Jack Hammer is a brand new private investigator with his very first client. Things get complicated when he finds her dead the day after he's hired to find her uncle. Now several people seem to be after him, even sending him cryptic letters threatening his girlfriend if he doesn't turn over a device that no one admits to knowing. Jack will have to follow clues that put him in the sights of powerful people who do not want him getting involved, but he'll have to figure it out on his own if he wants to keep people close to him safe.

I'm giving this one 3.5 stars becuase it's a good story, but it never managed to keep my attention. Burt's aim is very obviously to create a noir atmosphere and he does an admirable job of it, the only problem is that you need very strong personalities in your characters to keep things interesting and that's missing. Even with the excellent narration by Kyle Shive giving each one a speecific accent or language quirk, the characters aren't distinctive. It's not just keeping track of too similar characters, it's that I found most aren't memorable enough to distinguish.

In the end, it's a good noir PI that tells a good story in an okay way. It didn't hit the spot for me, but I see potential in it.

Very happy thanks to NetGalley and the author for the listen!

(3.5 Stars rounded up to 4 for audio)

Thanks to #NetGalley for making this book available for reading and review.

This book was decent. The story itself was interesting and different than the genre norms. This is probably both good and bad. I liked that it wasn't formulaic, but sometimes that format is necessary to keep the story moving along. This did not have the typical deadpan offbeat humor, but there were some funny parts.

I felt like there wasn't a lot of suspense, or laying out puzzle pieces to be put together as the story is weaved. Like I said, the story was good, but the logic was inconsistent, and a lot of the characters didn't seem "real". I did like the audiobook narration a lot.

Would I read a next installment? Sure, I'd give it a try and see if the author grows.

Jack Hammer is a Private Detective but mostly earns a living as a night watchman. He is asked to find a missing man but both the police and the FBI warn him off. He will not take their advice, putting himself and others in danger. Yasa, his client is found dead, can Hammer find the killer?

Well written and well narrated novel (I listened to the audiobook). Good characters in a well paced mystery novel. Set post WWII in Salt Lake City. There is mystery, Russian spies, FBI and police, together with Tesla.

I listened to this as an audio book and it was perfect company for a long drive.

The book is set in 1948 Utah. The main character - Jack Hammer (yes, really) - is a young Mormon ex-soldier recently turned PI. Thanks to his well-intentioned aunt, Jack succeeds in taking on his first client, a Serbian woman named Yasha who employs him to find her missing uncle. The case grows rapidly however and before he knows it young Jack is in the middle of something much bigger than he anticipated.

I found the pacing a little odd but that may have been the format. It seemed that a huge amount happened in each day of the story and yet in some ways things took quite some time to happen. I found almost all of the side characters inexplicably hostile in the first instance and there were points at which I found the turns and developments in the story tricky to keep up with.

The sense of place is fantastic, every location is described in enough detail to be able to visualise it without overtaking the plot. I loved the fact that the plot took in a lot of the dominating factors in post-war America; particularly the paranoia surrounding the FBI and Soviet Union, and the legacy of Nikola Tesla.

I agree with previous reviews that this might suffer in audiobook form, it doesn't really allow the tension to build or the characters to develop in the same way. But, the narration was enjoyable, and brought life to a good story. Worth a read / listen.

A great read. I really enjoyed this. Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read an ARC.

People, people, people. Let me start off by saying that this audiobook ARC was generously lendable out to me through Netgalley (thank you very much). This book had me going back to it just to find out what happens next!
I enjoyed the vast amount of characters that really added to the story in their own subtle ways. Whether it be the guy that works in the office building for the detective that asks the same question or the girlfriend that works at the Beehive Cafe. Everyone plays a role in solving this mystery throughout the whole story.
The characters truly drive the story forward, considering what they say is what pushes the detective to one way or the other- what would you expect from a mystery?
The speaker for the audiobook was a decent choice. I felt it matched the Jack Hammer persona quite well. He was likeable and felt “right”.
Thank you to the author for allowing this fun gem to be listened to and enjoyed by me.