Although badly scarred and down to his last kidney after the previous caper, Happy Doll is back in business. When a beguiling young woman turns up at his door, it’s Doll’s past that comes knocking. Mary DeAngelo is searching for her estranged mother, Ines Candle—a singular and troubled woman Doll once loved. The last he’d seen her she’d been near-death: arms slit like envelopes. Although she survived the episode, she vanished shortly thereafter. Now, years later, Mary claims Ines is alive and has recently made contact—messaging her on Facebook and calling her from a burner phone—only to disappear once again. Although his psychoanalyst would discourage it, Doll takes the case, desperate to see Ines again. But as the investigation deepens, there are questions he can’t shake. What’s led the flighty Ines to reappear? Is Mary only relaying half the truth? And who is Mary’s strange and mysterious husband?
Jonathan Ames’s A MAN NAMED DOLL was one of my big surprises last year. It was a book I was curious about, as I was really geeking out over pretty much anything Mulholland Books was publishing. And then I managed to win all three books in THE DOLL SERIES in a giveaway!
The tone & the vibe of that first book has really lingered with me…the sort of offbeat yet dreamy version of Los Angeles, the undercurrent of danger, the quirkiness of our intrepid private detective…I couldn’t wait to catch back up with Happy Doll & his great dog, George.
In THE WHEEL OF DOLL, Happy has lost his private investigator’s license (meh, a technicality) and he’s also become an “armchair Buddhist.” He’s at a crossroads in his life, it seems. Trying to reconcile the overall peaceful nature he aspires to with the more unsavory, violent things he’s done.
And I think everything Happy does, he does in attempt to feel worthy of his dog’s love. This will always make Happy Doll the most relatable private eye in all of crime fiction for me, real talk.
Happy’s latest caper brings him into contact with a woman named Mary DeAngelo, who is looking for her estranged mother, Ines Candle. Ines has fallen on hard times, is unhoused and an addict, last seen in Olympia, Washington.
But the real catch? Ines & Happy were once in love, briefly. Happy saved Ines from a suicide attempt & then never heard from her again. But he carries a deep fondness for her in his big dumb heart, and he takes the case.
It’s a right of passage for any private investigator in an ongoing series to hit the road & take cases outside their home cities, so we spend a decent chunk of this one in Olympia. Happy has to navigate the encampment under a bridge where Ines has been living, which has its own set of rules & is a dangerous, unpredictable place.
Jonathan Ames really has me under a spell with these books. I feel like my time spent reading a lot of private detective fiction in my twenties was both really formative & way too brief. My main focus was on Raymond Chandler & John D. MacDonald, though, and it’s really easy to see the influence of authors like that on Jonathan Ames. Or at the very least, the DOLL books are written with a real deep reverence for books like that, while also being somehow totally unique. There’s an otherness to these books that’s so hard to put my finger on, but make them stand out so much to me. Ames’s descriptions of Los Angeles are fascinating & alluring. Happy Doll is a magnetic character full of surprises…one minute he’s (endlessly) doting on his dog & sweet-talking the plants and trees, and the next minute he’s on a coke-fueled road trip with vengeance on his mind.
I’m so excited to have found these books, they’ve really reignited my love for reading an ongoing series with a private detective. I’m so curious/hopeful about how many books Jonathan Ames wants this series to be, but in the meantime, I’ll be trying to get to KARMA DOLL (book three) somewhat soon. I loved THE WHEEL OF DOLL a whole bunch!
Grimdark Dad 