'Little Girl Lost' is a Find

Review of LITTLE GIRL LOST (Hard Case Crime 2004) by Richard Aleas

LITTLE GIRL LOST is the first of the John Blake books written by Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai, under the pseudonym Richard Aleas. Having read the second book (SONGS OF INNOCENCE) first, I had some sense of what might happen in this one, but not enough to ruin the story for me.

John Blake is working in New York City (his home town) as a private eye for a two-man detective agency when he finds out that his high school sweetheart, Miranda Sugarman, has been shot, execution-style, on the roof of a “tenth rate” strip club, where it turns out she was also performing. Blake’s last memories of Miranda are of a girl who left New York to attend college in New Mexico, harboring dreams of becoming an ophthalmologist (or an optometrist—Blake can’t remember which). Along with the news of her murder, finding out that Miranda returned to New York ten years later, only to end up stripping at a bottom-of-the-barrel club, comes as a bit of a shock to Blake. He decides he simply has to find out who killed her.

This necessarily entails finding out more about Miranda and how she ended up where she did—inquiries that, as his employer warns him, may lead Blake to information he will wish he’d never found. It also involves his establishing a relationship with another stripper going by the stage name Rachel Firestone, whose real name is Susan—a woman who ends up doing a lot of the dull legwork for Blake “off-stage” so the narrative can focus more on action-oriented plot developments and Blake’s theories about the case.

Aleas captures the world-weary, ironic tone of the genre, yet makes Blake vulnerable enough for us to see that he’s not completely hardened by his experiences. Thus, finding the truth about Miranda’s death becomes something of a harsh reality check for him. The plot goes through its twisty paces as Blake tries to reason out what could have happened. By the end of LITTLE GIRL LOST, Blake loses what’s left of his innocence and makes a tough, but understandable decision. All this, plus the story’s gritty, evocative descriptions of New York and its noir-ish ending, make it easy to see why it was nominated for both the Edgar and Shamus awards.