Lightning Runes - (City of Shadows) by Harry Turtledove (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A stand-alone novel in the City of Shadows series.

Hardboiled Noir meets Urban Fantasy in a post-WWII Los Angeles where vampires, zombies, and demons are part of the social fabric.

Magic is just another way to get killed in the City of Angels.

Los Angeles, 1940s. The war is over, but the shadows are growing teeth. In this gritty Historical Urban Fantasy, detective work requires more than a badge and a .38. It requires an understanding of the runes that thrum beneath the pavement.

It started with a knock on the door. It usually does. Now there's a body, a missing musician, and a trail of magic that smells like ozone and bad luck. The LAPD is out of its depth. The "square" world is waking up to a reality they aren't prepared to handle.

Between the smoky jazz clubs of Central Avenue and the grease-stained floors of neighborhood garages, a new kind of power is rising. It's electric. It's ancient. And in the wrong hands, it's a death sentence for the whole city.

Harry Turtledove returns to the City of Shadows with a high-stakes mystery that stands entirely on its own. Whether you are a veteran of the series or stepping into this magical 1940s Los Angeles for the first time, the runes are waiting.

A Standalone Noir Masterpiece

No "homework" required. Jump straight into the action with a self-contained mystery that delivers a complete, hardboiled experience from the first page to the last.

The Noir Reinvented

Experience a Los Angeles where spells are as common as reefers and the "fuzz" has to watch out for more than just lead. It's the Philip Marlowe detective story, transformed.

Masterful Alternate History

Nobody builds a world like Turtledove. Every detail of post-war life is rendered with surgical precision-until the magic starts to bleed through the cracks.

"Old Man Mose had been sleeping on the beat-up old sofa in my office. My fuzzy red accomplice is no braver than he has to be. He disappeared under the sofa, just in case."

The shadows are calling. Order your copy of this standalone Urban Fantasy mystery today.

Review Quotes

For the first book in the series (Twice as Dead): "Wisecracking, biracial private eye Jack Mitchell takes on a series of cases complicated by the supernatural in this sharp-edged urban fantasy from Turtledove (The Wagers of Sin). In a post-WWII Los Angeles, Mitchell, a combat vet haunted by wartime horrors, investigates a missing husband who may have been turned into a zombie and a vanished half-brother who just happens to be a vampire. He navigates the city's segregated streets from the Vampire Village ghetto, where Jewish refugees handle daytime tasks for the incapacitated residents, through the jazz parlors of Central, where Charlie "Bird" Parker mesmerizes audiences, to the downtown centers of power, where corrupt cops shrug off grand jury indictments. Though the mystery elements sometimes feel underbaked, Turtledove admirably adheres to the noir aesthetic with his street-level focus on the resilience and resistance of society's outcasts. Readers waiting for Walter Mosley's next hard-boiled novel will fill the time nicely with this sympathetic but unsentimental tale of the ghostly underclass." - Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Harry Turtledove has spent forty years dismantling reality to see why the wheels come off. Hugo and Sidewise Awards fill his mantle because he breaks facts for a living. Most people call him the Master of Alternate History. That title is just a polite way of saying he is the only man who can make speculative dread feel like a peer-reviewed paper. Now he is applying that same grit to the supernatural. Los Angeles is full of vampires and gremlins. Turtledove lives in the San Fernando Valley and treats these monsters like historical inevitabilities. Ancient demons and the ghosts of history both smell like old paper. Just shadows and copper. This is a pivot by a man who already knows where the bodies are buried.