cover image Jimmy and Fay

Jimmy and Fay

Michael Mayo. MysteriousPress.com, $15.99 trade paper (274p) ISBN 978-1-5040-3607-8

In Mayo’s uneven third Prohibition-era suspense novel featuring Manhattan speakeasy owner Jimmy Quinn (after 2015’s Everybody Goes to Jimmy’s), movie star Fay Wray hires Jimmy to act as a go-between and deliver $6,000 in extortion money to suppress the publication of some dirty pictures that feature a Fay Wray lookalike in an ersatz King Kong production. Jimmy’s search for the lookalike involves visiting Polly Adler, who runs an upscale prostitution ring; holding off Gotham Comet columnist Saxon Dunbar, who’s hot for a juicy story; and confronting pornographer Oscar Apollinaire, who has a link to the naughty photos that Wray wants destroyed. Mayo does a good job evoking the 1930s, and he has a great ear for hard-boiled dialogue. He generates some intrigue as Quinn tries to figure out why his girlfriend isn’t speaking to him and why some heavies sacrificed a goat in the offices of a foundation for wayward girls. But, alas, the answers to both of these questions are, like the main story line, less interesting than they ought to be. Agent: Otto Penzler. (Oct.)