The Big Tilt - Peter O'Keefe Detective Series
Formats: E-Book, Audio, Paperback, Hardback
Ages: 18+
An old flame in danger. A friend framed. A Mafia vow to see him buried.
To save the people he loves, O’Keefe must walk into the past he never escaped.
A year after exposing a violent criminal ring, Peter O’Keefe is back in his hometown, trying to build a steadier life for himself and his daughter.
O’Keefe’s closest friend, attorney Mike Harrigan, is arrested and publicly humiliated. The charges are flimsy, the timing is convenient, and the forces behind the case are anything but innocent. Then comes the worst blow of all: the Mafia boss O’Keefe crossed in the desert left one final order before he died—kill O’Keefe.
Complicating everything is a woman from O’Keefe’s past—someone he once cared for—whose pursuit of justice for a long-ago crime pulls him into danger he can’t ignore.
With a bounty on his head and a friend’s freedom on the line, O’Keefe must navigate a maze of corrupt officials, criminal financiers, and men who hide their brutality behind polished offices. Every step closer to the truth pulls him deeper into the city’s underworld—and further from the fragile life he’s built for his daughter.
As the clock runs down and the danger rises, O’Keefe must choose whether justice is worth the cost…even if that cost is everything he has left.
Meet Peter O’Keefe—scarred, relentless, and a hero for our times.
Continue the Peter O’Keefe Crime Series with The Big Tilt.
Reviews
A gritty and eloquent crime novel. A blackmail case spirals out of control and poisons a private investigator’s friendships in this second novel in Flanigan’s Peter O’Keefe series, following Mink Eyes(2019). This story takes place in “a spot of rough country that urban development had bypassed, the expanding city metaphorically closing its eyes and holding its nose.” Its main characters—O’Keefe, a rough-around-the-edges private investigator with a conscience; and O’Keefe’s operatives, the mysterious Sara Slade and the womanizing ex-cop George Novak—seem to have emerged straight from the pages of classic pulp novels. Unlike the straightforward pulp formula, however, Flanigan interweaves multiple plotlines, a strategy that may leave readers wondering why major characters frequently fall by the wayside. In the first chapter, Carmine Jagoda, a Mafia don on his deathbed, charges Robert Sciorra and Paul Marcone with the task of murdering O’Keefe for damaging their criminal enterprise. Instead of building on this opening premise, however, the following chapters focus on a blackmail case. Mike Harrigan, O’Keefe’s lawyer and childhood friend, hires him to help determine the legitimacy of claims made by Beverly Bronson, another troubled friend—namely, that untrustworthy entrepreneur Jerry Jensen is the father of her adult son and murdered a woman long ago. As O’Keefe works this case, the mob-related plot simply devolves into a rivalry between Sciorra and Marcone. As a result, the mobsters unexpectedly become the least dangerous people in the novel, as O’Keefe learns when Harrigan comes under federal investigation and a car bomb nearly kills him. The author’s offbeat narrative focus doesn’t doom the work, however. Indeed, Flanigan manages to conjure deft, hard-boiled, but literary prose that’s reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s best work. A gritty and eloquent crime novel.
