Frank Litvak is a Chicago loan shark. Rico and Jerry are his enforcers. Jerry is relatively mild mannered, but Rico is the alpha male. Killing and wounding those who are fellow bottom-feeders doesn’t stop him sleeping easy at nights. When Litvak gives them an expensive necklace to look after, it seems all in a day’s work, but accidents happen. While Rico is messing around with his girlfriend Jean on the back seat of Jerry’s car, the pouch containing the jewellery falls out of his pocket, and is later retrieved by the fourth passenger in the car, a deeply-in-debt businessman called Robert McDuffie.

McDuffie flees to Honolulu with his wife Evelyn, pursued by Rico. Also in the resort is Paul Elliott, a Chicago lawyer, taking an enforced break and still grieving for his wife, killed by a drunken driver months earlier. The best thrillers always have an instance of separate worlds colliding, and boy oh boy, how they collide here.

Arriving in Hawaii, Rico wastes no time in sourcing weapons, and follows Robert and Evelyn to a nearby Luau (a traditional Hawaiian feast, but now tailored to tourists). He is bemused that the McDuffies are now part of a foursome, but puts it out of his mind. As readers, we know that Paul Elliott is part of the group, and that he knew Evelyn from student days. The fourth person is Rachel Givens, a professional colleague of Evelyn’s, with whom Mrs McDuffie had intended visiting Hawaii. Robert has produced the necklace – made of priceless ‘pigeon-blood red’ rubies, and presented it to his wife in an effort to repair their marriage.

Hidden in the trees outside the Luau, Rico shoots Robert, and then Evelyn. Moving in between the panicking party-goers, he reaches down to retrieve the necklace from Evelyn’s neck, but it is not there. Making his escape, Rico later learns that the woman he shot was not Evelyn, but Rachel, and Evelyn still has the necklace.

Rico, Evelyn and Paul return to Chicago leaving the funeral directors to repatriate the remains of Robert and Rachel. Litvak, of course remains seriously unhappy, as he still wants the necklace back. His mistake is to present a binary choice to Rico: either Rico kills Paul and Evelyn and retrieves the necklace, or Jean will suffer the consequences. There is a messy finale involving the brother of a man Rico killed just before leaving for Hawaii is seeking revenge, but Rico’s rather unusual moral compass remains stable.

The ‘killer with a conscience’ trope is certainly nothing new in crime fiction. If there is any remote moral argument for killing, I suppose it is best encapsulated in the still flourishing admiration for long-dead British gangsters, the Kray Twins. The logic runs something along these lines: yes, they were brutal, but never harmed ordinary people; their victims were always fellow criminals, or rivals; and, of course, they loved their dear old mum. Amazon has this to say about the author:

“Ed Duncan is a graduate of Oberlin College and Northwestern University Law School. He was a partner at a national law firm in Cleveland, Ohio for many years. Ed currently lives outside of Cleveland, OH and recently completed the third installment of the Pigeon-Blood Red trilogy, Rico Stays.

Pigeon-Blood Red is a fast-paced and convincing noirish thriller, with a complex central character. It is published by Next Chapter, and is available now.