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...