A severely burned body turned up one morning in front of a shrine in Thai Town in Los Angeles. Two detectives, a veteran Oscar Morales and a newbie Tully Jarsdel, get the case and have to solve the mystery of the deceases identity as well as why he was killed in such a gruesome manner.

Morales is close to retirement and not in great health. So he makes Jardsel the lead detective. Jarsdel had been working on a doctorate and teaching in a community college when he decided to go into police work. He made a quick rise from patrolman to detective as the police chief wanted to utilize better educated detectives. His parents, 2 academics, were not pleased with the career change.


The investigators eventually learn that the dead man worked odd jobs in the Hollywood area and did not seem to have any enemies. After weeks of solid police work, the detectives were able to find the diabolical killer.

Much of this book deals with Hollywood and the film industry. It also gives the reader a view of Los Angeles and the sort of people who live and visit there. I am not a film buff not have I any interest in Los Angeles. Therefore I found parts of the book quite tedious. Whole sections could have been eliminated and the story would have been easier for me to finish.

The ARC was provided by the publisher and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Loved this book. Quick paced, enjoyable. I will want to read muse by this author. The plot was interesting and the characters believable

With a wonderful cast of quirky, atypical characters, the author leads us on a merry chase through a tawdry and dated Hollywood trying to solve a particularly bizarre murder. The story grabs you from the first page and the many twists and turns in the story make it a real page turner that makes it hard to put the book down. I could not stop reading this book once I started.

This is my first exposure to this author and it definitely will not be my last!

Thank you to NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book started out good, but ended with a fizzle. There was a great deal of back story that seemed a little glossed over. (I checked a couple of times to be sure it was not a sequel.) I did not like the way the character Aleena was written. I think Schneider does a disservice to women with her. Tully is way too preachy. I was given an eARC in exchange for my fair and honest review.

A first book, a Los Angeles ex professor turned LA detective, out to right the wrongs of the world. Interesting characters, violent crimes, strange criminals. All in all a pretty good book, and i look forward to the next, which I hope there will be. Thank you netgalley.

An enjoyable story which kept me turning the pages. Would recommend to fans of this genre, really thrilling and intriguing characters.

Thanks to NET GALLEY for the ARC.

A great whodunit in downtown LA and if you have been there then you quickly know the writer knows the lay of the land. I liked the young/old pairings and I think I can see a series coming.

On its outermost layer, One Day You’ll Burn’s synopsis might make you roll your eyes and say, oh, boy, not this shit again. Another serial cop novel set in Los Angeles. But there was something in the blurb that pulled me, that beckoned me to give Joseph Schneider’s debut a try.

Reasonably new to the force after his departure from a promising academic career, Detective Tully Jarsdel is called to the scene of a torturous, ritualistic murder. Their victim is found posed in the middle of street, and has been quite literally cooked alive. The only thing closely resembling a clue is a red coin, baked into the hand of the cadaver. Jarsdel’s partner, Morales, is a proud member of the old school of policing who does not respect Jarsdel’s schoolboy background. His parents, on the other hand, both professors, are appalled that their progeny has abandoned academia for a position in an institution that fosters fear and distrust in both. Isolated within his field, and shunned by those who should feel the most pride in him, Tully Jarsdel faces adversity from all sides.

I must admit that the unique nature of the crime at the centre of One Day You’ll Burn was what intrigued me, but all other expectations were refreshingly surpassed by Schneider’s surprising characters. Tully Jarsdel is not the typical crime protagonist. He is not a sexy, tough, Bond-like hero. Instead, he is a former historian whose pretentious attitude combined with low self esteem makes him pretty useless socially. His appearance, rather than being rugged and mature, is framed by “round, wire-rimmed glasses and that schoolboy haircut and those rose-pink cheeks, like he’d just had his first kiss.” For the protagonist of a genre marred by toxic masculinity to be a mild-mannered smartypants who is actively trying to overcome his inherent chauvinism is a welcome change, and one I would certainly like to see more of. I’m sick of big silent dudes and hot lesbians with no other prominent personality traits other than kissing girls being slapped on every generic crime novel to draw in a male audience, especially when female interest in crime novels is through the ceiling. Say it with me, kids: we deserve cute smart self-aware detectives in crime novels. We deserve cute smart self-aware detectives in crime novels. We deserve cute smart self-aware detectives in crime novels.

Even aside from Jarsdel, our sensitive and mixed-race(!) protagonist, the representation in this novel is a pleasant surprise in what is, once again, quite a straight-and-white-washed genre. Jarsdel is the child of gay dads, one of whom is Iranian, and these aspects of the family identity play key and understandable roles in Robert and Darius’ mistrust of the police. Aleena, the love interest, is a wildly successful professional who is sexually frank and unafraid to challenge misogyny in her daily life, not even when it is coming from Jarsdel himself. Even Jarsdel’s partner, who one would expect to be an old white dude, is Mexican.

Of course, we cannot only rely on representation to make a novel good. Luckily, the prose is also excellent. The voice of One Day You’ll Burn is simultaneously gritty and glamourous, perfectly matching the city in which it is set. This, combined with the quick – and perhaps deliberately a little overcooked – dialogue, gives the novel a feel akin to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’s always so pleasing when a debut author can come out with something like this:

“Dawn made Hollywood into an after-hours club at closing time – the party over, the revelers departed or collapsed where they stood, the magic gone.”

One Day You’ll Burn is gorgeous, accessible, and able to boast some of the most capable characterisations of its wider contemporary genre. Joseph Schneider has accomplished something really, really impressive here, and I look forward to seeing where Tully Jarsdel, or Schneider’s other creations, go from here.

One Day You’ll Burn is a modern-day police procedural set in the mean streets of Los Angeles. Smoothly written, it showcases the author’s intimate familiarity with Los Angeles and the dirty streets of Hollywood that give little hint of Tinseltown’s stories past. It all begins with a virtually unsolvable homicide evidencing a rather torturous brutal killing when a corpse is dumped by a holy shrine in Thai Town, one of the newer neighborhoods of East Hollywood. Instead of a grizzled veteran homicide detective, LAPD brass has paired genius rookies with experienced veterans so that the star of this police story is a newer detective, but one who is a former PHD candidate who has a wonky tendency to go all “Rain-man” on you. The story flowed right off the pages which seemed to melt in my hands.

A creepy and dark thriller had me guessing through the whole time. A rest story. Very different from anything else I’ve read