Jordan Harper’s 2023 novel, Everybody Knows, closes with a difficult dilemma: Should the hero let a vile TV executive, who has ruined the lives of several young Hollywood actors, fall into the hands of his enemies? Or should she allow him to make a run for it because he knows things that could bring down predators at the highest levels of power?
In Harper’s latest, A Violent Masterpiece, the ramifications of that decision are explored more fully. The aforementioned executive, Eric Algar, is scooped up by the police, and he threatens to take down half of Hollywood with him. “I’m Samson over here,” Algar says. “I got my hands on the pillars of this whole goddamn town.”
Not so long ago, Harper was admired for his gritty stories of last-chancers embroiled in low-stakes criminal conspiracies at the fringes of society, where bikers, ex-cons, and meth cooks squabble over patches of California desert. One of his early novels, She Rides Shotgun, was adapted into an underrated film last year. These days, however, the author, who also works in television, paints with a broader brush that hits uncomfortably close to the ways the world operates under the shadow of the Epstein files and the most corrupt administration in American history.
There’s no such thing as a good judge. But there are bad ones. They love the robe. They love being called Your Honor. They love the permission it gives them to stick their hands into people’s lives and start squeezing.
Even so, in A Violent Masterpiece, Harper’s prose sings with the hard-boiled poetry of Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and—the author’s favorite—James Ellroy. For instance:
The high desert is Southern California’s unconscious. It’s where the things we push down go, where the unspeakable lives. It’s the place we go to go someplace else.
That’s Jake Deal, one of a trio of narrators in A Violent Masterpiece. Jake is a livestreamer who races around Los Angeles while listening to the LAPD police scanner so he can arrive at the scenes of violent crimes seconds after they happen, narrating the gory details to his paying subscribers along the way. Partly Weegee for the TMZ era and partly Christian Slater’s laconic DJ in Pump Up the Volume, Jake blurs the line between insider access and bad taste, saying, for instance:
LA death tours are a proud tradition. Here’s the chalet where Marilyn took her medicine. Here’s the corner where Biggie got asked who shot ya? Death-show tour buses get stuck in LA traffic so geeks can see where Whitney Houston took her last splash, where Nicole Simpson got juiced, where RFK took after his brother.
Then there’s Doug Gibson, the kind of lawyer whom everybody knows but no one takes seriously because of his ubiquitous ads on bus benches. Doug is in the middle of a personal crisis when he receives stunning news: Eric Algar wants Doug to represent him. Taking on Eric as a client presents huge risks to his reputation, but saying no could be hazardous to his health.
Rounding out this trifecta of desperate Angelenos is Kara Delgado, who is trying—and failing—to deal with the disappearance of her best friend and mentor, Phoebe Butterfield, who may be the latest victim of a serial killer known as the L.A. Ripper. Kara and Phoebe work for an off-the-books agency that makes things happen for rich people. We’re not talking a fast track to Coachella tickets, but a PR firm/concierge service that specializes in making negative publicity disappear. After the L.A. Ripper claims another victim who looks like her coworker, Kara begins to suspect that one of her high-profile clients might have something to do with Phoebe’s vanishing, but the amount of drugs that Kara’s taking would make anyone paranoid. Just to get out of her apartment, we learn, Kara “dry-swallowed a Vyvanse capsule, sniffed a fist bump of coke, finished with a Xanax bar to smooth it out.”
Jake, Doug, and Kara are united by their reluctance to step outside the roles that have been defined by the people they work for, but as their stories converge, they come to realize they have no choice but to break free of their constraints. These moments of awareness are breathtaking and terrifying—especially as they close in on the Ripper.
In his author’s note, Harper expresses thanks to reporters at the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Taco “for digging up the dirt.” With his latest, readers familiar with places where crime and culture intersect in Hollywood and on the internet will be reminded of stories that have played out in recent years, namely Armie Hammer’s alleged cannibalism fetish and the purported sexual misconduct of screenwriter Max Landis.
These echoes, however, don’t cheapen Harper’s story in a movie-of-the-week way; rather, they reinforce his larger point that people with deep connections and deeper pockets routinely get away with crimes far worse than what most of us would willingly imagine. Although the story that unfolds is nightmarish, Harper’s talent for focusing on real settings in L.A. with accurate driving directions makes the telling feel uncomfortably real.
A Violent Masterpiece evokes dirty truths about the celebrity-obsessed city. Harper transforms the reader’s sense of safety and security into the hunger of the voyeur. Bon appétit.•
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