I loved Philip's first book so I was thrilled when I heard the news about this one.
It's a GEM, like watching a 70s movie!

Not for me. The book was a very much a talking-heads piece - cutting from one scene to the next with characters talking out the story. This read more like a screenplay than a novel. I had to quit in the end due to the obvious and stereotypical story -- old, cynical detective on one last big case, etc.

Enjoyed the book. Elliot has a little bit of Elmore Leonard in him which makes for,fine reading. Lots,of Southern California crime novel tropes but well done. Look forward to more from this author.

I unfortunately had a hard time with this book, for the simple face it is the second in a series, and felt like i needed to read the first one to completely understand characters and background

This book drew you in from the beginning but as the story progressed, the characters became cliches. The only character that felt authentic was the private investigator. The story itself is one that is well known and rehashed in many a books, movies, and tv shows. The porn star angle is different and I enjoyed that part but it did seem unoriginal after you got past that part. I wanted to like it but the majority of the characters were one dimensional. I will say the ending was unexpected. It made it feel more like a noir in some aspects. I did not read this author's first novel so it may be his style to write stories like this but this one, was a disappointment.

Although the title of this book could be off-putting and there is some explicit language and descriptive scenes, I was amused by parts of the story and had to chuckle picturing a 78-year-old man (our intrepid private eye) wandering around during a porno shoot. Mickey O'Rourke is the private investigator in question (not to be confused with Mickey Rourke, the actor) and seems to be pretty unflappable. He's hired by a 18-year-old porn star to find her ex-boyfriend, also a porn star, who has disappeared.

Philip Elliott's writing reminds me a lot of the few Elmore Leonard books I've read and I was very entertained. The story takes place over three different timelines following a different set of characters in each timeline until their paths converge. The characters are developed well and very realistic in my limited experience of this type of 'noir' and it was a smooth read. I look forward to reading book 1 as well as any subsequent books in this series.

Two of my first three books of 2022 are by Canadian authors. What a country!

My thanks to Into the Void and Netgalley for the chance to read an ARC of this book. All opinions expressed are my own. The book was published in August 2021.

It is the year 2000 and Los Angeles P.I. Mickey O’Rourke, 78 years old, thought he had seen and done it all in his very long career as a private investigator. He’s planning to retire after this, the last case he plans to take. But this is one case that will really test his detective skills as heads to porn studios in the San Fernando Valley where an 18 year old porn starlet hires O’Rourke to look into the disappearance of her boyfriend … porn’s male mega-star, Jeffrey Strokes. His search will take him many places, including the dangerous streets of Compton, California.
I don’t want to say too much about this book because part of the enjoyment of a book like this is the journey and the reader should go in as fresh and open as possible.
This is the second book in a series – at least a trilogy I’d guess, based on the cliff-hanger ending – but the only thing that made it seem like there was something before this book was the recognition of some of the characters toward one another, otherwise I really didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything.
I found the book to be written in an unusual format. The book uses flashbacks to help tell the story, but those flashbacks only go back two years at the most. That’s a little bit unusual, but it speaks to the nature of this case and that Jeffrey Strokes has gone missing recently – this isn’t a cold case.
What’s unusual is that the flashbacks, which must make up half the book, don’t include our central figure – Mickey O’Rourke. Not only that, but it appears to be three different, non-linear stories which we assume will converge at some point in the book. But following these different storylines and characters and timeframes requires a little extra work on the part of the reader.
I wasn’t particularly fond of this style for much of the book, and then O’Rourke says something that put it in perspective for me. When the porn starlet (Bethany) asks O’Rourke how he can do this sort of job when he sees humanity at its worst he says,
I do this job by following the clues, one after another, until the case is done. It’s not like the movies. There are rarely gunshots or explosions, bad guys hunting you down. You follow a lead to where it takes you. Most times it takes you to a dead end and you have to return to the beginning and follow another. Usually, you have to follow dozens of leads before you get anywhere. But, sometimes, you get lucky, and every door you open leads you to another until, finally, you stumble upon the truth.
This is when I realized that those chapters that were flashbacks were ‘the doors you open’ O’Rourke was talking about. Rather than reading about O’Rourke being given these bits of information through his searches, we get to see those pieces of information in action. It’s actually pretty clever (though still a tad hard to follow).
Even though the book has maybe four (false?) endings (you read a chapter and think “Oh, that’s a nice way to end,” and then there’s another chapter) there’s a pretty clear set-up for another book, and yes, I want to read it. I also need to find the first book in the series.
The book is a nice nod to the noir detective fiction of the 50’s (Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, etc) while staying firmly rooted in our modern world (well… twenty year old, modern).
Looking for a good book? Porno Valley by Philip Elliott is the second book in a series, but can stand alone (except for the cliffhanger). It features a slow but methodical, septuagenarian looking for a missing male porn star.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

An aging private detective taking on his final case, a young porn star desperate to know what’s happened to her missing ex-boyfriend, a pair of drug addicts seeking an escape from their grim existence and an ambitious hairdresser who spots an opportunity to make some serious money. Their stories are told in rotational sections but we won’t know how they are to come together – as surely they must – until quite late on in this tale.

The broad story – I won’t go into spoiler detail – is that Los Angeles PI Mickey O’Rourke is hired to find Jeffery Strokes a porn star who has seemingly vanished without warning. We then step back twelve months to follow the activities of Richie and Alabama, who are undertaking ever more desperate acts to feed their drug habit. And a further year before that we meet up with Jemeka, a hairdresser, who with her boyfriend is to experience a violent meeting with a drug dealer. The action primarily takes place in and around the sex film studios of the San Fernando Valley and on the mean streets of Compton. Each strand is interesting in and of itself, with a good mixture of humour, suspense and sometimes real sadness.

As with all stories of this type, the major appeal for me is in meeting interesting characters who are believable and who I can and invest in. Here, I believed in every one of them and moreover I ultimately cared about the fate of each of them. Surprisingly, this is true even for those who undertook some pretty unsavoury and often violent acts - the author has pulled off a neat trick in this respect. The dialogue is smart and the action is brilliantly brought to life but the cleverest bit is how the various strands overlay in a way the maintained my interest and yet held back how they were to become ultimately interrelated. When it eventually came together it all made sense and led to an exciting finale in which I wasn’t sure who to root for the most.

I’d previously read and enjoyed Elliott’s first book Nobody Move, but this one is a clear step up and, for me, marks him out as a writer I’ll most definitely follow going forward.

Nobody Move is a great underrated gem so I was excited to read the follow-up! Porno Valley has the same vibe, with wildly entertaining characters, a colourful noir setting, gritty action scenes and twisty storylines. I really liked the friendship between a retiring private investigator and a young porn star, which is the epitome of the found family trope. I was less enamoured about the storylines involving a criminal couple and a hairdresser. I found it kind of predictable and the open ending is not fully satisfying. But I did enjoy the writing - especially the dialogue - and I could visualise certain scenes as if they're on the screen. I would be happy to read more books featuring Mickey! Overall, this book would be perfect for readers who want some Tarantino in book form.

I reviewed Philip Elliott’s debut novel ‘Nobody Move’ when it came out in 2019. At the time, I described it as “a love letter to the crime thriller movies of the 90s and is packed with enough sleazy motels, 80s punk rock and characters making questionable life choices to make you want to ask, “Whose chopper iz dis?’”

It was one of those slow burning books for me. When I had begun it, I had been sampling the movie references like a wine connoisseur ticks off flavour notes on the tongue: there’s a Heat, here comes a Reservoir Dogs. Do I detect a soupcon of Jackie Brown? I do. Notes of Pulp Fiction laced with The Godfather, Baby Driver, No Country for Old Men and Get Shorty? It arrives on the tongue with gusto.

It is then interesting to read the second in Eliott’s Angel City series which also arrives with a Pulp Fiction-esque series of disparate storylines swirling and coalescing around the same milieu of pimps and whores and drug deals gone wrong.

What is also clear is that Eliott has also taken the time to really continue building his craft. What ‘Nobody Move’ did so well was make you care about the characters once you got past the movie spotting tapestry game. What ‘Porno Valley’ does here is subtler – it is an initially slower moving novel which swirls to a crescendo – and takes the time to reflect on the effect of poverty and violence on these communities.

I’m not going to lie: for all the slick dialogue, believable bathetic characters and evocative setting, especially early in the novel, I did find the three timelines a little hard to keep track of at times. However, the characters are so visceral that it is better to just let the story sweep you along and let all be revealed in the fullness of time.

In short, this is an excellent read from a writer brimming with confidence and with something to say. The continuation of the Angel City series is becoming a highlight of the literary calendar for me and I look forward to following Eliott’s progress with interest.

A (too) heavy dose of Tarantino, a splash of Elmore Leonard, and a modicum of old-school pulp fiction come together in Porno Valley by Philip Elliott.

Fun in an absurdist, dark comedy kind of way. If you like over-the-top, oddball characters who talk in movie dialogue and live in a Tarantino-esque world of self-indulgence then this is the one for you. It's not bad, just a bit derivative - the author seems to be close to finding his own style, but hasn't quite got there yet (the frequent pop culture references are more tedious than tantalizing).

A septuagenarian private detective takes on one last case before retirement. A couple of criminal junkies try to find their way to the big score. A hairdresser's mistrust of her scheming boyfriend leads them both into dangerous territory. These three stories are told in parallel narratives across different timelines before they all come crashing together.

It's good fun. Plot holes the size of swimming-pools require extreme amounts of suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. This is not your "go to" book if you want something deep or meaningful but if you're looking for the modern equivalent of a pulse-pounding pulp crime story this is the one.

Not for children or sensitive readers. Adult content, strong language, graphic violence, drug use, etc. This one is definitely rated R.

4.5 stars

Another gritty and raw novel written in the style of a 1940s/50s film noir from Philip Elliot that transported me to Los Angeles circa 1998-2000. I left a few years before that, but many of the places he included in this book (like Tower Records) were quite familiar to me. This book dives into the world of sex, drugs, and violence, and puts the main character, Private Eye Mickey, on the trail of a missing porn star. The author does a great job creating characters that are complex and a product of the environment they grew up in. Some are a bit more "bad apples" than others, but I found myself having empathy for quite a few of the characters in this book who broke quite a few laws, including murder. I loved Mickey and learning about his background, and loved watching him connect the dots. The author wrote this in chapters that bounced around the past and the present that slowly led to the answers that Mickey dug up. There were definitely some surprises for me, but it all made total sense. The ending is somewhat up in the air, which is rather unsatisfying for me (and why I rounded down rather than up), but I'm going to try to be optimistic for the main players in this one. Then again, film noir rarely had a happy ending, so perhaps not. If you are a fan of dark and gritty crime novels, you should definitely check out this one.

I received an advance review copy from NetGalley for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Elliot pens out a good, fast paced plot with diverse, interesting characters. Unfortunately, after about half way through I began to find it a big long and drawn out.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Into the Void for an advanced copy of this comedic caper mystery.

Philip Elliot's second book in the Angel City series, Porno Valley, takes place over three years, in that city of magic and wonder, scum and villainy Los Angles. Each year, 1998, 1999 and finally 2000 focuses on one of two in love couples trying get by, with year 2000 focusing on a missing person and the detective trying to find him.

A famous porn star has gone missing. A private eye, at age 78 and widowed for one year takes one last case, bringing him to an even 50 years on the job takes the case. His investigation leads him to two couple, who we meet in various years, one couple living the life of addicted hustlers, the second getting deeper and deeper into a world, one character finds themselves very good at. Both are in love, both do things for love that have tragic results. Crimes are committed, bodies pile up a plenty, and a strangely sentimental story is told.

The book moves along well, even with the jumping from year to year. My only real problem is the sheer love of 90's movies that permeates the book. Quentin Tarantino, True Romance, Boogie Nights, even the characters names are all really really familiar. The book is really more of a pastiche, which is fine. There is a epigraph in Mr. Elliot's first book, Nobody Move, from Quentin Tarantino that admits where his influences arose. This was an enjoyable book, especially for noir fans, or film fans of a certain genre. I look forward to other books by Mr. Elliot.

I read a lot of Lawrence Sanders mystery thrillers that moved quickly and had some great snappy ending. This made me think of them 100%. Elliot has a very fun and easy writing style and his characters can be seen very well. I liked the plot. Will read more of him.

Holy cow this is probably one of the best books I've read this year! The writing is impressive and the storyline itself all wrapped up very neatly.i look forward to more from this author! Highly recommend everyone read this

A new author for me, congratulations on a superb funny mystery, I loved this book. The pace of the story is fabulous, with characters that are relatable and realistic, the emotions jump off the pages.
Delving into the low lives and undesirables, Mickey is a thorough and believable investigator, well worth reading!
Thank you and well done Philip Elliott, I wondered what exactly was between the covers of a book titled ’Porno Valley’, I assumed the seedy side of life, very well written!

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I didn't read the first book but I appreciated this one as it's gripping entertaining. Good characters, solid plot.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Porno Valley is the second book by Philip Elliot in the Angel City series. I haven't read the first novel but enjoyed the second story about Los Angeles Private Detective Mickey O'Rourke, who is on the verge of retirement. Mickey's last case investigates the disappearance of porn star Jeffery Stokes and delves into the ugly world of drugs, sex and violence. Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my ARC.

Porno valley is an exciting entry into what is sure to become a memorable series. Philip Elliott is a writer to be watched and Porno Valley is his coming-out party.
Recommend a read.