It’s the summer of 1966, and the Beatles’ upcoming concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park looms large while a local musician lies in a pool of blood, a garish Halloween mask with one of the Fab Four’s likenesses plastered to his corpse. As Beatlemania takes the city by storm, homicide inspectors Henry Nash and Ross Belcher fall down a rabbit hole of murder and greed beneath the counterculture’s veneer of daisies and bead curtains, peace and free love. San Francisco’s vibrant portrayal offers a colorful backdrop to compelling mystery, a tight-knit web of suspense, big personalities, indie art, jealousy, and Beatles-worship gone horribly wrong.
Layered with intrigue, Roy Chaney’s FLIP YOUR WIG is a captivating noir character study, both of the time period and its sense of place at the epicenter of the Sixties counterculture. From smoke-filled bars and cocktail lounges, to dingy, coffee-stained late night/early morning dives and Victorians crowded with hippie runaways and LSD and rock’n’roll, San Francisco comes alive. Chaney peels back the layers, for better or worse—the destitute artistic hopefuls, good community resources soured by desperate jealousy and greed, the wayward free-spirits mixed up in trouble, the cutthroat nature of the music business. Chaney’s deft, atmospheric prose renders the city in beautiful, heartbreaking, dangerous shades–a narrator of sorts and a character all its own. The book manages an impressive balance, touching on many different facets of the time period, all while the fervent Beatlemania remains a dull roar in the background that grows ever louder.
Nash’s wry humor adds levity to a dark, twisting underworld of lies and violence. His synthesia—associating colors with music—gives a unique aspect to his character and how he interacts with the music itself, which is sometimes intense and overwhelming. His and Belcher’s investigations puts them in contact with some interesting personalities, a rogue’s gallery of Sixties archetypes who aren’t always who they seem. It’s sometimes a muddle to keep all of them and their interconnected relationships and business straight, so Nash’s occasional recaps of the information they’ve uncovered is helpful in sorting through it all.
The middle act of the story takes a slight detour through the past which feels a bit overlong in getting to the point, but the journey itself is rife with rich character development and PTSD-laden anecdotes from the detectives’ time in WWII. There are a number of surprising plot turns while the fragments of the murder case start to stitch together and the body count rises. The conclusion, while a bit rushed in its execution, ends on one perfect, final gasp-worthy note.
Layered with intrigue and a tight-knit web of suspense, Roy Chaney’s FLIP YOUR WIG is a captivating noir character study which extends to its sense of place at the epicenter of the Sixties counterculture and Beatles-worship gone horribly wrong.
~Jessica Thomas for IndieReader