Review of ‘After the Blue, Blue Rain’ by A D Price

An impressively-researched detective novel set in Los Angeles, 1946. I would recommend it and am pleased to hear that there’ll be a sequel.

Book cover for After the Blue, Blue Rain by A D Price, showing a woman from the 1940s wearing a hat.

Kit Comfort is a private investigator whose next case is to track down a missing man, the pregnant girlfriend being the client. What seems like a usual case then becomes something more sinister, involving corruption, war trauma and even Nazis hiding in the city. The plot was really intriguing and the writing style seemed to be (in my admittedly limited experience) of the hard-boiled kind but with a feminist twist, as Kit is a strong character who runs a detective agency and knows how to get information out of people without using her sexuality. I liked how authentic the language was for the era, no political correctness. The atmosphere feels very evocative of post-war urban America, soaked in martinis, choking on cigarette fumes, the social upheaval, veterans returning to civilian life. The only thing I wasn’t too sure about was the ending, which I had to re-read a couple of times. I think it could have been made clearer and expanded a little.

Independently published in 2022.

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