Chase Harlem  

By Elise Burke Brown  

Rising Action, 2025 

Trade Paperback: $17.99 

Genre: Mystery & Detective  

Reviewed by Tom Spencer 

 Joanna Harlem is a private investigator in New Orleans, although she tells us, “my friends call me Chase” and “my clients […] call me P.I. Harlem.” This strikes me as a bit weird. I’ve read a lot of mysteries, but I’ve never read one where “P.I.” is used as an honorific before – though her client gamely employs it throughout, saying things like “I trust you, P.I. Harlem.” 

Harlem is 5’4”, living on the brink of insolvency and using a desk in her tiny apartment as an office. She’s a dab hand with a taser and has the self-defense skills to take down scuzzball men more than a head taller than her. “I’m not a good role model,” she tells us. “If you don’t believe me, please note the fact that I live in a run-down, dirty apartment, surviving off pizza and junk food. Also, my friends are a homicide detective and a few sketchy folks who work at a New Orleans bar. I’ve killed every houseplant I’ve ever owned, including a cactus.” 

Chase Harlem is Elise Burke Brown’s debut novel and the start of a series starring this protagonist. The plot concerns the murder of the LSU star quarterback, Eli Goldman, in a city where “college football is its own religion.” Harlem is hired by Father Nolan, a Catholic priest who “wasn’t always a priest.” Nolan wants her to investigate the murder with the aim of clearing the name of his estranged son, who is LSU’s backup quarterback and the police’s chief suspect. 

Despite some references to Name, Image, and Likeness money as a possible motive for murder, however, college football is not really the world in which Chase Harlem takes place. Rather, its home is the “magical” but mean streets of New Orleans, which smell of “chicory roast” and have “a saxophone playing on the corner”; they also have “one of the highest murder rates in the nation.” The murder takes place in one dive bar, and Harlem spends much of her time hanging out in another one – and Burke is at her best conjuring up the feel of these places, with their colorful characters, great food, and constant threat of violence. 

The novel is published by Rising Action, an independent house based in Toronto. Independent publishing is objectively a Good Thing, and it’s great to see them publishing page-turning novels like this one. To their credit, Chase Harlem looks both eye-catching and stylish. That said, the copy-editing is slapdash – quotation marks have been substituted for apostrophes all over the place, there are line breaks in the middle of abbreviations and spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces. If I were Elise Burke Brown, I might feel entitled to be a little angry at having the bloom taken off the rose of my debut novel in this way. 

Chase Harlem is difficult to pigeonhole, both in terms of its genre and its tone. On the one hand, there’s a cozy-esque lightness to Burke’s characterization of Harlem – she wears “trademark” red Converse! She has a kooky pet, a ferret named Louis! There’s a romance subplot with a devilishly handsome bartender! On the other hand, there’s a noirish darkness about the book, and not just because of its twilit urban setting. Partway through the novel, we discover that Harlem has had the word “VICTIM” carved into her chest by a sadistic serial killer on a previous case – a traumatic event that has driven her from her previous job as an FBI profiler and led her into alcoholism and therapy – and indeed threatens to destroy her fledgling romance with the aforementioned bartender. Overall, the novel reminds me of a cross between Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels and Carolyn Haines’s Sarah Booth Delaney series. It has Paretsky’s hard-nosed female P.I. and thriller elements coupled with Haines’s cozy Southern sassiness. How much you like Chase Harlem will, I suspect, depend on how much you think this sounds like a good combination. Personally, I found them to be two great tastes that taste pretty good together. 

 

Tom Spencer is the author of The Mystery of the Crooked Man (Pushkin Vertigo, 2024).