallen Idols was an especially good and very tense mystery. Another one I really enjoyed was 2001’s Above The Law, a legal thriller and sequel to 1999’s The Disappearance with former District Attorney Luke Garrison. Garrison lives in the woods, as if hiding from a past failure in a previous life in which he sent men to the gas chamber on a regular basis. He rides a Harley, wears an earring, and has obviously left the button down, the rising star of the district attorney’s office personality. With Freedman and Garrison’s gripping prose style as an engaging and funny hero, I expected many stories in a new series. But his next book, 2002’s Bird Eye View, was independent. It was very good and a bit more lighthearted than the two Luke Garrison novels, but then I didn’t hear from Freedman for two years until Fallen Idols. I think that’s why I lost track of him, it seems like he’s been between novels for two years and more.
But I was really glad to remember it long enough to pick up on In My Dark Dreams. From the opening chapter, it grabs you and sets such a dark and mysterious mood that you’re already guessing, examining, and analyzing the psyche of the characters to guess who did it, and you don’t even know what’s been done yet. What is almost as impressive is that the novel is written in the first person and that person is a woman. Not many male authors can pull off the female voice of an entire novel convincingly.
Public defender Jessica Thompson is a woman with a past, but not the usual past. Jessica is the daughter of an alcoholic mother who accidentally shoots her when she is 14 or 15 years old and one night she sneaks back home. Jessica never comes home after recovering, finishing high school, at a different school, and living with an old friend of her mothers. He never sees his mother again and, although he is very young, he does not really form a bond with his surrogate mother. Upon graduation, he moves in, gets a small apartment in a squat house with a series of hippie-type nihilistic children, and works odd jobs. Waitress, cashier and finally nude model for an art class. hey, money is great and it IS art. This continues until one day on his twentieth birthday, he enters Santa Monica City College on a whim. Eight years later, after immersing himself in it, he graduates from law school and begins working for the Los Angeles Public Defender. Six years have passed and Jessica is dating a classical musician and is contemplating getting married with children and training to run her first marathon. She is out for a training run, around midnight, in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles when almost surrealistically she runs into Lieutenant Luis Cordova, who is in a trap. There is a serial killer adrift and takes his victims during the full moon. He takes his third victim that night.
Jessica, who is a fairly young member of the Public Defenders office, picks up a client in what seems like an open and closed case and a fairly minor offense compared to serial killers and murder trials. Roberto Salazar. One night, Roberto is helping a friend with the delivery of televisions when the friends’ truck breaks down. Roberto meets the friend and transfers the cargo to his truck and goes to deliver them while the friend waits for a tow truck. On the way, Roberto stops at a mini-market to use the bathroom and a police officer stops him, probably because he is a Chicano, regardless of the accusation of a rolling stop and a flashing taillight. Any excuse will do when I’m a Chicano in West Los Angeles at three in the morning. It turns out that the televisions have been stolen from a warehouse in Long Beach and Roberto lands in jail. But Roberto is not a gangster dude. He is a pillar of honest hard work on his poor side of town and well thought out by all. He has never been arrested, is happily married and has children. He is a lay minister in a storefront church and a devoted youth counselor. He also owns a landscaping / landscaping business that caters to the wealthy in West Los Angeles and also owns an old truck that he uses to earn extra money as a moving or delivery man every now and then. But he was caught with a load of stolen goods and is a minority in Los Angeles.
One of Roberto’s clients is the very wealthy Amada Burgess, the royalty of Los Angeles. Amada comes forward and, in an unusual way, vouches for Roberto’s good name and with that confidence, Jessica wins an acquittal at trial. Meanwhile, The Full Moon Killers is still there, despite missing a month on the road.
A few months go by when one morning Roberto is sitting in his truck, waiting to start work at 7 o’clock. He is reading the newspaper and having a McDonalds coffee when Lieutenant Cordova approaches him. Roberto, now wary of any contact with the police, believes he is being harassed, but lets the police search his truck. They find nothing because Roberto, of course, has done nothing, but just as they are about to let him go his way, Córdova finds incriminating evidence under the carpet on the floor of Roberto’s truck. The Full Moon Killer has taken another vitim woman and she’s just a couple of blocks from where Roberto was sitting in his truck. It is registered as The Full Moon Killer and the evidence is very powerful.
Could Jessica be wrong? Could I have lost Amanda’s faith? You’ll find out when you let yourself be seduced by this legal / mystery thriller with twists and turns to satisfy the most jaded reader.
Freedman’s prose is tighter than a good alibi, and fascinating as you could wish for. The characters are well written and he seems to have the ability to get into the heads of not just Layers and cops, women and Chicanos, but the rich with their own secrets. Paint this story against a backdrop of prejudice covering Los Angeles like the smog it’s famous for and the detail in the courtroom is not only realistic but well-researched. I can only hope that I start publishing more than one book every two to three years, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Jessica again, or even Luke Garrison and his Harley.
