Lugarno by Peter Corris

Publisher's Synopsis

Although the meaner streets of inner Sydney are his traditional stamping grounds, Cliff Hardy finds that crime can flourish in the leafy, well-heeled outer suburbs as well. Lugarno may be an unlikely centre for drug dealing and corruption but the trail starts with the daughter of a wealthy client and leads quickly to threats of violence from some serious characters.

Once again, Hardy treads a fine line between police and suspects, coming up against blackmail and bullets before a surprising finale.

My Review of Lugarno by Peter Corris

The 24th book in the Cliff Hardy private investigator series, Lugarno starts off in a fairly standard way as far as the genre is concerned, meeting with a client who is looking to hire him. Giving things a bit more substance, and to keep him on his toes, he immediately picks up a second (unpaid) job from an ex-girlfriend. 

His paid job comes from Martin Price and he’s concerned his daughter, Danni, has gotten herself mixed up in drugs and would like Hardy to investigate to find out the full extent of her involvement. The fly in the ointment lies in the fact that a source claims that Danni is feeding Price’s wife’s drug addiction.

The unpaid job comes from Tess Hewitt, a recent ex, calling from Byron and she’d like him to track down her brother, Ramsey, who appears to have dropped off the map. Appearances can be deceptive and Hardy quickly picks up Ramsey’s trail by visiting the university he’s enrolled at but what he finds is that the young man appears to be somehow living well beyond his means. Now he has to work out how he can afford the course fees, the car and the house he’s living in.

Back to the Martin Price case and it quickly turns sour after a man he interviews is found dead the next day. The presence of Hardy’s business card in his pocket means the police are now anxious to talk to him. This ramps up substantially after Price’s wife dies of a drug overdose, again, a day after Hardy had visited her. 

But along the way things start to take a turn for the unusual. He appears to be crossing paths with an unusually high number of male escorts…in both cases he’s working on. It seems that Cliff can’t move without bumping into handsome blonde young men from a particular agency. When he’s warned off by a heavy connected to the agency, that’s when he, predictably, really gets stuck in.

In a barely believable way, his two cases become intertwined and we head down a tawdry road of sex parties, male escorts and blackmail scams.

Ultimately, though, what we get here is quite a lot of sitting down and observing on Hardy’s part. This gives him quite a lot of time for reflection and much of it you get the feeling he’s not exactly in a happy place. This tends to cast a dark pall over the entire book, giving it a brooding attitude.

I felt that Lugarno is a fairly standard private detective story that never really reaches great heights. Hardy covers a lot of mileage around Sydney’s southern suburbs and picks through all of the lies being told to him to reach a…well, a conclusion of sorts. To be honest, I can’t really say that any of the cases he was working on throughout the book were completely solved or that any of the crooks were punished.