I am a huge fan of police procedurals, especially with a woman lead so I was really intrigued by Bad Scene. I haven't read any of the Colleen Hayes books before so I was a bit worried I'd be behind or be missing details. If I did miss something or not know a vital background, it wasn't obvious. The story felt complete though I will say the storylines with Pamela and the cult plus the mayor being assassinated felt sort of disconnected-- even though they were in fact connected. They both could have been separate stories and honestly I didn't really feel like either made the other one stronger. The connection to the 70s and honest, real life San Francisco history was so cool and as someone who didn't live in that time, was a great way to expose me to important events in a fun and unique way. The story was enjoyable but it just felt okay. Not super memorable.

Reported on Colleen Hayes in my review of Tie Die not too long ago, which is #2 in the Colleen Hayes Mystery series. Bad Scene is #3.

Backstory in brief. Colleen is from Colorado. Got pregnant at 16. Had Pam. Her husband was worthless. When Pam hit puberty, the abuse got real. When Colleen learned of the abuse, she struck back, stabbed the pig in the neck and watched him die on her kitchen floor. Called the cops. Confessed. Spend just shy of 10y as a guest of the Colorado Dept of Corrections. In that 10y, Pam's anger with what her mom did boils over and off she goes into various communes in the mountains and west coast. When Colleen is released, Pam wants nothing to do with her mom. That doesn't fly with Colleen and she goes on the hunt, eventually settling in San Francisco. While doing a nothing job, she ends up doing some off the books investigative work that leads her to taking steps to become a licensed PI, which is kinda tough for an ex-felon. Backstory done. Current day in this series is the late 1970s. Disco, platform heels, and bell bottoms are the norm.

For a PI, divorce cases pay the bills. While tracking down nefarious lotharios in her short time as an off-the-books PI, Colleen has developed a bit of a network of sources. One, nicknamed Lucky, tells her that he overheard some bikers talking about an upcoming plot to murder the mayor and the person behind the threat is a current SF Board of Supervisors member. Being a good citizen, Colleen tells her contact in the SFPD. They check out the Board member and find nothing so the threat gets lost in the SFPD bureaucracy.

But one other thing Lucky overheard was that the bikers were expecting a delivery of LSD from The Moon Ranch, a commune of hippies in the CA mountains outside of the bay area. And The Moon Ranch was the last sightings of Pam. So Colleen starts digging learning that Pam may actually be part of the delivery.

Or maybe not, but Colleen has to find out. To her horror she finds out that Pam has taken up with a cult run by a charismatic South African committed to perfection in everything . . . including death. And this guy has taken a couple hundred devotees to the slopes of an Ecuadorian volcano that is coming back to life. Colleen scrambles to get to Ecuador in search of Pam before . . . before what?

Tomlinson is cool. His stories take place in the not too distant past in an era and place where society was tilting in mulitple directions. It's easy to root for Colleen. She's in a place of her own doing and determined to dig her way out . . . if she'll just put down that damn shovel.

Good stuff. Really good stuff.

Now to find the first one.

The 1970s setting was definitely interesting! Packed with drama it was a quick read. Controversial and intriguing to say the least.

Thank you NetGalley for the arc

Fans of private-eye procedurals and partisans of 1970s nostalgia will find much to enjoy in BAD SCENE, the third outing in Max Tomlinson's series featuring convicted-killer-turned-private-investigator Colleen Hayes and set in 1978 San Francisco.

Where Hayes' first two adventures, VANISHING IN THE HAIGHT and TIE DYE, mostly addressed the ear from a cultural perspective, exploring the city that Colleen Hayes left after the Summer of Love and returned to later to find it buzzing with nervy punk and pre-New Wave energy, Tomlinson broadens the period palette in BAD SCENE by heavily incorporating two major real-life stories from 1978: the murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and city Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the Jonestown Massacre led by cult leader Rev. Jim Jones.

(Tomlinson plays it pretty straight with the Moscone/Milk murders, basing his private eye's involvement in a later report that found a that a conspiracy appeared to extend beyond the convicted killer, ex-Supervisor Dan White into the San Francisco Police Department. The Jonestown angle is rendered as the fictitious Die Kerk cult, with the action transported to a volcano in Ecuador.)

Tomlinson deftly juggles verisimilitude within not just a taut procedural tale of finding out who killed a societal outcast who had potentially vital information about the broader murder conspiracy with several other elements. Key among them is moving Colleen Hayes' series-long search for her estranged daughter Pamela to continually fraught fruition, while making time for a couple of potential-love-interest subplots. Even with all that ambition in play, Tomlinson keeps things moving along in crisply professional fashion, making BAD SCENE the most satisfying read yet in this wonderful series.

(Thanks to NetGalley and Max Tomlinson for providing me with an advance reading copy of BAD SCENE, set for an August 2021 release.)

Max Tomlinson is to San Francisco what Raymond Chandler was to Los Angeles!

Tomlinson's latest in the Colleen Hayes series gives a note-perfect evocation of San Francisco in the 1970s. Anyone who's lived there will feel like they're back again, and anyone who hasn't should know that reading Tomlinson is the next best thing to having been there. The City itself joins a large cast of indelibly drawn characters--from the gutsy, intrepid if flawed heroine Colleen to her troubled daughter Pam to the cadre of bumbling or malevolent cops to Colleen's trusty right-hand man Boom to some of the most colorfully disgusting bad guys Tomlinson has written yet. The race to locate and rescue Pam zooms all through the City and down to South America, tying in plot twists mirroring some of the most horrific SF-related events of that time--the Jonestown massacre and the murders of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk. This is one inventive, compelling, lightning-paced book that will keep you transfixed until the end. It's a tale that is begging to be made into a major motion picture. Give yourself the best pandemic present possible: read Bad Scene and then read the rest of Tomlinson's back catalog.

Unfortunately I didn't finish "Bad Scene", Max Tomlinson's latest thriller involving Colleen Hayes. I just couldn't get into it. I found the plot too rushed & convoluted, the cult story gave me the creeps, the Latin American volcano totally idiotic, the characters annoyed me, the 70s ambiance irritated me, etc. It must have been one hell of a bad day for me....
Max Tomlinson is a great writer & I loved his "Vanishing in the Haight"
So I promise to give "Bad Scene" another try later this spring and modify my review eventually.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Oceanview Publishing for the opportunity to read this book prior to its release date

Set in 1978 San Francisco, this mystery definitely isn't a cozy. The protagonist, Colleen Hayes, spent a decade in jail for fatally stabbing her husband in the neck with a screwdriver. Her estranged daughter is involved with a cult. (I'm guessing one of the earlier books in the series explained why there's a restraining order against her, filed by a different cult that her daughter was previously involved with -- these are really interesting characters!) She's also infiltrating a neo-Nazi group of bikers to investigate rumors that they plan to shoot the mayor. And did I mention the active volcano in South America where the cult is building its new church? This book is a wild ride that had me holding my breath more than once.