Anybody who read Thomas Kaufman’s debut novel Drink the Tea has no need for me to tell them that American PI fiction has one of the most promising new characters and series to take notice of in years. Willis Gidney has the appropriately shady past to keep his ever moving present interesting and reluctant conscience enough to keep him likable. And the stakes? Yup, Kaufman’s swinging for the fences.

The new Kaufman/Gidney title, Steal the Show, finds the hero finding an abandoned child, a baby girl, whose plight is too familiar to Gidney, who grew up without a home or family of his own. So rather than see infant disappear into the system, he decides to hold onto and raise her himself, (perhaps taking a cue from Sara J. Henry’s Learning to Swim heroine – remember that?)

One thing that trips me up about Private Detectives is their motivations. To put up with all the hell that I, for one, want them to have to put up with, they’ve got to have y’know something big to gain or something terrible to lose, ‘cause I just don’t buy the white knight thing, (okay, I rarely buy the white knight thing, but you’d better not try to slip it by me twice, you’ve been warned). So, I’ll go on record here and say that I’m completely on board with this scenario. You certainly don’t have to have a heart of gold to be moved to do crazy, sacrificial stuff (do your kids play sports on Saturday mornings?) for the sake of a child. Trust me. I have a heart of rusty tin and I’d do anything for mine. Almost.

All that to say that what comes next, all the crazy hoops Gidney’s got to jump through and plates he’s got to keep spinning, what with the felonies he’s hired to commit and then blackmailed for and the corruption in Washington D.C. and the framing for murder, (yup, again), I’ll go along absolutely because I believe in his motivation.

So, watch out George Pelecanos, Kaufman’s budging in on the DC Noir scene and putting his own mark on it. Kaufman’s one of those folks like a Craig McDonald or a Megan Abbott that you'd like to ply with social lubricant, then sit back and listen to them ramble about whatever they've got on their mind, ('cause you know it's gonna be interesting, well informed and delivered with a flair). Aside from his writing, he's also an Emmy Award winning film maker and I had the pleasure of hearing him lecture on film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith books, combining two of my (and his, apparently) biggest interests, (crime film and fiction). I’d sign up to hear him speak again in anytime. If you can’t hear him speak, you can read this micro-essay on writing that he contributed to Hardboiled Wonderland.

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.