The con game, coupled with blackmail, receives an intriguing update in The Lady Upstairs, as Halley Sutton skillfully melds a feminist noir approach with a contemporary femme fatale in her debut.
Deception is the default for each character beginning with Jo, who works for the Lady Upstairs' Staffing Agency, a Los Angeles front for a blackmail scheme that targets wealthy, contemptible men with reputations for sexual harassment, adultery, "men who never heard a no."
Jo recruits and trains the young women who entrap these men in compromising situations--with Jo's coworker and sometimes lover Robert Jackal photographing them. The blackmail plan of a nasty Hollywood mogul backfires when Jackal fails to show up. Jo was counting on that blackmail money to pay off her debt to the mysterious Lady. Jo learns that Lady "wants to retire" her, a euphemism for eliminating her completely, as this retirement doesn't come with a pension plan. Needing more money to disappear, Jo tries to devise a couple of side projects of her own while working on Lady's next assignment, to trap a mayoral candidate, all of which quickly backfire.
The suspenseful Lady Upstairs grows darker--and richer--by the page as betrayals mount, taking a cue from Jim Thompson's 1963 novel, The Grifters. No one can be trusted--certainly not Jackal, nor Lou (Jo's female co-worker with whom she also is sexually involved), nor the corrupt cops with fluid loyalties. Sutton boosts the con game by giving the men a last name but referencing the women only by first names, which may be aliases. No one knows who the Lady is, or if she is a woman, though Jo couldn't imagine a male "sharing that vendetta" for bad men.
Sutton's sharp prose and keen eye for noir situations elevate The Lady Upstairs. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer