Sunset Swing is the closing number of his City Blues Quartet. It's Christmas 1967. Ida Young has recently retired, selling her PI business in LA. Kerry Gaudet, a USAAF nurse, facially scarred by napalm, has flown in from Vietnam to find her missing brother. Nick Licata, boss of the LA Mob, calls in fixer Dante Sanfelippo to find his missing son. Louis Armstrong flies in to perform on Steve Allen's Christmas special.
Armstrong and Ida are friends from way back in New Orleans. Dante and Ida have worked together before. Ida has retired and Dante is about to, hoping to exchange his wholesale booze business for a vineyard in the Valley, deeds to be signed on December 26 - coincidentally the day Licata Jnr is due to answer bail, otherwise his father is out half a million bucks. Kerry, of course, only has a few days leave. So the clock is running from the outset, always a bonus in any thriller.
Meanwhile the Night Slayer is prowling the city. He might have killed a young woman called Audrey. Dante doesn't think so, given that she was Riccardo Licata's secretary. Ida has no interest - until the cops find her name and former office number in Audrey's handwriting. Slowly, gradually, the threads are drawn together to unpick a massive conspiracy, government agency against government agency, and a horrible truth becomes apparent. The CIA are using Faron, the legendary killer Ida almost caught in postwar New York in The Mobster's Lament (see review below) twenty years earlier. Faron is a serial killer but he is not the Night Slayer. The feds are using him to track down and kill the handful of losers who might be the Night Slayer. Kerry Guadet's brother Stevie is one of them.
It's complex, maybe slightly far-fetched, though much of conspiracy angle is fact-based; but Ray Celestin has the writing skills to pull it off. Sunset Swing reads like a breeze (like the Santa Ana which is fanning LA wildfires in the novel), pacy, punchy, noir when its needs to be, and yet always compassionate. Dante builds a touching relationship with a stray dog he has picked up along the way, Ida with Kerry; and Ida's longtime friendship with Satch has always been a welcome distraction. Celestin even gives us a musical motif - a tune I don't know by Chet Baker - which ends with a beautiful Christmas twist right before the shooting starts.
The Quartet has plenty of through-lines but unlike so many epics you don't need to read them in order. I didn't. Each novel stands alone, has its own themes and developments. Jump in with the first one you come across - and enjoy.
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