That Left Turn at Albuquerque, by Scott Phillips ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️_

The latest effort from the pen of the author of Ice Harvest is a quirky, enjoyable, and puzzling SoCal-noir thriller that will, at the very least, challenge your expectations of the genre.

For quirky and puzzling, let’s start with the title, which will be instantly recognized by fans of the Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s and ’60s (the line was most famously uttered by Bugs in the 1953 Warner Brothers cartoon Bully for Bugs); but for reasons I cannot fathom, there is no reference to the line in the book, nor to Albuquerque, or even (at a stretch) to Bugs Bunny.

For enjoyable one need look no further than Phillips’ prose, and his characters. His observations and dialogue are spot-on, and the characters that inhabit the story are well-realized and original – and therein lies one of the challenges of the story. His protagonist, a lawyer named Douglas Rigby, is pretty hard to like. A philanderer and an embezzler, Rigby is on the brink of financial insolvency and is not particular about whom he steamrolls over in his quest to reverse his situation. I mean, I know that many noir leading men are a bit shady, but Rigby plumbs new depths in the role.

Rigby is also not too bright, as he is constantly flitting from disaster to disaster (generally of his own making) as he tries to dig himself out of his financial hole—starting with a drug deal gone wrong, before proceeding to blackmail and murder, and then to another caper involving fraud, theft and art forgery. All while sleeping with the widow of his late partner. Instead of being a character that the reader can identify with, Rigby is more of a train wreck that you just can’t tear your eyes away from.

There are fun moments in this book. One that I particularly enjoyed was the introduction of a character who is an assistant golf pro at the golf and country club where Rigby and his wife are members—when we meet this character he is folding sweaters in the pro shop at the golf course. You may have to be a golfer (as I am) to get the joke here, but I chuckled to myself when I read that bit.

Another unique feature of the story, which I am sure that a lot of Los Angeles-area readers will appreciate, is that rather than being set in Los Angeles proper, the story is set in L.A.-adjacent Ventura County, a commute-from-hell bedroom-community area northwest of the L.A. Basin that may be enjoying its first primetime exposure in the world of detective fiction.

Phillips’ writing is witty and very readable, though he has one rather annoying habit, which is to start a new chapter with a total jump cut—new location, new characters, new situation—with absolutely no introduction. More than once I found myself a few paragraphs into a new chapter asking, “Where are we? Who are these people?  What’s happening?”, and as often as not the answers to those questions came only by inference. It got a bit tiring.

In the final analysis, however, That Left Turn at Albuquerque is an enjoyable (if lightweight) read, with witty prose, memorable characters and an ending that I’m pretty sure most readers won’t see coming.