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. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary. (Mar.)