Coorparoo Blues & the Irish Fandango

Enter P.I. Jack Munro, a World War I veteran and ex-cop with a nose for trouble and a stubborn dedication to exposing the truth, however inconvenient it is for the -powers that be. Hes not always a particularly good man, but hes the one you want on your side when things look bad.

When Jack is hired by a knockout blonde to find her no-good missing husband, he turns over a few rocks hes not supposed to. Soon the questions are piling up, and so are the bodies. But Jack forges on through the dockside bars, black-market warehouses, and segregated brothels of his roiling city, uncovering greed and corruption eating away at the foundations of the war effort.

Then Jack is hired to investigate a suspicious suicide, and theres a whole new cast of characters for him to deal with ? a father surprisingly unmoved by his sons death, a dodgy priest, crooked cops, Spanish Civil War refugees ? and a wall of silence between him and the truth, which has its roots deep in the past. Friends, enemies, the police ? theyre all warning Jack to back off. But he cant walk away from a case: he has to do the square thing.

Written in the spare, plain-spoken style of all great pulp fiction, G.S. Mansons fast-paced debut captures the high stakes and nervous energy of wartime, when everything becomes a matter of life and death.