‘The Last Songbird’ by Daniel Weizmann

Published by Melville House,
25 May 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-68589-030-8 (PB)

Accidental sleuths come in many varieties, but until now I’ve never encountered a cab driver.  That’s what Adam Zantz is. He’s also a musician and songwriter but has discovered the hard way that the music business is one in which success is hard to find. Small wonder, then, that when legendary and now mostly retired singer Annie Linden listens to his songs and thinks they have something, she becomes Adam’s favourite client. When Annie needs a ride, she calls Adam direct instead of going through the app.

But when he arrives by appointment one evening, he finds her house surrounded by police. Annie and her security guard have been murdered, and her long-time, on-off assistant is missing. Adam is left wondering where she planned to go that night, and also what she meant when she sent him a text saying she needed his help.

Bix, her assistant, is arrested for the murders, though it’s hard for Adam to see him as a killer. He finds himself under arrest too, as an accessory, and that and the cryptic text make him determined to find the real killer and clear Bix’s name and his own. In his own words, he is as hard-boiled as scrambled eggs, but that doesn’t stop him setting off to delve into Annie’s past in search of answers. It’s a journey which unearths former lovers, friends and enemies, and a shocking secret, and asks questions about the nature and costs of celebrity, and most of all about Annie herself.

Weizmann is primarily a journalist and editor, but he adopts the mantle of novelist as if he was born to it.  The novel is peopled with eccentric characters: ex-partners, family members, Adam’s own friends and associates, and they all live and breathe. Even assorted policemen are quite distinct from each other. The story is located in parts of Los Angeles known only to its denizens and cab drivers, all brought vividly to life: apartments and seedy streets, a shabby yacht which is the home of Adam’s best pal Double Fry. 

It’s not a book to race through at a sitting; indeed, it’s probably best savoured in small bites to ensure you don’t miss any of the elegant detail. Weizmann’s writing style is unusual in a crime novel: quirky and distinctive, almost poetic at times, and owes a lot to his background in the punk era. For this if for nothing else I’d recommend the novel – but there’s plenty else to enjoy as well.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Daniel Weizmann is a writer  and editor who work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Jewish Journal, Times of Israel, and several anthologies of fiction and humour.  He lives in Los Angeles, California.

 https://www.danielweizmann.com/

 

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.