City Lights: A Fog City Noir Mystery
Maggie Laurent is on her own. The head of the Nick Moore Detective Agency has moved from San Francisco to Chicago, leaving Maggie to scrounge for cases. She’s soon drawn into a strongarm plot involving union busting and business leaders undermining the men who work for them when a friend’s former fiancé is pushed into the street and run over by a taxicab.
City Lights is the second in the Fog City Noir series. The first, Fog City, won the 2025 Macavity Award for Best Historical Mystery, and City Lights is nominated for the 2026 Lefty Award for Best Historical Novel. It highlights the 1930s labor unrest when cab drivers were beaten and shot, their taxis were burned, companies froze union members out of work and hired lackeys to vote for stooge union leaders, and disguised Pinkerton operatives or cops billy-clubbed heads. The novel has a Sam Spade feel: lean descriptions, tight pacing, no-nonsense personal observations and to-the-point dialogue.
Instead of developing from detective spade work, some plot twists pop up coincidentally or conveniently, and some explanations repeat for no clear, dramatic reason. Maggie’s moves through Fog City are nonetheless private eye-worthy. She learns her trade using camera settings for taking pictures through darkened windows, scaling a fire escape, listening at a keyhole, plying a hotel detective or concierge with a box of cigars or a round of drinks, learning to box and fire a weapon, roughing out clues from golfers, acting on tips from gossip columnists, and discovering give-away undercover tells.
Picking up a Brigid O’Shaughnessy quote, Maggie “won’t need much of anybody’s help: You’re good.”
