Everything but the Squeal — Timothy Hallinan

Simeon Grist is a private eye and Los Angeles is his city, and in the mid-nineties it's a city of lost children. Against his better judgment -- this is heartbreak territory -- Grist is on a new case, one that leads him down the streets of LA and into the dead, dark places of a killer's heart.

Missing is a thirteen-year-old from Kansas, Aimee Sorrell, a/k/a Dorothy Gale, who didn't find Oz over this rainbow. In fact, from the Polaroids her mother got in the mail, Aimee found nothing less than hell. The not-so-pretty pictures convince Grist to take the Sorrell case, hoping against hope for a happy ending. But the trail soon leads him to the city morgue, and the first of a string of victims. The trail leads Simeon -- and his willful god-daughter, Jessica -- on a perilous journey to find out what happens to America's lost children when they go looking for love in all the wrong places.