murder Parachute kids — L.A. — mentions Islam Temple

The victim is found dead in a chic shopping center parking lot, her two-carat engagement ring still on her finger. To the cops, it s a routine carjacking gone bad. But L.A. Times reporter Eve Diamond thinks there's more to the story.Searching for the truth plunges Eve into the darkest shadows of L.A., where young women are forced into virtual sexual slavery, and money can buy the most brutal pleasures.

But someone wants to keep these dirty little secrets from being revealed. Someone with more power than Eve knows. Someone who has killed once and will kill again.

I cannot say enough about the writing style of Denise Hamilton. She not only knows the streets of LA, she breathes life into them through her every written word. It's chilling to read her books. Denise has the skill of a fine surgeon, knowing just when and where to place the razor and how to cut to release that last shred of skin between our belief and disbelief. Her hand is quick and so adept we hardly know we've been "had" until it's over and we're shocked to see our heart in our hands. She is a master writer of this genre. I have a feeling Denise is a masterful writer of anything she chooses to put her mind to. I thinks she's spoiled me for reading anyone else in noir fiction, female or male.

"The Jasmine Trade" is breathtaking. I was completely spellbound by the insider information and story surrounding a young girl killed outside a shop with her bridal dresses in her car! What starts out as a horrendous, but not that unusual these days, tale of a young girl's tragic murder, turned into a spider web of the macabre for me. Denise Hamilton unveiled layer after layer of LA's underside, teaching me things I had no idea existed; i.e., "parachute kids?" I'd never even heard this was happening in our country. And she shone a light into some dark dwellings both physical and psychological that left me shuttering.

What I found most exciting about Ms Hamilton's writing in both the novels I read (and her short story "Midnight In Silicon Alley" in her L. A. Noir Collection) was her ability to use an ordinary pace, an simple staccato of words and sentences to lay out the most astounding and dark situations. A clip of interchange between characters that conveyed more than just the words themselves...It was like reading the movements of a cat studying it's prey before pouncing! Glorious and so unusual I wanted to clap and yell, "Yes!!" several times through the books. This kind of writing is intense and so freaking rare!

Let me say a little bit about Eve Diamond, who is the journalist/investigative writer protagonist of "The Jasmine Trade." She is vulnerable, hard-core on the side of right, and devoted to her story. I'm a huge fan of this character. I loved everything about her. Hamilton hits just the right chords with her balance between a woman with the insecurities of a feminine sort, and a journalist looking for more than just the surface report in order to lift the scab off a deeper slash on the LA landscape. It's Denise's development of both these sides of her that makes Eve a remarkable character, but it's the use of Eve's vulnerabilities that makes the story itself just blast off the pages. She is unrelenting when looking for the truth behind a murder; but, bound up and driving that is the underlying concern for Asian children abandoned by their parents, for instance. Eve Diamond is a character I can happily read more about in Hamilton's other novels.

What was new to me about these books among all the books I've read? The dark tone of "voice." The descriptions of the underbelly of the city and the surrounding scruff and side-beaches. The brilliance of too much light at night and used tinsel garishness by day, both literally and figuratively. The "invisible" people that stray and strand along the sidelines of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and LA. Concepts of evil hidden behind the flat, compliant faces of ordinary kids in designer label outfits- -apparently, no drugs applied. How swiftly calm, security and routine can be smashed in a smoky room, in an unknown section of town where you weren't aware that nobody speaks English, and you don't know how to get a ride home. The multi-cultural nature of a city that is a microcosom of our country and where we're headed.

I've tried to convey to you how unusual and how brilliant a writer Denise Hamilton really is. "Damage Control" will send ice splints through your veins. "The Jasmine Trade" will change the way you look at Asian children and their parents for a while; at least it changed things for me. I haven't been able to put these books, and Ms Hamilton's short story out of my mind. I keep returning to parts of them long after I've read them. When studying fine arts and art history I learned that one of the tests of a masterpiece is that we can't stop looking at it. We find ourselves continually drawn back into the painting, finding more things of interest and wanting to look at it longer. There is much of this quality in Denise Hamilton's books. They just keep coming back to haunt you ( )