An excellent read, wonderful plot & well written. The description was good, the clues excellent & the characters very believable & logically motivated. Set in modern NYC, I could see this unfolding on any day of the week there. Our hero is a private detective - a very real one. He spends hours searching the Internet & making phone calls, most of which don't pan out. Aleas doesn't bore us with the details, but he does let us know it is happening, unlike so many detective novels where the hero either magically keeps hitting jackpots or I get bored & confused from all the false leads.Our hero gets his butt kicked, does a little kicking of his own, deals with the devil & has to make choices that are almost too real. Good & bad are relative - which is why he isn't really happy about his choices. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to sample the genre. It's one of the best. ( )

#1 John Blake P.I. mystery, under the “Hard Case Crime” imprint. I actually had thought to weed this book out of my TBR; it was one I’d acquired on a whim well over a year ago, and when I added it to my ‘weed out’ pile, I wondered what I’d been thinking! I was anticipating it’d be one of those kind of cheesy, stereotypical Dashiell Hammett type ‘hard ass’ PI books. I was very pleasantly surprised instead. John Blake isn’t your typical tough guy—though he is that, certainly. He’s actually got a degree in literature and there were some literary references woven into the prose, and he’s much more sensitive emotionally than any of those fifties-style PI guys. John gets involved in trying to solve the murder of Miranda Sugarman, the girl who was his high school girlfriend ten years ago. She’d gone off to college in another state, set to become an eye doctor, and he never heard from her again aside from a few sporadic letters her first year away. She ended up as a stripper in one of the seediest strip joints in New York—and died with two bullets in her head on the roof of the building where the club is located. John’s boss and mentor, Leo, advises him to leave it alone, but John feels obligated to find out what led Miranda from the path full of promise to that sad and violent end. This was a fairly quick read, but had much more substance and character than I expected. I like John and his supporting cast of characters, the book was well-written with a style that didn’t make it ‘work’ to read it. The mystery was well-plotted too, and with the surfeit of suspects and possible baddies, I wasn’t sure at all til near the end who the real bad guy was, though I did figure out part of the mystery itself well in advance. I fully expect to carry on reading this series. A. ( )

In his debut novel, Richard Aleas shows that he has learned his craft - he knows how to write the formula. Now what he needs to do is create more interesting characters and surprise his readers a little more. The protagonist, John Blake, is an underachiever who hasn't grown much emotionally in the ten years since high school (for example, he's never had a serious relationship; he's still mooning for his high school sweetheart.) The ex-sweetheart, Miranda, apparently ditched her plans to become a doctor and went on the road as a stripper instead because...(well, not because she's deep.)

The surprise twist in the plot has been done in other mysteries and it's a great device, but it's not much of a shock here (everyone in my book club guessed it.)

All in all, I'd characterize this book as "workmanlike." All the right elements are there, they've just been done better by more experienced writers. ( )

The author is also the (I believe co-) founder of Hard Case Crime. "I'm not just the president, I'm a member!" And he more than acquits himself. HCC are great books, and I have yet to regret reading one--not that I've read all 30 or so titles. If you love noir, gritty crime novels, and suchlike, you'd do worse than to have these delivered to your door on a monthly basis. I realize this doesn't say much about the book in question, which has strippers, drugs, and private investigators. Or maybe that's the other book, which also has strippers...and drugs. This one may not have the drugs. The mind gets confused. I read this and *Songs of Innocence* like I was eating potato chips, one after the other, and quickly, so they kind of blend into one book. ( )

Author Charles Ardai (who wrote this book under his anagramatic pen name Richard Aleas) described Little Girl Lost's protagonist John Blake to Terry Gross as well-meaning but not very good at his job. Which is not say that Blake is incompetent, but rather that whatever he does, he only makes things worse. Thus the kernel of truth at the center of the Hard Case Crime books: things can always get worse.

I enjoyed this book for that very reason. Not that I revel in stuff going bad and characters messing up themselves and others with abandon (I couldn't read Walter Moseley's Killing Johnny Fry, not because it's porn, which it is, but because the main character was so singularly bent on self-destruction). It's just that sometimes in life, s*** happens. And so it is with Blake.

Blake never had much ambition for himself, but as his career trajectory degraded from literature professor to junior private detective in a two-man outfit with a ground-floor Chelsea office, he found solace in knowing that his high-school girlfriend, Miranda, had gotten out of the city, gone to college and probably wound up with a nice career and 2.5 children. Imagine the abject shock to his universe when he opens the paper and sees her picture beside an article explaining that a stripper was murdered execution style on the roof of the club where she worked.

And so Blake chases down the rabbit hole, unearthing progressively more painful truths about the city, Miranda and himself.

Sounds like a joy to read doesn't it?

Well, it is. Part of what saves it is that it's probably only about 60,000 words long, and moves at a furious pace. Not a lot of time to dwell on death there. The other thing that saves it is that it's all so authentic. The crap that befalls Blake and Miranda is not there to screw them up as fodder for the plot (that's not the only reason). It's a harrowing lesson in expectations and how we adjust or ignore them to get by. ( )