'Eddie Miles is one of a dying breed: a Windy City hack who knows every street and back alley of his beloved city and takes its recent descent into violence personally. But what can one driver do about a killer targeting streetwalkers or another terrorizing cabbies? Precious little - until the night he witnesses one of them in action...'
There tends to be three types of crime stories, those that follow cops, those that follow private detectives, and those that showcase amateur sleuths, which can cover anything from priests, to writers, or even gardeners who keep finding dead bodies. Eddie Miles, the protagonist of Nobody's Angel would have to fit into the third category, yet feels very far removed from most of those kinds of stories. Eddie is less a man out to solve a murder because he's got that crime busting itch, and more a man trapped in a terrible situation.
Nobody's Angel follows Eddie, a Chicago cab driver who hates what's happening to the city he loves. There are parts of the city where gentrification has changed it to a place he doesn't even recognise anymore, and others where cab drivers just can't go anymore due to fear of violence. He's feeling lost in his home city, and a couple of recent murder sprees does little to help. Having one killer stalking the streets would be bad enough, but Chicago is dealing with two; one who targets sex workers, and another that's killing cab drivers.
Despite the dangers, Eddie continues his work as a driver, and then one night when he stops down a back alley to pee he discovers the near dead, mutilated form of a sex worker, the latest victim of one of the killers. This draws Eddie into a world he was trying to avoid; but when his old friend and mentor, another cabbie, becomes the latest murder victim of the cabbie killer Eddie becomes determined to try to find some answers.
One of the things that sets Nobody's Angel aside from most crime stories is that for the most part it feels like the crime solving takes a back seat, and instead we spend much of the book driving around the city with Eddie, picking up fares and hearing stories. The book has a big quote on the front from Quentin Tarantino calling it his 'favourite novel this year', and it's clear to see why it'd appeal to him. The stories that Eddie tells, the way he goes into what kind of people make for good fares, who tips and who doesn't, and his musings about the changing nature of Chicago feel very Tarantino-esque. It feels relaxed, conversational, and whilst not everything is an important part of the mystery, or helps to solve it, it all helps to build the world we're inhabiting and the people who are part of it.
Part of the reason a lot of the book feels so real, so effortlessly crafted, is that Jack Clark knows this world. An actual cab driver from Chicago, this is the world that Clark knows, he's putting a lot of his own experiences onto the page and it absolutely bleeds through into the work and makes for a very grounded, very real kind of mystery story that a lot of writers in the genre never manage to create. I also love the fact that Clark self published 500 copies of Nobody's Angel and sold them to people riding in his cab for $5 a copy before he got picked up by a publisher; that's the kind of person who has a passion for what they're doing and won't take no for an answer.
Nobody's Angel is a short read, barely more than two hundred pages in all, but it's one that's thoroughly enjoyable. Clark clearly knows this world, and has a passion for his home city that makes its way onto the page. Whether you're into the book for the mystery story, or just want to lose yourself into a side of Chicago that never really gets shown, this book will steer you right.
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