CINNAMON GIRL
Daniel Weizmann (danielweizmann.com)
Melville House (mhpbooks.com)
£16.99
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Adam Zantz, L.A.-based Lyft driver and private detective, is hired by his old piano teacher – and a very close friend of the uncle who raised him – to help with a case. Emil Elkaim, the piano teacher’s son, was something of a hero to Adam in his childhood, the cool older kid on the street with a cool girlfriend and a car; a role model of sorts. At least until he was imprisoned for murdering another teen, then was murdered himself while he was serving his sentence. After all these years, someone has approached Charles Elkaim claiming to have evidence that Emil was innocent, something that the old man has believed for forty years. Now Charles needs to know the truth, and he needs to know it fast: he has little more than weeks to live, and craves the peace that the truth will bring him. Adam takes the case reluctantly, and starts to dig into Emil’s life during the early 1980s. He discovers an old LP, recorded by Emil and his friends during the height of the Paisley Underground. This is a side of Emil that Adam never knew, and he soon discovers that he wasn’t alone. The teen that Emil was accused of killing was one of his bandmates, and Adam soon discovers that their friendship was solid, that Emil had no reason to want his friend dead. All clues point in one direction: Cynthia, more commonly known as Cinnamon, Emil’s girlfriend and the band’s manager disappeared shortly after Emil’s death. But the rest of her story might be more fiction than fact, and Adam is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, if only to give his old teacher the peace he so dearly craves.
Adam Zantz made his first outing last year in The Last Songbird. It’s one of my favourite books of 2023, so I was excited when I heard that he was returning for another outing, in the second book of the Pacific Coast Highway Mysteries. Returning to Weizmann’s Los Angeles feels good after the year-long break, and it doesn’t take long to slip back into the rhythm of Adam’s first-person narrative and inside the head of this young man who splits his time between taxiing people around the City of Angels, attending school to gain a qualification that will support his work as a private detective, and to get his license and start practicing for real. It’s an unusual combination, but it’s part of what makes Adam Zantz – and Daniel Weizmann’s mystery series – stand out in the mind of the reader.
Weizmann found a perfect voice for his protagonist early in the first book, and returns in his second novel, Cinnamon Girl, with a voice that shows signs of his misadventures in The Last Songbird. In many ways Adam feels very naive, despite his chosen field. He’s a friendly and trusting (sometimes over-trusting) guy whose outlook is sunnier than most detectives we come across in fiction. His job driving for Lyft allows him to meet a reasonably diverse cross-section of the city’s population, and it’s a joy to spend time with him as he shows us around his city, a city that he obviously loves. A failed singer-songwriter – this part of his life feels like it’s way back in the rearview mirror, but he holds no bitterness; he gave it a shot, it didn’t work out, no point in dwelling on it – he’s a big fan of the city’s music scene, and music has played a big part in the first two books, here in the form of a long-lost album that Adam manages to find during the course of his investigation. We feel his joy radiating off the page as he listens to a record that no-one has heard in almost four decades. When we see this side of Adam, it’s hard to believe how he could fit into the gritty role of private detective, following in the footsteps of the likes of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer and Harry Bosch, and while he sometimes feels out of his depth – and, like his predecessors, isn’t immune to the odd beating – he gets the job done, and keeps coming back for more.
Cinnamon Girl isn’t quite noir, and it’s a long way from “cosy”, but falls somewhere along the spectrum between those two extremes. In his protagonist, Weizmann presents us with a sort of everyman, if such a thing could be said to exist in modern-day L.A. He’s a man with whom we can empathise, and his dogged nature helps him to solve his cases in a methodical, logical way: there are no leaps of faith here, no inexplicable jumps. Weizmann presents us with all the clues we need to solve the mystery and uses Adam as a guide to help us connect the dots. The novel is peopled with a variety of interesting and lifelike characters, some more colourful than others (I’m looking at you, Double Fry!), but all equally well-constructed in a way that lets us know that, even if we’re not going to find out their backstory, there is definitely a backstory there. Obviously, one of the novel’s main characters is Los Angeles itself, and the city shines throughout. Adam – and Weizmann – obviously love the place he calls home, and this comes through in his narrative. I have never visited the city, but I’m sorely tempted after reading Cinnamon Girl!
The Last Songbird was a fantastic introduction to this new character and series, and I highly recommend you go read it. Happily, Cinnamon Girl is just as good, if not better, than its predecessor, and begins to flesh out Adam and some of the returning characters more fully. It’s a story about people, music, showbiz, with an intriguing mystery at its heart. It’s a story about personal histories, and about how those histories get twisted and reinterpreted as time passes. The plot moves along at a moderate pace, but we’re not too worried, because we’re enjoying the company and the slow unfolding of that mystery. Daniel Weizmann knows which buttons to press, and when to press them, and the result is the brilliant and engaging Cinnamon Girl. I suspect – and hope – that this won’t be the last time we encounter Adam Zantz, and that makes me a very happy reader.
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