Paperback Mysteries

Two Shots At Kuhlken

2007-02-04T09:59:00.000-08:00

If you liked Ken Kuhlken's earlier mysteries about the Hickeys--a California family of investigators, lawyers and musicians--you have two chances this month to renew old acquaintances. Poisoned Pen has a new paperback edition of The Loud Adios to go with The Do-Re-Me, a thoughtful and exciting hardcover. Among its other virtues, Do-Re-Mi captures summer 1972 and its motley crew--outlaw bikers, war protestors, marijuana growers and users--to understated perfection.

Not just a pretty face?

2007-01-28T11:07:00.000-08:00

Check out The Rap Sheet for some news that might be of interest...

Stout's Honor

2007-01-22T13:19:00.001-08:00

Before he earned literary immortality by inventing Nero Wolfe, Stout wrote several crime novels – two of which the tireless publisher/editor/bookstore owner Otto Penzler has collected (along with another early short story) in this classy package.

Her Forbidden Knight features a smart young woman who works as a New York hotel telegraph operator and unwittingly gets involved in a counterfeiting scheme. A Prize for Princes is about another kind of young woman – one who captures men’s souls and the uses them for her own nefarious purposes.

Holy Sheed

2007-01-21T15:14:00.000-08:00

"No occupation designed for dim younger sons was ever easier to enter than book reviewing; or, once entered, easier to rise in. You go immediately to the top, it is the least you can ask.... So whatever politics a microscope may turn up in this game can have little to do with upward mobility. Since there is absolutely no way of not reaching the top -- and since the top proves to be so close to the bottom -- the satisfaction must be sought crabwise, foraging side to side, magazine to magazine; passing on the way other reviewers of similar, sometimes almost interchangeable sensibility, who are lurching counterclockwise." WILFRED SHEED

Bad Titles, Great Books

2007-01-18T16:47:00.000-08:00

"Peter Rabe wrote the best books with the worst titles of anybody I can think of," says Donald Westlake -- whose own books (and titles) are world-class -- in his afterword to this new edition from Stark House of two of Rabe's most powerful paperback originals. "Murder Me for Nickels, Kill the Boss Goodbye? And yet," Westlake continues, "Kill the Boss Goodbye is one of the most purely interesting crime novels ever written."

Perhaps the title problem came from the fact that Rabe was born in Germany in 1921 and immigrated to America in 1938 -- so English was not his original language. But the books themselves are fascinating and unique, as these two newly-rescued examples -- My Lovely Executioner / Agreement to Kill -- prove.

Both books are about men in or recently released from prison. Jimmy Gallivan of My Lovely Executioner is about to get out, but a fellow inmate screws up Jimmy's plans with a treacherous scheme. In Agreement to Kill, Jake Spinner is just out of jail and headed back to work on his farm, until deadly events turn things around. Both are absolutely riveting.

And So Say All of Us

2007-01-15T10:39:00.001-08:00

I'm delighted to report that England's venerable drinking and writing group called the Detection Club has decided to celebrate one of its founders' 80th birthday with a collection of stories in his honor. H.R.F. Keating, known as Harry to friends, fans and colleagues, is a rare talent, author of the Inspector Ghote series of mysteries set in India as well as less-exotic but equally sleek and sly crime novels.

Prominent club members who celebrate him here include P.D. James, Peter Lovesey (who also does an ace job of editing the book), Reginald Hill, Colin Dexter and Len Deighton – in his first published story in recent memory, Sherlock Holmes and the Titanic Swindle. It's a jaunty, strange, occasionally baffling tale of swindlers and publishers (though its sometimes hard to tell the difference), which at 30 pages begins and anchors the collection in a way which Keating must have chortled at.

Bringing Bardin Back To Life

2007-01-11T12:18:00.000-08:00

Salvador Dali on the cover, a ground-shaking introduction by Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn etc.) quoting the likes of Greil Marcus (whose latest book is the critically acclaimed The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice) -- who is this guy John Franklin Bardin anyway, and why is everyone making such a fuss?

Bardin (1916-1981) wrote ten psychological crime novels, no doubt influenced by early tragedies -- deaths of close relatives; a mother's increasing mental illness. But he also worked for an advertising agency and edited popular magazines.

The Deadly Percheron, championed back into print by Lethem, is, as he writes, "a combination of paranoia and amnesia... but the tone is anything but. Instead, the book comes off like a brisk blend of Damon Runyon and The Twilight Zone."

Many thanks to Millipede Press for another handsome restoration.

Excellence Present

2007-01-11T12:10:00.000-08:00

S.J. Rozan has a new hardcover -- In this Rain -- which I'll review in my Chicago Tribune column 1/14, plus a new paperback of her last novel.

Rozan isn't the first writer to use what happened to New York on Sept. 11, 2001, as the background for a crime novel. But the images of pain, loss and fear on every page of Absent Friends are so strong that the book will probably be remembered for them, rather than for the intricate and heart-breaking story of her characters, a group of friends who grew up on Staten Island in the 1970s.

"Everyone was like this now," says a criminal lawyer named Phil Constantine (a latecomer to the friends' circle and a definite outsider who does their dirty jobs but is treated roughly, especially by the women), suddenly caught up in a TV news item involving a client. "Every siren, every subway delay, every unexpected crowd as you rounded the corner made your heart speed, your palms sweat." And the sense of the city's vanished crystalline beauty comes through like an arrow in the heart: "In New York now, beautiful days were suspect, clear blue skies tainted with an invisible acid etch."

At the center of these absent friends (even the ones who survived paid a terrible price of loss of hope for the future) is Jimmy McCaffery, a heroic firefighter who died in the towers. While most of the others remained in their peaceful Staten Island harbor, Jimmy left 20 years ago for Manhattan, where he became a captain at a firehouse near the site of the attack. But why did McCaffery really leave: over a failed love affair, or because of his involvement in some secret payments to the family of a mob-connected man who died in prison?

A once-great newspaper reporter, now mired in booze and self-pity, thinks he has found the answer, but his body falls from a bridge before his story is finished. His young, idealistic lover is determined to find out why. Constantine the lawyer and other friends of McCaffery would rather let it all sink beneath the water and ash.

Rozan, who has justly won every mystery award going, knows how to balance their pasts and their presents without trivializing anything that happened on 9/11. Her performance--a dance in front of the burning towers--takes guts, brains and heart, and all are present in abundance.

No End to Abrahams' Story -- or His Talent

2007-01-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

Peter Abrahams, one of my favorite writers, has a new hardcover -- Nerve Damage: A Novel -- out soon, and the paperback version of his last terrific novel, End Of Story, in the stores.

Here’s the deal: I’m going to keep on raving about Abrahams until he 1.) writes a bad book; or 2.) gets to be a regular on the best-seller lists where he deserves to be. If thriller-writing was a disease, Abrahams would be its poster boy, and End of Story is a beautifully crafted and astonishingly exciting story.

Ivy Seidel is a writer in trouble: she has an impressive educational background, lots of rejections (the New Yorker’s was kind and handwritten), a job as a waitress. A lucky Hollywood break for her best writing buddy gives her the chance to teach prisoners at upstate New York’s Dannemora Prison, at $100 a visit plus gas money. It’s as far from the New Yorker as Ivy can get in terms of atmosphere, but Abrahams makes you smell the fear and feel all the bad vibes.

At least one of her five pupils appears to have talent, and Ivy is so caught up in his work that she buys into his story of innocence – until life threatens to be much more dangerous than fiction.

Down But Not Out

2007-01-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

Theresa Schwegel has a new hardcover out -- Probable Cause -- and the paperback version of her Edgar-winning first novel, Officer Down.

Schwegel's impressive first mystery about a cop named Samantha Mack – Smack to her colleagues – catches the flavor of Chicago in endearing ways. “It’s low-key, unadvertised, and out of the way, and it’s been around for too long to be trendy,” she says of her favorite late-night eating place, Iggy’s on Milwaukee Avenue. “I’ve never had a better steak after 10 p.m.”

Waiting for her date – a homicide detective named Mason Imes – to show up and buy her that steak, Smack gets an urgent call from her boss at the 23rd to fill in for another colleague with the flu. She joins her ex-boyfriend Fred as they go after a pervert, and many shots are fired. Smack gets hit hard on the head, and Fred winds up dead – killed by Smack’s .38. Was it an accident, as the police department badly wants to label it? Or was there really someone else in the room, who the battered and concussed Smack is virtually certain did the killing?

Of course there was, and it soon becomes evident – perhaps a bit too evident – that Smack will have to do all the digging herself. Between the slickly dismissive (and married) Imes, a particularly pesky bird from Internal Affairs, and a police establishment which threatens to take her badge if she doesn’t behave, Smack has no real friends.

But Schwegel, who writes about police work with authority (“It’s like hide-and-seek and my .38 is a heavy toy,” she has Smack think as a bust develops) has also created a tough and original character. At 32, Smack is as honest as they come, especially about herself. “My hair looks like it’s been pulled back all day (it has) and my makeup looks like a second coat rather than a fresh one (it is). Good thing we’re going to Iggy’s; at times like these, I live for bad lighting.”

Another Deadly Year

2006-12-22T13:53:00.000-08:00

I can't think of another annual anthology of crime stories which supplies as much sheer reading pleasure plus as much important information as the one which editors Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg lay upon us like a golden egg at the end of every year.

Their 2006 door-stopper is 576 pages of surveys by Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and ace blogger Sarah Weinman (who analyzes and chooses the best of online crime, but sadly doesn't have one of her own sharp print offerings in the book).

What stories are here are topnotch, from Sharan Newman's The Deadly Bride (which loans the book its title) through excellent offerings by James Hall, Nancy Pickard (her The Virgin of Small Plains: A Novel of Suspense was one of my own best books of 2006), David Morrell, Rick Mofina, Robert S. Levinson, Jeremiah Healy, Anne Perry -- the list is endlessly readable.

Save the Independent Book Stores

2006-12-20T13:53:00.000-08:00

The most endangered species in the world seems to be the independent crime book store, including this one and others talked about by book people including Sarah Weinman and many others.

I use Amazon on my own blog, mostly because it's a way to get the new paperback covers on line for a non-geek like me -- and also the chance to make a (very) few bucks. Many other crime bloggers do the same.

But the point of this post is to say very loudly that if you're anywhere near an independent book store, PLEASE buy your books there -- no matter where you first see, hear or read about them. You'll feel much better about it when you do.

An Italian Kiss

2006-12-14T18:26:00.001-08:00

THE GOODBYE KISS, by Massimo Carlotto; translated by Lawrence Venuti

So many mysteries as strong and black as good espresso are coming out of Italy these days that a bookwatcher might just detect a trend. In the last couple of months, there have been such dark delights as The Smell of the Night, by Andrea Camilleri, and Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio. Like Carofiglio, an anti-Mafia judge, Massimo Carlotto has a history as riveting as any novel. In 1976, the leftwing militant was charged with murder; he fled to Paris and then Mexico before being returned to Italy, where after seven years in prison a presidential pardon set him free in 1993, and he soon became one of Italy’s most popular writers.

The Goodbye Kiss, Carlotto’s first book to be published in America (by the increasingly impressive new Europa Editions), has a lead character – by no stretch of the imagination a hero – named Giorgio Pellegrini. Still wanted for political crimes in Italy, he is hiding out in Central America, his idealism burned away. The betrayal of his revolutionary colleagues by one of their leaders makes Giorgio decide to head home to Italy, to see if anything is left of his once lofty plans and hopes.

There isn’t much light in Carlotto’s piazza, and readers expecting soothing travelogues might opt for another writer. But those with a taste – even a need – for an occasional inky cup of bitter honesty should lap this up.

One of My Best of 2006 Books...

2006-12-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

...is due out any minute in paperback:

Gentlemen & Players is one of those rare books that grips and holds you like an elaborate conjuring trick. It’s only after you’ve stopped gasping – after the last page has been turned and marveled at – that you begin to ask questions. What did I miss? Were there any hints I should have noticed, any mistakes the author or her editors should have caught?

Joanne Harris, who has written everything from sensuous cookbooks to best-selling novels like Chocolat, immerses us so quickly in her frightening story of a child driven to murder by hatred for a school that her new book is both socially important and vastly entertaining.

At its center is a palace of privilege – St. Oswald’s, a British school for the sons of the wealthy and powerful, an escape from the real world they will soon have to face. “St. Oswald’s was another world,” says the troubled child who tells half the story. “Here I knew there would be no graffiti, no litter, no vandalism – not as much as a broken window…I felt a sudden inarticulate conviction that this was where I truly belonged…”

The other half of the story is narrated by a classics master named Roy Straitley, who has been at St. Oswald’s for 33 years and knows the best and worst of what the school really is. He at first seems like an unlikely and unworthy opponent, chosen at random -- but turning those ideas upside down is another one of Harris’ amazing tricks. The two lead characters play out their elaborate chess match involving unrequited love, revenge and violent death.

Have a Very Noir Xmas

2006-12-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

Greg Shepard of Stark House, along with a small and equally daring group of other paperback houses (Hard Case Crime, Felony & Mayhem, Crippen & Landru, Millipede, to name a few) are dedicated to restoring to print the best mysteries and thrillers of the past.

Shepard’s latest effort, as fascinating and exciting as it is laudable, is a double dose of Gil Brewer – a tremendously gifted, deeply troubled man who was one of the stars of the Gold Medal stable of paperbacks which so many of us used to spend our quarters on in the 50s and 60s.

Anthony Boucher, the man who invented serious mystery reviewing, applauded A Taste of Sin in the New York Times for its “vigorous pace… and its wild, incredible, yet somehow compelling hyperbole in both crime and sex.” Like a James M. Cain on booze and speed, it tells the story of a woman who wants her lover to murder her bank manager husband and steal the bank’s money.

Wild to Possess is a more complicated story, but equally gripping – about a man who first discovers his wife and her lover murdered and then stumbles on the actual killers and decides to cut himself in on their bloody business.

“They were selling pulp fiction, yes, but it was a different, upscale kind of pulp,” says the wonderfully dedicated and resourceful Bill Pronzini of Gold Medal and its cohorts in his afterward – which, together with a 1990 memoir by Brewer’s wife provides details of the writer’s life which would make a stone weep. And if the cover has a familiar look, especially to Hard Case addicts, it’s a photo from the collection of ace paperback illustrator Robert Maguire, who did the original Wild to Possess cover.

McKinty's Gold

2006-12-07T18:53:00.000-08:00

If I were a student at the Denver high school where Adrian McKinty teaches English and Civics, I’d try very hard to get into both of his classes. Not many people can combine obvious mastery of the two subjects – plus a pungently jaundiced dash of political history -- into one ironic paragraph as he does in his new paperback, The Dead Yard.

“The thing you had to remember when dealing with these people was that the Britain of the Empire was long gone,” says Irish roughneck Michael Forsythe as he’s about to be blackmailed into working for MI6. “The Brits may have conquered India and won two world wars but they also had a complacency and an incompetence that had gotten many people killed. Jeremy and Samantha [his MI6 handlers] were the descendants of the people who had been responsible for the disasters of the Somme and Gallipoli in World War One. The people who had tried to walk to the South Pole instead of taking dogs, who had built the unsinkable Titanic, who had lost America, surrendered at Singapore, starved Ireland, appeased Hitler...”

We first met Forsythe when the Belfast mercenary was infiltrating a bloody South Boston Irish mob for the FBI, in Dead I Well May Be. Now the resourceful, amoral, surprisingly charming young man of 26 who lost a foot and a few measures of skin and blood in a Mexican drug adventure, has slipped out of the Witness Protection Program to watch the Irish and British soccer teams (and their fans) do battle in Spain. Violence erupts in the streets; Forsythe winds up facing not only a long prison sentence as a warning against football hooliganism but also possible extradition to Mexico where his other foot might not be the only thing he loses. So when the sexy Samantha and her uppercrust underling Jeremy offer him a get-out-of-jail card and a free trip back to Boston, he agrees in spite of his anti-Brit instincts.

What Michael is supposed to do is charm his way into a small terrorist cell called the Sons of Cuchulainn, whose loose cannon status threatens an elaborate cease fire agreement with the IRA. Instead, Michael falls in love with the touching and troubled Kit, the 19-year-old daughter of the cell’s lunatic leader, and has to go up against his even more dangerous deputy, known as Touched McCuigan. There are enough bullets to stock an armory, but with McKinty it’s the words which leave the deepest impressions.

Not Prone to Kill

2006-11-28T13:13:00.001-08:00

THE PRONE GUNMAN, by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by James Brook.

Manchette, the revered French author of many thrillers for the famous Serie Noire publishing title, retired from writing in 1981 (he died at 53 in 1995). This was his last book, and it does a fine job of summing up a genre and his work in it. If the plot sounds familiar (a paid assassin wants to retire, but is tricked into taking on one last job, which goes absurdly and violently awry), it's probably because so many writers and film-makers have used -- and often abused -- it since.

Murder by the Numbers

2006-11-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

THE OXFORD MURDERS, by Guillermo Martinez, translated by Sonia Soto.

The best crime fiction, as I've said often, lights up landscapes both exterior and interior. Martinez is a novelist from Argentina who combines – in person and in his latest work – a fascination with mathematics and murder. Is the violent death of an old woman in the British university city of Oxford connected in some way with a highly-lauded study of a particular form of discipline called logical series? And is it the first of a series of death which might just be putting the study to its ultimate test?

Here Comes a Falling Angel...

2006-11-18T16:31:00.000-08:00

Millipede Press, a new publishing house in Lakewood, Colorado, specializes in crime fiction books that are beautifully designed and shrewdly introduced -- carefully chosen specimens of classics that are often not easily available elsewhere. Two recent additions to Millipede’s list prove how important the house has quickly become:

I first fell under the spell of Fredric Brown when science fiction was my mental drug of choice: his stories in Weird Tales and Astounding were worth paying the cover price for on their own. Then, as crime fiction became my favorite genre, Brown’s “cynical idealism” (as Bill Pronzini says in his new introduction) made me a devout admirer of this aspect of his work. Here Comes A Candle tells of the inner battle fought by a haunted young man who is torn between making a living as a mobster and doing something worthwhile. It uses several stylistic devices to tell its story, and you can see its influences on crime writers in the 50 years since it was originally published.

“This is the literary love child of Raymond Chandler and Stephen King,” says film director Ridley Scott in his succinct foreword to the other new Millipede tribute out this month, and King himself makes a graceful appearance in a 1978 letter to the original hardcover publisher of Falling Angel. A new afterword by author William Hjortsberg, telling how his novel has moved into the land of legend since its early cult days, plus a bonus story and an introduction by his friend and fellow Montana literary giant James Crumley make this book about a private detective named Harry Angel who is literally in over his head a holiday gift for your favorite crime fiction lover.

Any Questions?

2006-11-15T14:30:00.001-08:00

"In my career, I reckon I have read about 3,000 crime novels; some of them all the way through. Yet I am always being accosted by crime writers who announce themselves and then say 'You haven't reviewed my new book' to which I usually answer 'There's no need to thank me.' " -- MIKE RIPLEY

A Hard Life on the Oklahoma Frontier

2006-11-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

As the mother of nine, Alafair Tucker's hard but basically peaceful life on a farm on the Oklahoma frontier in 1912 is changed forever when one of her daughters - 17-year-old Phoebe -- is involved in the murder of an obnoxious neighbor. Phoebe is the girlfriend of the chief suspect, the dead man's son, and might even have been his accomplice in the crime.

Under Donis Casey's gifted hand and shrewd historic eye, Alafair adds solving a mystery to her busy schedule. It all could very easily have gone soft and cute - especially the many long visits to the Tuckers' fellow farmers. But by avoiding all the built-in traps, Casey has produced a sharp and suspenseful first novel.

Music to Our Eyes

2006-11-14T16:09:00.001-08:00

Johnny Temple, publisher of the always lively paperback house Akashic Books, is a rock musician himself, and he combines his interests in music and mysteries in this first novel from Claypool -- bassist and lead singer for the band Primus.

South of the Pumphouse started life as a screenplay, which adds a strong visual element to the sharply evocative book -- the story of two brothers on a fishing trip riddled with drugs and danger. And the only connection to Tom Wolfe's legendary Pumphouse Gang is that both pieces take place on or near the Pacific...

It's Murda Out There

2006-11-12T16:29:00.000-08:00

MURDALAND, edited by Michael Langnas, asks the question,"Is a new magazine featuring short stories what the crime fiction world needs right now?" (Can you say Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen?) Luckily, the folks behind this new semi-annual (they hope to publish at least quarterly soon) aren’t put off by the competition.

The format is a handsome paperback, and editor Langnas has convinced such top writers as Daniel Woodrell, Ken Bruen and Anthony Neil Smith to contribute to his first issue. There’s also a classic reprint from David Goodis, and a remarkable article called “My War” by the poet and ex-Sandinista rebel Paolo Madrigal.

The Coldest Stone

2006-11-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

When Stone City was first published, in 1990, the reviews were as glowing as the possibilities of thriller stardom for author Mitchell Smith. His career has taken several different directions since then, but this remarkable look inside a state prison so brutal that it almost makes a good argument for the death penalty is an absolute original – now being brought back from out-of-print perdition to amaze a new generation.

Omaha Noir

2006-11-12T15:53:00.000-08:00

The last time I waxed poetic (now it’s Poetic’s turn to wax me, as Groucho might say) about Doolittle, for Rain Dogs, I suggested that he was too good to be a writer of original paperbacks all his life. Belay that: he is, as Laura Lippman says in a jacket blurb for his latest, “a cult writer for the masses” – a title which fits several other writers (Dickens, Doyle, Dostoyevsky) whose last names also happen to begin with D. The Cleanup is about a terminally hopeless Omaha cop who winds up as a night security guard at a supermarket, and it could well be the best thrills-for-the-buck reading bargain of the year.

Rules of Laughter

2006-11-11T13:27:00.001-08:00

Humor is hard, especially in crime fiction. J.A. Konrath pulls it off regularly, as does Joe Lansdale. But some of the former masters still mentioned in blurbs (Leonard, Hiaasen & Co.) have faltered of late, so it’s a pleasure to welcome newcomer Troy Cook to the Comedy Crime Club.

47 Rules of Highly Effective Bank Robbers starts off with a jolly premise – a 22-year-old woman raised by her father to take over the family heist business and be a veritable Joan Dillinger – then ups the ante and moves on to truly inventive excitement and hilarity.

The trouble is that Tara Evans’ daddy, Wyatt, is going nuts – jeopardizing both of their futures by breaking all the survival lessons he has passed on with such care. Tara’s new boyfriend, Max, a sheriff's son who definitely has grander plans than a career in law enforcement, also adds an element of comic danger.

Cook, a former filmmaker with a great respect for words, knows just how many to use to bring to life a sunburned Arizona landscape and the slightly screwy, often touching, almost constantly amusing people who live in it.

Wheelmen Don't Eat Quiche

2006-11-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

How much physical punishment are the lead characters in a thriller supposed to absorb before they collapse, die, or have to spend months in hospital getting skin grafts and reconstructive surgery?

In Duane Swierczynski’s first novel, just out in paperback to coincide with his latest hardcover, The Blonde, Patrick Lennon – an Irish criminal currently working in Philadelphia -- is so smashed up, punctured, shot and mutilated that at every page turn we expect to find him lying in a whimpering heap on the ground. But minutes later, after a deep breath or two and a check of his pulse through his carotid artery, he’s back for more punishment.

Lennon doesn’t curse or scream out loud during any of this, either -- because he lost his voice to a bullet during an armed robbery some years before. An expert driver, Lennon is part of a three-man team intent on removing from a bank the $650,000 in cash which the Mayor plans to use as a political gesture to revitalize a rundown neighborhood. The robbery itself goes down smoothly, and we learn how to get a couple of crooks out of a bank’s access-control unit which supposedly locks them in the revolving door but can be deactivated by smashing an Acura head on into it – a fact probably learned by the author when he did the research for his non-fiction book, This Here’s A Stick-Up.

But (wouldn’t you know it?) somebody else also has their eyes on the loot and knows Lennon’s getaway plan: he and his two colleagues are treated extremely badly, smashed into by a van, stuffed naked down some drainage pipes, things like that. Only Lennon survives, and expends his rudely-treated body and mind on finding out who.

Swierczynski has an uncommon gift for the banal lunacy of criminal dialogue, a delightfully devious eye for character, and a surprisingly well-developed narrative engine for a beginner. I hope he also has a good health insurance plan which he can share with his hero...

Religion Can Kill You

2006-11-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

The veteran mystery writer and reviewer Jon L. Breen has taken one of today's hottest-button issues from the editorial pages and turned it into a crackling good novel which invokes all sorts of spirits -- from G.K. Chesterton and the later Dorothy L. Sayers to more contemporary writers such as Robert Irvine and Julia Spencer-Fleming.

What happens when Norm Carpenter, one of the two partners in a successful Orange County private detective firm (men apparently as compatible as bread and butter) suddenly announces that he's quitting because he has become a born-again Christian? His partner, Al Hasp, thinks that by persuading Norm to take on one final case, involving a popular televangelist anonymously accused of fraud and other criminal behavior, Carpenter will realize the error of his decision. But things quickly turn very nasty, and it would be a sin to reveal any of Breen's devilish plotting...

Lone Wolf in Bear's Clothing

2006-10-31T20:54:00.000-08:00

Another strong and zesty Canadian thriller writer heard from. Linwood Barclay, a columnist for the Toronto Star, wrote two justifiably well-received books, Bad Move and Bad Guys, about a journalist named Zack Walker who just can’t stay out of trouble or danger. His latest roars along a similar, satisfying track, as Zack – worried about what might be a murder by bear in the fishing camp his father owns – stirs up a much more dangerous kind of evil.

Rapping About Paper

2006-10-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

If the idea of beautiful, handmade paper or a painting by the famed 19th Century British landscape artist J.M.W. Turner gets you as excited as reading a sharp and sad mystery, this new novel – her first -- from a British journalist who specializes in covering wars should satisfy all your cravings.

Charlotte "Charlie" Hudson, recovering slowly from the physical and psychological wounds of her coverage of the war in Kosovo, becomes fascinated with handmade art papers – especially the ones used by Turner. This leads to a romantic connection with another British painter – whose daughter’s suicide is beginning to look much more like murder. Holden manages to be as interesting about the history of paper as she is about modern crime.

Who Was That Lady?

2006-10-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

Death In the Garden (see my review posted 6/01) had a shining moment among reviewers and book-buyers last year when its ambitious new publisher proved that being the wife of the British ambassador to the U.S. (Elizabeth Ironside is the pen name of Lady Catherine Manning) couldn’t disguise a major talent. Now the folks at Felony & Mayhem hope to reinforce that by reprinting another wonderfully readable Ironside story, also set in a bucolic English village, but this time with tragic roots in the Russian Revolution.

Have A Very Noir Halloween

2006-10-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

More than 20 years ago, Pete Hamill interrupted his rise through the higher ranks of journalism and tried his hand at crime fiction with three books about a reporter named Sam Briscoe. The Guns of Heaven is about terrorism, of the IRA variety, including vivid and credible threats to New York – a city Hamill knows as well as a child knows its parents.

David Dodge, the other half of Hard Case Crime’s shapely noir package this month, is best known as the author of To Catch A Thief – although you might be forgiven for thinking “Cary Grant” or “Grace Kelly” or even “Alfred Hitchcock” when that title flashes. Dodge died in 1974; the typescript of his last book sat in an archive until recently, when a librarian discovered it and sent it on its way to Hard Case – who by now have performed enough resurrections to qualify as a religion.

As Goodis It Gets

2006-10-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

David Goodis lived hard and died when he was just 50. But his life’s work (17 novels, many stories, radio scripts and film treatments) qualify him as the man who invented noir – although fans of Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich might disagree. Black Friday is a fine place to start if you've never read a Goodis novel: bitter, dark, but with a thin redeeming light at the end of the cold tunnel.

Waites and Measures

2006-10-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

While we wait for Martyn Waites' Mary's Prayer to appear next month, here's what I said about his gripping The Mercy Seat, just out in paperback.

Waites, one of Britain’s hottest young crime novelists, writes about the rusted industrial city of Newcastle. The Mercy Seat, his first book to be published in America, is a welcome treat: a story with familiar ingredients which also manages to cover some fresh ground.

Journalist Joe Donovan’s life disintegrated two years ago, when his six-year-old son disappeared in a crowded department store: his marriage and his high profile career were victims of the still unsolved disappearance. When Donovan’s name turns up on an audio disc for which a man died, his former newspaper sends its top editor and a shrewd lawyer somewhat short on scruples to help them find out why another reporter has vanished – promising in return to help Joe in his obsessive search for his son.

Bloody violence explodes on virtually every page (the mercy seat of the title is an especially vicious instrument of torture) and there are some really scary villains. But the feeling which readers are likely to take away from the book is the unstoppable power of decent feelings which Donovan manages to retain – especially for a lost street boy named Jamal.

The Writer Who Couldn't Read

2006-10-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

What do you do if you’re a successful, highly-lauded mystery writer in his late 60s who suffers a stroke that causes a rare condition called alexia sine agraphia, which affects the memory and the ability to read but not the ability to write? If you’re Howard Engel, you turn the experience into one of your wry and solid books about Toronto private detective Benny Cooperman.

Benny’s latest investigation begins as he wakes from a recurring dream about a train wreck to find himself in a Toronto hospital. Cooperman has been in a coma for eight weeks after being found in a trash bin near the University of Toronto with a near-fatal blow to the head — next to the body of a young female professor, dead of a similar injury. Using a small notebook in which he meticulously jots down thoughts and details as they occur to him, Benny and his friend Anna Abraham reconstruct his most recent case. An anonymously-sent basket of flowers triggers the name Rose or Rosie, and other clues suddenly pop into his head apparently at random to finally reveal an academic conspiracy.

Dr. Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and no mean writer himself, contributes an afterword that says it all: “Is the present volume up to the standard of the previous Benny Cooperman novels? My answer, as a reader of detective stories, is ‘Yes, absolutely.’ Indeed, I think this may be the most remarkable of them all, because of its special personal dimension… Memory Book has a unique depth and authenticity, because Howard Engel has known and traversed all that he writes about…’”

Renko and the New Russia

2006-10-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a worthy paperback we missed when it came out earlier this year:

From his first appearance, in 1981's Gorky Park, through his last, Havana Bay in 1999, Arkady Renko has been the perfect dark mirror of his time and place in history -- the replacement of Cold War Russia by what passes now for a more democratic and capitalist society.

Martin Cruz Smith's police detective has certainly paid the price for his obstinate loyalties to truth and justice during those years, suffering physical and psychological trauma in a withering variety of settings. He is as out of place in the so-called New Russia as "an ape encountering fire," as he thinks when he sees a sleek new computer.

"Stop using the phrase 'New Russian' when you refer to a crime," his superior tells him wearily. "We're all New Russians, aren't we?"

"I'm trying," Renko replies, and in his own way he is. When powerful billionaire Pasha Ivanov (a man photographed often with world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, "who, as usual, seemed to suck on a sour tooth"), commits suicide, Renko just wants to do a thorough job of investigating. When he takes the sadly silent and badly damaged 11-year-old boy he has volunteered to provide some entertainment for to a big charity event thrown in the dead man's honor, he is finally taken off the case.

But the dogged Renko follows a clue to Chernobyl--the Ukranian city where a nuclear disaster in 1986 began Old Russia's downfall and frightened the world into some semblance of sanity. Chernobyl is now a radioactive wasteland, and Ivanov's business successor has been found with his throat slit and his face eaten by wolves in a cemetery inside Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion--an area inhabited by a strange band of scientists, soldiers and some dysfunctional citizens who risk their health to live in its abandoned houses and apartments. A reading on Renko's radioactivity detector taken at a small amusement park "shot the needle off the dial."

As he did in his second Renko outing, Polar Star, in which the detective is punished with one of the world's nastiest and most grueling jobs aboard a fish-processing ship, Smith manages to make the horrors of Chernobyl almost a redeeming experience--for Renko and for us. As Renko searches for the truth about the two murders he's investigating, he seems to single-handedly be trying to tell us that Russia and its people, New or Old, are worth the effort.

Atkinson Is On the Case

2006-10-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

While we wait for Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn (which I'll be reviewing 10/22 in my Chicago Tribune column), her last book, Case Histories, is available in paperback. Here's what I wrote when it first came out:

I'm tempted to call Kate Atkinson's wonderful new mystery a detective story for people who don't like detective stories -- but that would be both pointless (Why would they be reading this column?) and pandering. So I'll just say that Atkinson, who won the British Whitbread Award in 1995 for her memorable novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is having lots of fun bending genre rules until they seem about to shatter.

Who else could create a central character as dark and funny as Cambridge-based private detective Jackson Brodie, lover of country music (especially as sung by women), divorced and desperately missing his daughter, an investigator determined to give his clients as much closure as possible?

Brodie is the link between the three case histories chronicled by Atkinson with much wit and heart: two sisters still haunted by the disappearance of a third 34 years ago, a guilt-ridden father whose daughter was murdered in his own law office, a woman eager to escape the drudgeries of home and baby who suddenly and horribly gets what she wants. It's quite an amazing performance, whatever bookshelf you put it on.

Millar's Crossing

2006-10-11T17:43:00.000-07:00

Having already done stalwart service in the cause of one-half of the Millar mystery writing household (his biography of Ross Macdonald, born Kenneth Millar, still stands as an edifice in the landscape of literary biography), Wall Street Journal critic Tom Nolan continues the splendid defense he began in The Couple Next Door of Margaret Millar as an equally important writer --

by picking two of Millar’s best books of the 1950s, long out of print and now part of Stark House’s ambitious genre restoration. She “could seem as hard-boiled as any ‘50s writer,” Nolan says in his shrewdly admiring introduction, “and as lyrical as a poet… Juxtaposed, the two novels represent the sort of reversals of theme typical of Margaret Millar’s fiction.”

A Deserved Prize For Ed Wright

2006-10-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

RED SKY LAMENT, which I reviewed in May, has just won the Ellis Peters Award for Best Historical Mystery from the British Crime Writers. Here's my original review of Ed Wright's three books. (The line about RED SKY LAMENT not having an American publisher will probably change as you read this...)

Should crime fiction – written mostly for profit and entertainment – be expected to compete in the artistic arena, to strive for that abused but occasionally useful term “literature?” Probably not: the field is too skewed to make such comparisons fair. But every now and then a writer of thrillers or mysteries emerges who deserves to be compared with the best. The list of names is short, each tied to a territory or period: Charles McCarry, who has played the Cold War like a lute; Olen Steinhauer, who makes the Communist side of that war understandable; Sara Paretsky, who holds the rough, greedy heart of Chicago in her hand. You probably have one or two candidates.

To that list, I’d like to add the name of Edward Wright. Like previous novelists who wrestled with Los Angeles before and after WWII (John Fante of Ask the Dust and Horace McCoy of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? come to mind), Wright knows how to capture the smell of something burning in the hot fields and streets of that 1940s city and turn it into the kind of art that both stirs up old memories and pierces the soul.

His books are about John Ray Horn, a former cowboy star of B-movies who played a character called Sierra Lane. The son of an unforgiving Arkansas preacher, Horn had his few moments in the film sun, before a very bad war in Italy and then a violent attack on the son of his studio owner -- which sent him to prison for two years and ended both his career and his marriage to the wrong woman. Now he lives in a shabby mountain cabin which he keeps up in lieu of rent, and earns food money collecting debts for Joseph Mad Crow, his former co-star who has started a gambling casino.

Wright’s first book about Horn, CLEA'S MOON, won a British award on the basis of a sample chapter and an outline. His second was published by Putnam here as WHILE I DISAPPEAR and as a paperback called “The Silver Face” in England. And RED SKY LAMENT--his best and most important political and social statement – appears to have no American publisher as yet.

Red Sky Lament starts off with a friend needing Horn’s help: Maggie O’Dare, the woman he should have married – a top stunt rider whose horse ranch high above the San Fernando Valley is a place of great comfort. Maggie wants John Ray to help a once-famous screenwriter, Owen Bruder, now unemployable and on his way to prison as an “Unfriendly Witness” before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee which is in full swing. Horn, with no particular sympathy for Communists, takes on the job of finding out who lied about the cold and unlikable Bruder to HUAC’s investigators because Maggie gives him convincing reasons.

What all of Wright’s books do is what the best fiction does: recreate a vanished world (even if the time passed is days rather than decades), then populate it with people we’d know anywhere.

Crime For Art's Sake

2006-10-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

Janet Gleeson first came to the book world's attention with The Arcanum, a fascinating true story about the alchemists who recreated the formula for porcelain. Then came a series of historical mysteries set in the English art world, including a lovely book -- The Grenadillo Box -- about the famous (and corrupt) furniture maker Chippendale.

Gleeson's latest, The Thief Taker, does the same kind of high-level hatchet job on the silversmith's art. Set in 18th Century London, a period which the much-missed Bruce Alexander refined and invigorated, the new book tells about a family of silversmiths whose fame and riches are in a sad decline. When a valuable wine cooler is stolen and an apprentice murdered, the family cook -- Agnes Meadowes, worth a series of her own -- does most of the investigating and comes up with some extremely tarnished items.

Creeping, Brit Style

2006-10-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

Like the people in David Morrell's Creepers, reviewed below, the lead character in Spectres in the Smoke by Tony Broadbent has a fascination with exploring other people's buildings.

We first met the British cat burglar known only as Jethro in The Smoke, set in 1947, when Jethro’s occupation – breaking into London houses that survived the German bombings and removing objects of value – led to him being recruited by the MI5 intelligence mob, for whom he liberated some sensitive documents from the Soviet Embassy. A year later, with the city still largely pockmarked with ruined buildings – described in detail as heartbreakingly vivid as in John Lawton’s memorable mystery Black Out – Jethro is arm-twisted into stealing records from a Fascist organization intent on sinking the ruling Labour government.

Aside from his tribute to a blitzed capital, Broadbent also honors – with understated admiration and moments of high-quality local humor – the spirit of London’s inhabitants. Cary Grant could have played Jethro perfectly.

Horses and Courses

2006-10-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

Horses play a large part in the life of Ruby Murphy, the highly addictive amateur crime solver of Estep’s shrewd series about her – a subtle mix of excitement and eccentricity. Murphy works for a museum in Coney Island, mostly to pay for the feed and stabling of Jack Valentine, her best equine friend, and this time she risks losing her job, her lover, even her life when a simple search for her therapist’s husband turns into a photo finish.

Estep is also the co-editor, with Jason Starr, of BLOODLINES, a high-stepping collection of stories and articles in which 20 writers (Starr, Estep, Ken Bruen and that fine crime novelist Scott Phillips) explore the deep love between humans and racehorses.

Jeepers

2006-10-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how much time David Morrell has actually spent sneaking around in abandoned luxury hotels in Asbury Park, New Jersey, but when he describes a floor collapsing under a young teacher named Vinnie (“The sound was like wet cardboard being torn. As Vinnie fell, his arms shot up, his flashlight flipping away. He screamed. Something crashed below him”) he certainly made a believer out of me.

Morrell is the author of dozens of thrillers, including the one which is probably Sylvester Stallone’s favorite – First Blood, wherein he introduced a rogue soldier called John Rambo. He has written expertly about war, organized crime and other staples of the genre. But Creepers is something unusual: a serious, even literary urban nightmare about a decaying civilization and some adventurers who deliberately make it a part of their lives.

Creepers – some of the more socially conscious prefer to call themselves “urban explorers” – are people who pay tribute to the architectural artifacts of the recent past by taking extreme risks to search through buildings and other structures which have been closed off and abandoned. Walt Whitman was one of them: he slogged through an ancient New York subway tunnel when he was a newspaper reporter. As he says in an author’s note, Morrell began his own creeping career as an unhappy boy in Kitchener, Ontario, going through apartment buildings abandoned but not worth being leveled by builders.

The five people who start their exploration of the Paragon Hotel in Asbury Park – a popular resort city in the early 1900s which turned into a documentary for social, racial and economic upheaval in the 1960s – include a 60-year-old college professor risking tenure and his fragile health; a married couple who are his students; the floor-crashing Vinnie; and Frank Balenger, supposedly a magazine writer doing a story but really (as it soon becomes obvious) a troubled ex-soldier carrying a lot of emotional baggage and a loaded pistol.

The Paragon itself is a major character, built in 1901 by a hemophiliac millionaire with a twisted psyche who included secret passages, hidden vaults and exotic touches like gold-plated eating utensils. Several violent deaths and mysterious disappearances have taken place within its walls, and now that it’s finally about to be torn down the urban explorers want to spend a night digging through its darkest secrets.

Morrell knows how to build suspense to an almost unbearable level without slipping over the edge into foolishness. Pursued by mutant wildlife, plants gone mad and some other very real super-creepers with night vision goggles and a thirst for blood and gold, his crew convinces us early on of their high intentions – to show their respect for an increasingly disposable culture.

Who You Callin' Canadian?

2006-09-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

Canadian crime fiction writers don’t get enough respect – or so they say, with some justification. But Ottowa’s own Mofina, who has won several of his country’s top awards, might just be the next Peter Robinson-type international breakout. His latest book about reporter Jason Wade turns all the usually suspect adjectives like “tough,” “tense” and “taut” into real emotions, as Wade digs into the kidnapping of a baby boy which quickly takes on some exceedingly scary overtones.

Thanks for the Nehr Nod

2006-09-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

Many gratitudes to the American Crime Writers for this year's Ellen Nehr Award, announced at the Bouchercon opening ceremonies. Here I am with my lovely prize (shirt ain't too shabby, either)...

Limon Aids His Cause

2006-09-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

Martin Limon's books about two very different but equally fascinating military cops working in Korea in the 1970s haven't gotten nearly the attention they deserve, but Soho's new paperback version of his latest might help to change that.

The Door to Bitterness starts with Sgt. Sueno losing his badge, gun and some blood in an attack in a Seoul alley. Limon uses the 10 years he spent in the Army in Korea before retiring to become a writer to recreate a pungent setting that reeks of realism, as Sueno and his partner search for the stolen items -- which have been used in a casino robbery -- down a dark and nasty path through local and international politics.

Waiting for Scott Phillips

2006-09-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

Scott Phillips' first two novels set in 20th Century Kansas -- The Ice Harvest and The Walkaway -- were bleakly comic affairs connected by a brilliant link of shared history.

There's a similar link in his third book, Cottonwood, but you have to read the epilogue to fully appreciate it. Meanwhile, while we all wait for a new book from this most gifted author, we can enjoy the pleasures of Phillips' unique and pungent prose, as well as his skill and daring at moving us through a well-covered narrative landscape.

The story begins in 1872, in the frozen mud of Cottonwood, Kan., a profoundly unpromising place where ambitious Bill Ogden, 27, has largely abandoned his failing farm to run the local saloon and try to work at what he really likes, photography. Left to their own devices on the farm, Ogden's young son treats him with a decided lack of interest and his wife has taken to sleeping with the hired hands. This doesn't seem to bother Ogden, who has his own sexual needs taken care of by various women in town.

"One thing I particularly valued about the prairie was the reticence of most of those living there, and the lack of interest, or overt interest anyway, in one's neighbor's origins," Ogden says, and you can sense in his words the classic loner of Western literature and a man unsure of his abilities to control himself within the bounds of society.

Temptation arrives in Cottonwood in the form of slick Chicago operator Marc Leval, who announces convincing plans to turn the town into a railroad hub and promises vast prosperity. Ogden is more taken by the promise of Leval's lovely wife, Maggie, but he is shrewd enough to also sign on as Leval's partner in a new saloon. Then the book's tone deepens and darkens, as a growing number of traveling salesmen and itinerant cowboys begin to disappear. Their deaths are traced to a family of predators known as The Bloody Benders (based on an actual criminal clan), and it's during the hunt for these killers that Ogden and Leval have a serious falling out.

From this point, Ogden--accompanied by Maggie Leval--begins an odyssey that reads like a modern, deconstructionist version of a story by Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce and moves from Cottonwood to San Francisco and back again, covering a sizable slice of American history. We can only imagine what he'll do next.

Fermi in Chicago

2006-09-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

Robert Goldsborough’s award-winning first mystery about Chicago Tribune police reporter Steve (“Snap”) Malek, Three Strikes You’re Dead, was set in 1938 – the year a sore-armed Dizzy Dean took the Cubs to the World Series. His second moves up four years and over to the University of Chicago, where Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi is hard at work on a secret weapon. The author’s own secret weapon is the way he stirs in just enough period detail to make you believe it really happened this way.

Death In Shorts

2006-09-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

This might not be the new Golden Age Of Crime Fiction which some observers have called it, but it certainly does begin to look like a glittering era for the mystery short story. The latest evidence comes from the Mystery Writers of America, where editor Harlan Coben has honchoed an anthology of writers both currently hot (Lee Child, Laura Lippman, R. L. Stine, Brendan DuBois, Ridley Pearson) to others just about ready to come to the boil.

Worth turning to first is “The Home Front,” by Charles Ardai – whose work as editor of Hard Case Crime rubs off here in terms of dark energy and period perfection in a story about a federal agent who accidentally kills a World War II black market figure.

Best of Paperback Mysteries/Thrillers

2006-09-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

See and bookmark our shorter version, BEST OF PAPERBACK MYSTERIES

'Boy Detective' Creator Doesn't Fail

2006-09-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed that paperbacks are getting more gorgeous as physical objects, as well as more imaginative than most hardcovers? Pirate Signal International, who designed the package for Meno’s visually and verbally delectable new book, deserves some special award for setting the tone from the first touch. (How many books include a “Make Your Own Boy Detective Decoder Ring!” kit on extra-heavy backcover stock?)

Meno mixes metaphors with audacity and daffy brilliance. Never once does he slide into parody, satire or trendy fake homage as he tells the story of Billy Argo, who as a youngster growing up in Gotham, New Jersey discovers that he is a born detective. His triumphs – aided by his sister Caroline and an overweight chum called Fenton – make the local newspapers, with headlines that might come straight from the Hardy Boys (“Wonder Boy Detective Unmasks Tarot Card Fake Without Any Kind Of Assistance At All”).

But Caroline eventually slides into depression and kills herself, and the Boy Detective appears to be off the case for good. Billy enters a mental asylum, finally coming out at age 30 to take a menial job. But it turns out that the Boy Detective was not really dead, only sleeping until the world caught up with him. This is one to leave around for young adults, who might even stop blogging or video game-playing to give it a try.

The King of the Paperbacks

2006-09-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

Stark House Press, the enterprising paperback house in Eureka, CA, seems intent on restoring lost crime classics to the ranks of print – a worthy calling of interest to fans as well as fanatics. But Stark’s covers (perhaps for budgetary reasons) are often the least interesting part of the package. So for this new release -- A NIGHT FOR SCREAMING/ANY WOMAN HE WANTED -- of two books by probably the most prolific paperback writer ever, Harry Whittington, who wrote 170 paperback originals under 20 different names, I’ve taken advantage of national treasure Bill Crider’s amazing collection of original paperback covers to show you what these two looked like when they first came out in the early 1960s.

“After the sale of his first softcover original, Slay Ride for a Lady… in 1950,” Crider writes in one of the Stark edition’s fascinating extras, Whittington “wrote and sold 25 paperback originals in the next three years.” Tell that to your friends who spend several years on one novel…

The Tang of Cinnamon

2006-09-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

Even when his plotting totters into the twilight zone, as it does in the tenth book in his series about Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley has such a firm command over the mind and body of his lead character that he quickly outstrips the bounds of fiction and becomes a man we would recognize in a crowd.

“I had changed the sign on my office door from EASY RAWLINS – RESEARCH AND DELIVERY to simply INVESTIGATIONS,” Easy says. “I made the switch after the Los Angeles Police Department had granted me a private detective’s license for my part in keeping the Watts riots from flaring up again by squelching the ugly rumor that a white man had murdered a black woman in the dark heart of our boiler-pot city.”

That all happened in Little Scarlet, the last and arguably the best Rawlins book because of its overwhelming sense of the racial and social history of Los Angeles. Cinnamon Kiss is bounded by other kinds of 60s history: Vietnam and the hippy explosion, particularly in San Francisco.

Thanks to a fellow private detective, a white man with a black wife, Easy is hired on a Chandleresque task to find some missing bearer bonds supposedly stolen by a lawyer/activist named Axel Bowers. “Bowers had a colored servant named Philomena Cargill, generally known as Cinnamon – because of the hue of her skin, I’m told,” says Rawlins’ new employer – which is why he thinks a black detective will have more success finding her.

Everything about the investigation raises Easy’s blood pressure, especially when he finds Bowers’ body stuffed in a trunk. But it’s either this job or helping his friend Raymond “Mouse” Alexander pull an armed robbery. His real estate dreams – detailed so lovingly in earlier books in the series – have been turned to ashes by the Watts riots: “I owned two apartment buildings and a small house with a big yard, all in and around Watts. But after the riots property values in the black neighborhoods plummeted. I owed more on the mortgages than the places were worth.”

Rawlins finds Cinnamon hiding out in Los Angeles, and there’s an immediate attraction. “When Cinnamon smiled at me I understood the danger she represented,” he says. Easy’s stomach gets almost as large a workout as his other organs -- including this wonderful meal prepared by the wife of Rawlins’ mechanic friend, Primo: “She gave me a large bowl filled with chunks of pork loin simmered in a Pasillo chili sauce. She’d boiled the chilies without removing the seeds so I began to sweat with the first bite. There was cumin and oregano in the sauce and pieces of avocado too. On the side I had three homemade wheat flour tortillas and a large glass of sweetened lemon juice.”

All these elements, rendered in Mosley’s explosively distilled prose as powerful as homemade booze, go a long way to making the plot (Nazis and pornography are part of the package) easier to swallow. In the end, we’re left with the knowledge that Easy will be around for a long time, showing us the world we have lived in. As Mouse’s wife EttaMae says, “Easy Rawlins… if you wandered into a mine field you’d make it through whole. You could sleep with a girl named Typhoid an’ wake up with just sniffles…”

What Wine Goes With Poison?

2006-09-04T16:23:00.000-07:00

Linda L. Richards expertly combines mystery, the sadness of life passing, and some very interesting details of two successful careers – that of a celebrity chef and an ethical stockbroker – in her third book about Madeline Carter, a broker based in Los Angeles.

Richards, who is the editor of the pioneering Internet literary journal called January Magazine, has made Carter a complicated but instantly recognizable person – a hard-edged woman who left her easygoing chef husband in New York 10 years ago, when she was 25. When she hears that he has killed himself, she decides to go to his funeral: they parted amicably, after all, and he was an important part of her early life.

But when Maddy learns that he died after taking poison in two very ill-matched dishes (duck a l'orange and beef Shiraz), she is certain that it wasn’t suicide – the man she knew would never have combined those foods. The local police, of course, don’t buy it, so Carter goes off on a dangerous private investigation.

More Steinhauer

2006-08-29T19:22:00.000-07:00

Olen Steinhauer is the writer I mention first when people ask me "Who's new and good?" I raved about his latest,

in my Chicago column and Publishers Weekly,

spoke highly of

on this blog, and thought I'd have to wait until Book 5 in his series for another blast of his subtly ferocious talent. Then I discovered that something called Amazon Shorts (not an underwear store) has two Steinhauer stories for a fantastic price.

Both are sad and frightening slices of the meat which would nourish his novels. In Half-Lives, he writes about a housing project in Bucharest: "Take an American 'fifties-era urban renewal complex on its final legs, where wild mixedbreed dogs sniff through piles of rubble and garbage that lie between the scarred towers; where burned-out Pintos (here: Dacias) sit tireless on pitted gravel courtyards gone feral while smokeblackened children climb over the piles, teasing the dogs with sticks then kicking them in the head. When you look from your window, instead of sky you see the grids of crumbling facades of the other concrete towers, rusty lines of drying clothes, smashed windows, old women staring out at nothing. This is Bloc 5."

Jan Burke Walks the Bloodline

2006-08-27T17:37:00.000-07:00

While we wait for Jan Burke's new Irene Kelly hardcover, Kidnapped, to come out in October, here's what I wrote about
her last one, just out in paperback:

Jan Burke is deeply gifted at plotting and character, but what earns her a special place in my heart is her obvious love and respect for small-market newspapers. The Las Piernas News-Express, where her Irene Kelly has worked since 1978, is no Los Angeles Times -- it's a struggling Southern California paper where the obits take up several pages and are largely the records of quiet local lives.

The News-Express plays an important part in Burke's first book about Kelly since she won the Edgar for Bones in 1999. In 1958, Conn O'Connor is a young reporter with the paper when his mentor, Jack Corrigan, is the victim of a near-fatal beating. Drifting into and out of consciousness, the serious boozer Corrigan tells a bizarre story of witnessing a bloodstained car being buried on a farm in the area.

Nobody but O'Connor believes the story, but 20 years later--when Kelly, as one of her first stories under O'Connor's editorship, covers the groundbreaking ceremony for a shopping center--what should emerge from the ground but a car containing human remains. Despite everyone's best efforts, the trail goes cold again; O'Connor dies, never knowing the truth; Kelly marries homicide Detective Frank Harriman; and the News-Express seems to finally be on its very last legs.

As a tribute and a debt to O'Connor, Kelly decides to thread her way through a desperately tangled series of plots about a wealthy family that went missing just after Corrigan's beating, a man claiming to be the heir to their fortune, and lots of other dangerous and devious characters. The novel's sturdy center, however, is a portrait of a vanishing American icon, the local newspaper, which makes Bloodlines a valuable relic and a journey through our collective memory.

London After Dark

2006-08-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

I raved about Cathi Unsworth’s ability to bring London to life in her first novel, The Not Knowing, and I’ll continue that praise with this collection of carefully-chosen stories by some of the best new names in crime fiction. Like last year’s Chicago Noir, these tales are each set in distinct neighborhoods, from Unsworth’s own entry (“Trouble Is a Lonesome Town”) firmly rooted in King’s Cross, to Dagenham (in Martyn Waites’s exceptional “Love”) as well as others in Soho, Ladbroke Grove, Camden Town and Canary Wharf. With collections from Manhattan, Baltimore and Havana in the works, just how far will Akashic’s Noir net be thrown? When they get to Ventura County, give me a call…

Quarry Redux

2006-08-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what’s more fun – a brand new Quarry novel by Max Allan Collins or another chance for artist Robert McGinnis to create a tastefully erotic cover painting of a young woman in her underwear. Luckily, you can get both in the latest literary madeline (read your Proust, tough guys and dolls) from Hard Case Crime.

The last time we saw the world class hitman known as Quarry, 20 years ago, he had decided to retire from the murder-for-hire racket. Collins – who has ideas the way other writers have coffee – went on to write another series (about detective Nate Heller, who always seem to be on hand when history happens), graphic novels (like Road to Perdition) which became good movies, and was the wordsmith in charge of the Dick Tracy comic strip.

Still, Quarry seems to have been lurking somewhere in Collins' artistic attic. The Last Quarry, which began as a short film script and is now a full-length one, returns to his old ways for a large fee to cancel a lovely young librarian’s account – with exciting and revealing results…

Who You Calling A Geezer?

2006-08-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

DAMN NEAR DEAD
is subtitled An Anthology of Geezer Noir, and it's edited by Duane Swierczynski. “When people think ‘senior citizens’ and ‘mystery fiction,’ certain images come to mind,” writes 34-year-old Swierczynski (who gave us the memorable thriller The Wheelman earlier this year) in his dead-on introduction. “The kindly old amateur sleuth with a ball of yarn in her lap, cat on the sofa and a dead body in the foyer… Truth is, getting old is the most hardboiled thing you can do…”

He and David Thompson, owner of the promising new paperback house called Busted Flush Press (think Travis McGee), have put together a collection of new stories by writers who range from their late 20s (Dave White and Sarah Weinman) through their 60s, all dealing with some aspect of crime and old age. Some are hilarious; many are sad; all are the kind of stuff that makes Miss Marple look like a Girl Scout…

The Force That Through The Green Fuse

2006-08-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

"Amy's closed eyes looked sunken--bruised--and her skin had a soft, bloated texture, as if she had been underwater too long. . . . She hadn't opened her eyes for more than two years now, but with each visit I still hoped her smile or grasp would welcome me."

Trial consultant Calla Gentry's younger sister, Amaryllis, called Amy by everyone, was the victim of a brutal rape in the parking lot of a bar in Tucson when she was 19. What she told police and her sister about her rapist was rambling and incoherent, certainly not enough to point to a suspect: three days later, she tried to commit suicide and failed--but reduced herself to total silence.

Because of that crime, Gentry refuses to take on anything but civil cases--an arrangement that her bitchily successful female boss has so far honored. But now the firm needs to quickly back up the defense in the upcoming trial of a wealthy young man accused of rape and attempted murder. Could Gentry at least start the work, until another employee is available? Gentry, who needs her salary to pay for Amy's private care, recognizes the threat behind the request and reluctantly goes to meet the client. She immediately has a bad feeling about him, and for deeply rooted but unprovable reasons thinks he may be her sister's rapist.

This is Louise Ure's first novel, and it is full of touching and frightening surprises. The link to flowers is set up on the opening page by instructions on a garden tag ("To force amaryllis, place bulb in a cool, dark place"), and is reinforced by the ways lovely, gentle things can be so easily destroyed.

Those Bleeding Angels

2006-08-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

Reed Arvin writes smart and exciting legal thrillers as well as anyone now working. His The Last Goodbye got some fine reviews and should have earned him a spot on every major bestseller list. That didn't happen, but with any luck his latest effort, Blood of Angels - the kind of book that makes “unputdownable” and “page-turner” more than just overused clichés -- about a prosecutor in Tennessee who suddenly finds himself in big trouble will get Arvin the attention and sales he deserves.
Thomas Dennehy's problems include the well-documented possibility that a man he has sent to the death chamber is innocent, and a murder case against a much-loved member of Nashville's Sudanese community that could start some serious racial strife. There are some requisite family difficulties as well, but Arvin skillfully keeps them from overwhelming his main stories.

Lawyers And Liars

2006-08-15T18:55:00.000-07:00

Lawyer David Ellis burst onto the scene with a series of thrillers set in the legal world he obviously knows and savors. His debut, Line of Vision, won an Edgar Award for best first novel, and the two books that followed were well-reviewed and widely purchased.

Now, for his fourth effort, Ellis moves away from the familiar world of courtrooms and cop shops and into the dark jungle of terrorism. He also challenges himself and his readers by writing In the Company of Liars not only in the present tense but also working backward from the death of his lead character.

Allison Pagone is a writer who apparently takes her own life when her lawyer lover gets her involved in a terrorist plot and she becomes a suspect in his murder. The time device takes a few pages to get comfortable with, but then it becomes an exciting part of the whole illusion: How many chainsaws can Ellis juggle without doing himself and his book some serious damage?

Ellis keeps us in suspense and curious about Pagone, mostly by having us see her involvement in plots and crimes through the eyes of determined FBI agent Jane McCoy. There's also enough high-level corruption to keep a roomful of paranoid investigators busy.

Let Icons Be Icons

2006-08-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

Why did top agent Neil Olson switch to the other side of the desk to produce a richly readable and probably very commercial debut thriller? “Stories, which was to say, the chaos of life made coherent, this is what compelled him,” says a dying old man early in The Icon. And what a story Olson has dreamed up: the search for an ancient object of Greek Orthodox art called the Holy Mother of Katarini, supposedly destroyed during World War II by Nazis or stolen by partisans, which has suddenly made a miraculous reappearance.

Before you mutter “Aha -- The Da Vinci Code, with a Greek accent,” consider this: Olson's story would be a memorable one in any publishing climate, and his writing ranges from vivid battle scenes between German troops and Greek guerrilla fighters to an extremely evocative description of the icon itself: “The eyes drew you in… Large, dark brown almost to black, and almond-shaped, in the favored eastern style. Penetrating, all-knowing, forgiving, or rather ready to forgive, but requiring something of you first.” Doesn't that make the Mona Lisa sound like a second-rate piece of portraiture?

Silva Is Gold

2006-08-15T18:50:00.000-07:00

Daniel Silva has a new hardcover, The Messenger, headed for the bestseller list, but his previous books are cheaper and take up less room in your luggage. Here's what I said about two recent efforts:

When a bomb at the Austrian Wartime Claims office leaves its chief investigator close to death at the start of A Death in Vienna, art restorer and secret Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon is persuaded to put aside his work on a Bellini altarpiece in Venice to go to Vienna to investigate.

It turns out that a leading suspect is Erich Radek, the Nazi officer in charge of wiping out all evidence of the Holocaust in the last days of World War II, now living under a different name, in charge of a prestigious business-development group in Vienna. Reading his own mother's account of her time in concentration camps, Allon realizes that Radek is the man who almost had her killed, and he plunges into the chase with extra vigor.

Various groups of ex- and current Nazis want Allon to lay off, but they've got the wrong boy. Art isn't the only thing he restores: He takes a stab at justice and human decency as well. And Silva keeps the pot from boiling over with cool brilliance.

Early In The Confessor, Pope Paul VII, the elfin Venetian outsider finally chosen after much in-fighting to succeed Pope John Paul II, is having one of his dreaded weekly lunches with the extremely political Cardinal Marco Brindisi, his secretary of state. When the pope tells the cardinal that he plans to open all secret Vatican archives pertaining to the Holocaust, Brindisi bristles and points out that Pope John Paul II already did something similar in his 1998 study "We Remember."

" `We Remember?' " the pope says. " `It should have been called We Apologize--or We Beg Forgiveness. It did not go far enough, neither in its soul-searching nor in its search for the truth. It was yet another insult to the very people whose wounds we wished to heal."

This is an important scene, because Silva has more in mind here than just using up a lot of research into the ever-popular fictional form of Vatican office politics, or jumping on the current bandwagon of pope bashing. He intends to make his Pope Paul VII not just a colorful piece of moving scenery but a major part of the story--a real man with a history and a heart, whose actions jump-start the narrative and whose motives are personal and ecumenical.

Many books and plays have questioned Pope Pius XII's silence and lack of action during the Holocaust. Silva goes beyond easy assumptions, using newly uncovered documents to create a darker scenario. That darkness is increasingly tinged with sadness, as Allon moves through present-day Jewish communities in Munich, Venice and Rome where nothing seems to have been changed by the deaths and denials of history.

At the end of The Confessor, after many scenes of thumping action, passionate words, hot pursuit and cold revenge, what will probably stay with you longest are the quiet moments where the reasons for Pope Paul VII's convictions are revealed. It's a different kind of thrill than you might expect from a commercial thriller, but it certainly leaves a tingle.

The Times It Isn't Changing

2006-08-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

While we wait for Denise Hamilton's most recent Eve Diamond book (Prisoner of Memory) to come out in paperback, here's what I wrote about its predecessor:

Hamiliton's version of the Los Angeles Times where her star reporter Eve Diamond works (lots of pages for investigative journalism and writers given a free hand to fill them; a heavy interest in arcane local cultural events like theater) make it sound like a cross between the paper in Hecht/MacArthur's The Front Page and the old lefty P.M. in New York (before it became the Post.) If recent reports are true, this isn't quite like life at today's Times. But it does give Hamilton's books about Diamond a decidedly historic feel - probably to be studied by future scholars and passed off as the same kind of truth that has encircled stories about London in the 1960s.

Eve is in fact wearing a “1940s cocktail dress of raw silk with a scoop neck” as she waits at the fountain outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where the world premiere of a play called Our Lady of the Barrio by a former gang member named Alfonso Reventon is about to happen. The fact that the star, Catarina Velosi, Alfonso's ex-lover, has disappeared spoils Eve's date with a glamorous music executive named Silvio (imagine a young Caesar Romero), Alfonso's friend, who brings Diamond along on his search for the missing actress.

What makes Savage Garden worth our time is Hamilton's obvious desire to turn Los Angeles into a piece of the past - a place where ethnicity matters, where culture other than movies is treated with respect, above all where newspapers make occasional stabs at greatness.

Roosevelt's Law

2006-08-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

Most legal thrillers use the idea of the law firm – large and greedy or small and courageous – simply as the backdrop for the cases won and lost by their lawyers. That’s why Kermit Roosevelt’s thoroughly gripping debut novel is such a major breakthrough: it makes the firm itself – the giant Washington, D.C. operation Morgan Siler -- the book’s most important character.

“Pro bono was the perfect solution: cases on which summer associates could take positions of significant responsibility without any worry that their incompetence would cause problems for the firm,” says Roosevelt about the best way to keep law students happy. “Furthermore, it gave them an unrealistic idea both of the sort of work they’d be doing and of the firm’s commitment to pro bono practice, something law students seemed to value.”

That quote says more about the idea of pro bono than the lengthy and self-defeating gyrations which first year associate Mark Clayton goes through as he works on a death penalty case in Virginia. And what another new associate, Katja Phillips, discovers about litigation (that it “consisted of trying to prevent people from enforcing the legal rights they claimed”) is never really improved or made more real during the hundreds of billable hours she spends when victims of a chemical plant explosion in Texas (owned by a Morgan Siler client) join in a class action against the offending company.

It’s not that Mark, Katja and all their immediate legal superiors are anything less than fully-fleshed characters: a shrewd and cocksure third-year associate who clerked for a Supreme Court justice (as Roosevelt himself did) is particularly well-drawn. But in the end, it’s Morgan Siler, standing like a warehouse of broken legal promises on K Street, which constantly holds our interest.

Fearing's Clock

2006-08-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

"In short, the big clock was running as usual, and it was time to go home. Sometimes the hands of the clock actually raced, and at other times they hardly moved at all. But that made no difference to the big clock. The hands could move backward, and the time it told would be right just the same. It would still be running as usual, because all other watches have to be set by the big one…"

Kenneth Fearing, born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1902, three years after Ernest Hemingway, drank himself to death just short of his 59th birthday. The Big Clock, which came out in 1946, dazzled critics (and impressed the hard-to-impress Raymond Chandler) and was based on the six months Fearing spent at Time, Inc. – one of the few jobs he could ever hold for long. Its lead character, a womanizing boozer named George Stroud, edits a magazine called Crimeways for a weird publishing tycoon whose blond mistress is murdered after a surreptitious fling with Stroud – a murder Stroud himself is ordered to look into by his boss.

Both tough and strikingly poetic, Fearing's book (which was filmed twice – once with Ray Milland as Stroud and a superb Charles Laughton as the publisher, and most recently as No Way Out with Kevin Costner) is definitely an important look at American values after WW II. All credit to the New York Review of Books and their paperback branch for this handsome reprint.

Gardner Goes Zoom

2006-08-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

My first serious magazine job (as opposed to writing captions and text blocks for a sleazy publisher of girlie mags, but that's another story) was on Argosy, where Erle Stanley Gardner ran the Court of Last Resort -- a non-fiction feature that tried to free unjustly imprisoned people. I met Gardner a couple of times on his rare visits from California, but since I wasn't a big Perry Mason fan I didn't try to talk to him about fiction.

Little did I realize that (as Bill Pronzini reveals in his lively introduction to the latest invaluable Crippen & Landru Lost Classic) before he ever wrote about the courtroom ace, Gardner had created many more colorful characters for pulp magazines in the 1920s and 30s -- "Ed Migrane, the Headache Detective; Speed Dash, the Human Fly... None, however, were more unique, well-developed, or eccentric in name and nature than Sidney Zoom, the Master of Disguises."

Zoom, like Mason, was also a lawyer -- but the similarity ends there. Underneath the disguises and other examples of eccentric behavior which spice up these ten stories, all reprinted for the first time, lies the same combination of a deep distrust of the legal system and an equally strong desire to help the unfortunate which probably made Gardner study law in the first place -- and to practice it in my current home town of Ventura, CA.

Romilia Spices Up L.A.

2006-08-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

When we first met Romilia Chacon, the smart, sexy (and how do you say “feisty” in Spanish?) police detective was not just the sole Latina on the Nashville homicide squad but the only woman. Overcoming, even using her diverse background, Romilia rose quickly through the cop ranks. Now, in her third outing, she is 30 and has become a special agent of the FBI in Los Angeles – much to the delight of her mother, who does most of the daily looking-after of Romilia’s eight-year-old son Sergio, and to the boy himself, on his way to soccer confidence. Chacon was glad to give up her job as coach of Sergio’s team, the Mighty Slayers: “I hadn’t warmed up much to the other mothers on the team,” she admits. “There were differences between us, like shards of glass strewn over the sidelines…”

But her new happiness quickly turns to darkness and anger, when someone beats to death Romilia’s former lover, Chip Pierce, an FBI agent with a prosthetic leg. A brutal drug lord is the leading suspect, but digging into Chip’s background and past cases sends Chacon on a frightening search in another direction. Villatoro catches her voice and attitude so perfectly that we hope to read many more books about Romilia.

Knowing and Not

2006-07-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

If you’re left a bit dazed and baffled when you try to get a grip on the current London film, music and journalism mileux, Cathi Unsworth is your ideal guide. Her first mystery, The Not Knowing, swerves jauntily across these environments, as she tells her story while a lively sountrack ranging from rockabilly to new bands from Northern England plays in the background. A hot film director is found murdered in a scene straight out of his latest picture; journalist Diana Kemp – who dated the director when he was unknown – and her colleagues at the new magazine Lux are especially interested in the killing because they have in hand the director’s last interview. Unsworth dedicates her book to Derek Raymond, a mad radical writer of the 1960s and 70s now happily coming back into favor, and to Ken Bruen, the Irish roustabout novelist whose latest effort is reviewed below. It’s an impressive outing: read it on the plane to London.

Dublin in the Dark

2006-07-29T17:41:00.000-07:00

“Reverse-Gentrification of the Literary World” says a note on the Akashic catalogue, and it especially catches the spirit of their city-centered short story collections. I'll be reviewing the latest, LONDON NOIR, in my column. As for Dublin Noir, editor Ken Bruen seems to be one of the few Irish-based writer on hand: his story, “Black Stuff,” has as deep roots in the Dublin soil as his novels . As for the best of the rest – Olen Steinhauer’s “The Piss-Stained Czech;” Sarah Weinman’s “Hen Night;” Gary Phillips’s “The Man for the Job” – they deliberately tell what it’s like to be from outside Dublin, looking in

War and Murder in Rome

2006-07-25T13:12:00.000-07:00

Where would crime fiction be without World War II to provide an invaluable distorting lens that lets writers show how badly private people can behave in a world gone mad? That admirable British television series Foyle’s War was a fine example, as are the books of J. Robert Janes and many others.

Carlo Lucarelli seems ready to join them, on the basis of this first novel of a trilogy set in Italy in 1945. As Mussolini’s reign and life are about to end, Commissario De Luca, a Roman police officer, gets involved in investigating the stabbing murder of a man with connections all the way to the top of the Fascist food chain. Welcome to the club, Commissario De Luca; have a seat right next to Chief Inspector Foyle…

Patrick O'Brian Light

2006-07-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

I admit it: I probably expected too much from naval historian Joan Druett’s mystery A Watery Grave, which had the presumption to sail over the same territory as the justly revered – and recently dead – Patrick O’Brian. But both of us seem to have acquired wisdom in the interim, and I’m glad to report that her second book set on the infamous U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838 (which ended in disaster, only two of the original six ships returning to New York in 1842) is a much more interesting and considerably less irritating outing.

For one thing, her central character – Wiki Coffin, the son of a Polynesian mother and whose American father made sure he got a college education – doesn’t spend all his time swimming from vessel to vessel as he did in the first book. Wiki, officially the expedition’s linguist but also its chief crime solver, gets to exercise his brain more than his breaststroke in Shark Island, as he and his friend George Rochester, captain of the Swallow (a fictional seventh vessel which Druett added to the enterprise) investigate a sealing ship foundering off the coast of Brazil, abandoned by its crew. When the captain of the wrecked ship is murdered, the leading suspect turns out to be the ambitious and vindictive officer who made Rochester’s and Coffin’s lives such a misery in A Watery Grave. Druett replaces the flood of too-convenient coincidences which almost sank her first book with sharp psychological portraits and stirring, sea-swept descriptive passages that might remind you of – dare I say it? – Patrick O’Brian.

Shark Island isn't out in paperback yet (maybe it will be by Sept., when Druett's latest appears), but a lot of used copies are available on Amazon and ABE. And there's also a new 796-page novel called To the Edge of the World by Harry Thompson, which I'll be reviewing in the Chicago Tribune shortly. It's about real people -- Charles Darwin and Capt. Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle -- who might just remind you of another seafaring pair.

Lankford's "Lightning" Flashes Brightly

2006-07-21T15:29:00.000-07:00

Nobody writes with more eerie precision about the lizard-infested undergrowth of the independent film business than Terrill Lee Lankford. In Dan Tana’s pleasantly non-trendy Hollywood steakhouse, a would-be film magnate offers money to writer/director Clyde McCoy for a piece of his upcoming cheapo thriller, Blonde Lightning – but there’s a catch about some foreign rights: “I need Benelux, Italy and Germany,” the investor insists.

“ ‘Germany?’ Clyde was horrified. ‘We can’t give you Germany. Germany is huge.’

“ ‘I need it. Or I can’t put up the money. Germany is the main reason I want to be involved with this film. I need to fulfill a contract there… I’m not as interested in the revenues as I am in being able to deliver Germany. It’s the key to completion funds on my two other films. They want three pictures or nothing.’”

Clyde saves the day, and the deal, by suggesting that the investor can have Germany – as long as McCoy and his producer/star, a once semi-famous film and TV actor, get a piece of the action. Mark Hayes, the ambitious but soft-headed hero of Lankford’s EARTHQUAKE WEATHER (where he and McCoy met after the 1994 Northridge quake cracked open their San Fernando Valley apartment building) watches the scene and takes notes. If all goes well, he’ll be hired as associate producer on Blonde Lightning, and maybe some day he’ll be talking about Germany himself.

Of course, all doesn’t go well. Clyde has (along with a serious drinking problem) a ladyfriend, Emily, a successful stunt woman and martial arts expert who has managed to earn the hatred of a very nasty piece of Hollywood flotsam. When a suspicious accident almost kills Emily, Clyde and Mark strike back in a violent gesture that threatens to send them both to jail or the graveyard. There’s not much glamour in Lankford’s version of the movie industry, but there is a truckload of suspense, anger, frustration and sadness – as well as enough eating and drinking to make you break any diet.

The Man From Berlin

2006-07-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

Philip Kerr has written many interesting books since his famous Berlin Noir trilogy, set in Germany before, during and after World War II. But now, with a new Bernie Gunther story – THE ONE FROM THE OTHER – due out in hardcover in September, it seems like a perfect time to revisit the original, a Penguin paperback containing the entire stunning trilogy.

We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines.

No Place Like Nome...

2006-07-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

John Straley was the first mystery writer I ever read who made Alaska his natural canvas: his investigator, Cecil Younger, seemed to understand the people and the environment, and he blended the oddities of their lives and deaths with liberal dashes of humor and explosive action. Here’s a good place to start if you’ve never read Straley (or if you’d like to resume an old acquaintance), as Younger goes to great lengths to work on the case of a client even after she turns up dead.

Mr. Monk Goes to the Head of the Class

2006-07-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

A surprising number of my friends and relatives love the Monk TV series so much that they ask me to get them signed copies of Lee Goldberg’s books based on it. Judging by this latest outing, where the weird cop follows his assistant, Natalie, on holiday, they’re on to a good thing. Goldberg makes Adrian Monk much more interesting than the TV version: the twitches are less obvious, the outcomes much less predictable. Even (or especially) the secondary characters are more interesting and have sharper dialogue.

Prime Sturgeon

2006-07-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Was it really 50 years ago that noted science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon first gave us his dark vision of the vampire myth? Sturgeon, who died in 1985, has had as much influence on other writers and artists as the currently trendy Philip K. Dick, and this frightening and eventually heartbreaking story of a soldier whose desperate search for a normal life is exposed when he assaults a superior officer – beautifully published by another new paperback house -- shows why.

Steinhauer Rules

2006-07-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

While we all wait with high hopes for LIBERATION MOVEMENTS, Olen Steinhauer's latest in his stunning series of political thrillers about policemen at work in an unnamed Eastern European country, here's what I said about its immediate predecessor, just out in paperback:

The series began with a setting in 1948 for The Bridge of Sighs, in which an idealistic young recruit named Emil Brod had to deal with the problem of proving to his colleagues that he wasn't a spy for the new, pro-Russian regime. Then came The Confession, set in 1956--the story of another homicide detective, Ferenc Kolyeszar, a talented novelist at work on a book about the fate of artists in the Soviet-dominated satellite countries.

36 Yalta Boulevard, the third entry in Steinhauer's fascinating and original series, begins in 1966 and has as its central character a man at first glance much less colorful than Brod or Kolyeszar. At 50, Brano Sev has achieved the rank of major in the country's state security office. He lives alone, has a limited social life and sexual history, and is famous for his loyalty and devotion to his superiors at 36 Yalta Blvd., in the country's capital city. But when an operation to eliminate a traitor goes bad in Vienna, Sev is sent home in disgrace, booted out of the security service and given a lowly, tedious factory job. He accepts the demotion without complaint, believing he will be reinstated eventually.

His chance at redemption comes when he is ordered to return to Bobrka, his native village in the north of the country, to track a possible defector. Sev hasn't been home for years, but it holds a large part of his history, including sending his father out of the country rather than risk the inevitable imprisonment the former farmer would face because of his forced collaboration with Nazi occupiers:

"It seemed that everything was already known to him in this town of less than four hundred; everything was tactile. The lit windows with their rough lace curtains, the tire-mangled road, the sharp grass springing up in his headlights, the fogged windows of the village's one bar and the old man shivering outside in the cold with a beer in his hand, watching Brano's Trabant roll past."

One reviewer of The Confession compared Steinhauer to Graham Greene, but his latest is more in the Eric Ambler tradition of people in unwilling exile. Brano's tortuous journey out of Bobrka takes him back to Vienna, where among the dangers and temptations are a much-younger Yugoslavian woman who apparently loves him, as well as an anti-communist group of religious fundamentalists, funded by the U.S. government, who offer another kind of freedom.

After much physical and mental suffering, Sev is following a suspicious character in Vienna. Steinhauer says late in the book:
"This was a young man's job, creeping around a metropolis, tracking people while remaining invisible. Decades ago, Brano had found the minutiae interesting, sometimes exciting, but he no longer remembered why. All the older Brano found himself desiring . . . was a life that looked a lot like retirement."

Sev might think this at the time, but in the end he makes a decision that at first seem surprising but really is inevitable.

Harper & Iles Fight Crime -- and Each Other

2006-07-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

That undersung British master of irony, Bill James (who once wrote a biography of Anthony Powell), has a hardcover -- WOLVES OF MEMORY -- just out. While you wait for that one, here's a new paperback treat. This is what I wrote when it first appeared:

Desmond Iles is in trouble, and that's enough to give a new jolt of energy to James's long-running series about the dapper, devious, demented Assistant Chief Constable of an unnamed British Midlands city and his colleague and primary antagonist, Chief of Detectives Colin Harpur. Here Iles faces two challenges: a tough new chief constable may replace his well-meaning but clueless boss Chief Constable Mark Lane and crush Iles like a bug; and one of the city's three top drug magnates is rumored to want Iles dead.

The titular young woman with the shapely rear is the 18-year-old daughter of a recently deceased "grass," or informer. Fascinated by teenage girls, Iles naturally finds himself attracted to her -- until she begins to respond favorably to his advances. Once again, it's James's darkly ironic writing that makes this series worth the padding and occasional plodding.

Another Pip From Granger

2006-07-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Who will finally replace Ruth Rendell and P.D. James as icons of the British crime novel when those two worthy Dames (of the British Empire, I mean) finally call it quits? Denise Mina and Morag Joss are certainly likely candidates. Less likely but equally deserving is Pip Granger, whose books are set in London’s working class neighborhoods in the 1950s, when the city and its inhabitants were still trying to find a way to reconcile a blasted past and an uncertain future. If you read Not All Tarts Are Apple, The Widow Ginger or last year’s Trouble In Paradise, you’ll know what a rich and yeasty brew Granger has distilled from an array of characters who range from the flamboyant to the bizarre.

No Peace For The Wicked is set in 1956, in the burgeoning sex and art center of Soho where the narrator/heroine Lizzy lives above a pub very much like the one on Old Compton St. where Granger herself lived as a child, and also contains a fascinating portrait of the Chinese dockside district known as Limehouse – a once seedy and dangerous place now gentrified beyond all recognition. A 16-year-old part-Chinese girl named Peace who comes to live with Lizzy’s family disappears, which sets in motion the Limehouse visit and other mysteries and adventures. Granger’s greatest strength is making all sorts of human behavior seem as normal as sliced bread.

2006-07-15T16:27:00.002-07:00

A Russian Cop Grows in Brooklyn

Reggie Nadelson's Russian-born NYPD detective Artie Cohen is one of the most interesting and complicated crime solvers to join the genre since S.J.Rozan's Lydia Chin. Like Rozan, Nadelson deliberately makes her prime character an outsider, living and working the nastier streets of New York but with a part of his soul still planted in the old USSR.

During an unusually fierce blizzard in the winter of 2003, Artie is called in to investigate a pile of bloody children's clothing found on a beach in Brooklyn, near the territory where Russian expatriates from gangsters to shopkeepers have settled into a colony. Cohen's search becomes personal in more ways than one: is he more Russian than American despite all his efforts to fit in? And is one of the dead or missing children his own godson? As the city still struggles to absorb the psychic damage of 9/11, Artie has to deal with his own demons. Nadelson's excellent series about him - this is book five - deserves much wider attention.

2006-07-15T16:27:00.001-07:00

Return of the Buddhist Policeman

One of the eye-opening delights of Bangkok 8, John Burdett's hilarious and mordant first book about a Royal Thai police detective named Sonchai Jitpleecheep, was the way Sonchai managed to be both an observant Buddhist and a shrewd cop. When a drug-crazed cobra killed his partner, the only other Buddhist in the Thai police force, Sonchai seemed to be honestly torn between religion and revenge; he managed to walk that delicate literary tightrope until the book's end.

In Sonchai's second outing, both of those important elements have been played down. Sonchai is still a Buddhist, but either his devotion hs been channeled into other pursuits or our fascination with his moral dilemma hashad the edge taken off it. Bangkok Tattoo is still an original, imaginative thriller, full of irony and social comment, but we don't get to see Sonchai on that tightrope very often.

Never mind. Burdett, who has soaked up enough Thai culture to fuel several more books, writes like a dark angel. His descriptions of the country villages kept alive and thriving on the money sent home by Bangkok's so-called exploited sex slaves is convincing; his breakfast menu bought from street vendors for $1.50 makes you want to fly to Bangkok for other pleasures.

And best of all are those increasingly rare but most welcome moments on the old tightrope. “Believe it or not, I don't spend any of the money,” Sonchai tells us about his partnership in the club owned by his mother and his boss. "Vikorn's accountant wires my modest ten percent share of the profits into my account with the Thai Farmer's Bank every quarter, and I let it stack up, preferring to live on my cop's salary in my hovel by the river when I'm not sleeping at the Club. To be honest, I've promised the Buddha that when I get the chance I'll do something useful with it… When I tried to take some money out of the account to buy a fantastic pair of shoes by Baker-Benje on sale in the Emporium (only $500), I was prevented by some mystic force.”

2006-07-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

Still Burning Bright

One of the many pleasures delivered by Barbara Cleverly’s books about Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands, who is enjoying a long stay in India after being wounded in World War I, is the way they bring back memories of favorite books and films. Her third effort in this excellent series begins in the cool and stately mountain resort of Simla made famous in The Jewel in the Crown and then moves into a dangerous environment of high adventure where wild animals attack at will.

A tiger with a taste for humans is frightening the mango chutney out of the inhabitants of the princely state of Ranipur, so Joe and an experienced hunter named Edgar Troop are asked to join a party tracking it down. Sandilands begins to suspect there’s more to the invitation when he’s offered not only a fine hunting rifle but also a pistol much more suited to shooting humans.

Ranipur turns out to be a mysterious and dangerous place: the old Maharajah is dying, and his oldest son has been killed by a panther. Then a second son dies violently, and it’s up to Joe and his companion to protect the remaining 12-year-old heir from other ambitious denizens of the palace and an untrustworthy chief of police.

Cleverly’s research brings even the most exotic places and people to full credibility, and she balances her ingredients – including a steamy dose of romance -- with the skill and imagination of a master chef.

2006-07-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

Another Strong British Voice Heard From

I’ve raved at length about Scottish writer Denise Mina, whose books have led some to anoint her as the latest heir to the Ruth Rendell/Minette Walters/P.D. James crown. Now we have another contender, Morag Joss, whose mysteries about cellist Sara Selkirk, set in the lovely Regency city of Bath, have been extremely readable without breaking any genre boundaries.

Joss’s latest in paperback, which won one of those silver daggers which the British Crime Writers Assocation hands out so stylishly, moves her up a couple of rungs on the ladder. Like Rendell’s books about dysfunctional people who feed off of each other, Half Broken Things slowly creates an atmosphere of absolute terror. As three very odd people – a 64-year-old professional housesitter working on her last job; an unsuccessful thief; an abused and pregnant young woman – come together in a country house whose owners are away for nine months, Joss lets us watch as the three become a family.

But what starts as the happy home life which the characters have been sorely missing becomes an exercise in psychological suspense worthy of any of the writers I’ve mentioned. In the end, the question of how far they will go to keep their house and family turns into a matter of life and unnatural death.

2006-07-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

Those Were the Days...

Remember what paperbacks used to look like -- and cost? (Hard Case Crime does -- see below)

Many thanks to Bill Crider for helping us remember...

2006-07-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

Natsuo Kirino has been one of Japan's top mystery writers for a dozen years; amazingly, Out, translated by Stephen Snyder, is her first appearance in English. With the heartbreaking inevitability of a Russian novel, it tells the story of a collective crime: the murder of an abusive husband and the disposal of his body by four women who work together on the night shift at a Tokyo factory that produces cheap, tasty, possibly even nutritious boxed lunches. The women are bound together in a friendship made up of financial need and a deep understanding of revenge.

2006-07-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

Continuing their praiseworthy crusade of bringing worthy but so-far ignored European crime fiction to a wider audience, the sweet folk at Bitter Lemon Press give us this first novel – a prize-winning bestseller in Italy -- by a man who knows all about danger: he was an anti-Mafia judge in the seaport of Bari, responsible for many indictments. His fiction debut is a sad and sharply-edged legal thriller, smoothly translated by Patrick Creagh, about a top defense lawyer whose collapsing conscience is saved by taking on the case of an illegal immigrant from Senegal accused of murdering a nine-year-old boy.

2006-07-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

A sizeable benefit of reading (and reviewing) crime fiction is the chance to meet strong, smart women solving puzzles while moving through a freshly-researched historical period. Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs hit the ground of 1920s England running, and in her third book is keeping up that admirable pace while widening her range.
Maisie's diverse background energizes the series: daughter of a greengrocer, hired as a housemaid and then sent to Cambridge by a wealthy woman employer who spotted her intellect and a leading psychologist who sharpened her perceptions about people, Dobbs served as a nurse at some of World War One's bloodiest battlefields, then returned to London to open a detective agency where humanity and understanding are the specialities of the house.
Two unusual but possibly-linked investigations into the fates of men missing in action and declared dead occupy most of Maisie's time in Pardonable Lies (the title comes from a poem by Sophocles which would almost certainly have been part of the education of a young woman at Cambridge's Girton College): a man who is honoring a deathbed promise to his wife to find out what happened to their aviator son, and an old college friend wanting to know more about her brother's end. Dobbs also tries to prove the innocence of a 13-year-old country girl (the same age as Maisie was when she went into service) who became a prostitute and is now charged with murder.
As in her first two books about Maisie, Winspear shows us how everything she knows and has learned in her various roles influences her work. Spiritualism, which ran rampant in England after World War One - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became an advocate after the loss of a son -- is examined in all its shapes and degrees of honesty, through the eyes of a woman both sharpened by the skepticism of science and softened by a vast compassion for all of those people who, like herself, have seen the worst of what the world has to offer.

2006-07-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

I am even more full of admiration for Jim Kelly's second mystery about British journalist Philip Dryden than I was for his impressive debut, The Water Clock.

Kelly could have easily coasted on the qualities that made his first book so distinctive: the landscape (the mysterious oozing fens surrounding the old East Anglia cathedral town of Ely, where he and Dryden live); the fascinating secondary characters (an about-to- retire cop who trades crime tips for birdwatching news, a minicab driver almost as large as his vehicle, which has become Dryden's sole means of transport); the absolute sadness of Dryden's private life, as his much-beloved wife, Laura, remains hospitalized in a coma after a car accident. Instead, Kelly keeps those ingredients and pushes the envelope they came in. Laura has amazingly begun to make progress, communicating (heartbreakingly slowly and painfully) by pressing Dryden's hand through the alphabet, stopping at letters that seem to make words. She is trying to tell him about a confession she heard from someone who thought she was completely comatose, concerning a murder Dryden is covering for his local newspaper, the Crow. Maggie Beck, the woman in the other bed in Laura's hospital room, is the lone survivor of a fiery crash of a U.S. Air Force bomber that plowed into her farm after a dust cloud ripped apart its jet engines in 1977. The fire baby of the book's title is Maggie's love child, burned to death in the disaster. But now Maggie, dying of cancer, is stirring the ashes of that painful past and seems ready to disclose some important information.You may never choose to visit the fens--especially in the summer, which sounds particularly toxic--but the area will come alive from the very first page because of Kelly's extraordinary art and imagination.

2006-07-07T18:43:00.000-07:00

Those shrewd and enterprising folk at Hard Case Crime continue their quest to keep affordable paperbacks alive with three new entries. Even at $6.99 a pop, these are bargains – especially since their cover art eerily recreates past pleasures.

LEMONS NEVER LIE, by Richard Stark, is a long out-of-print delight by Donald E. Westlake, who under his real name and his Stark alias has been making heroes out of criminals all his writing life. Unreformed thief Alan Grofield runs a live theater in Indiana, but gets involved with a lunatic who wants his help in robbing a brewery – and just won’t take Grofield’s refusal as anything but a reason to explode.

STRAIGHT CUT, by Madison Smartt Bell, is another treasure: the only straight mystery (published originally in 1986) by one of our leading novelists. Freelance film editor Tracy Bateman, who is having trouble staying sober since his wife Lauren left him, takes a suspiciously high-paying job in Rome offered by his former best friend Kevin, a semi-successful film producer. Not only is Kevin the man for whom Lauren left Tracy; he has also been known to smuggle drugs in sizeable quantities – both of which cause Tracy a large portion of angst and danger.

WITNESS TO MYSELF, by Seymour Shubin, is an amazing story -- not to mention a great mystery. What’s the opposite of a burned out writer? Shubin burst into the mystery world in 1953 with his best-selling first novel, Anyone’s My Name; his career continued up through 1982, with the memorable Edgar nominee The Captain; now he has a brand new example of classic noir – about a 15-year-old crime suddenly resurfacing to change a man’s life -- out. Once again, the pleasure is enhanced by a piece of original cover art (this one by Larry Schwinger) which catches the period perfectly.

2006-07-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

Michael Connelly has the guts of a burglar, a genuine love for justice, and a wry sense of humor rarely present in his books about LAPD detective Harry Bosch. But his newest – a legal thriller introducing a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer of the type we all love to hate – is not only brave and intensely gripping but also often very funny.
Even the title is a good laugh. Mickey Haller is the kind of lawyer who takes out ads in the yellow pages, carefully skirting Bar Association rules about promising clients too much. He runs his business mostly by cell phone from the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car, chauffered by a former client working off his debt to Haller at ten bucks an hour (the other ten comes out of Haller’s pocket and/or expense account.)
“There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore… Every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers. They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistakes with lies. My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks. To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them. To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.”
Connelly is so good that we believe Mickey when he says that. We also understand his financial problems well enough to sympathize with his desire for just one “franchise” case – a long-running affair for which he can bill a rich client $300 an hour and set himself up for life. So when a bail bondsman tells him about Louis Roulet, a wealthy Beverly Hills real estate agent accused of the rape and beating of a prostitute, Haller thinks he’s found his franchise.
But as his ex-cop investigator Raul Levin starts to dig into Roulet’s past, The Lincoln Lawyer opens up into a whole other kind of quest. It gets into a case of a client who Mickey now is sure was innocent but who was convicted and sent to San Quentin for life. “I was always worried that I might not recognize innocence,” Haller says. “The possibility of it in my job was so rare that I operated with the fear that I wouldn’t be ready for it when it came. That I would miss it.”
A smashing conclusion, with echoes of Presumed Innocent and Witness For the Prosecution, gives The Lincoln Lawyer stature and suspense. Connelly has stepped up to the plate in the overflowing ballpark of legal thrillers and blasted a grand slam his first time at bat.

2006-07-05T17:48:00.000-07:00

Gerald Seymour is one of the unsung heroes of the political thriller. In many impeccably crafted, grippingly timely books, he has written about everything from the Irish struggle and the Cold War to Israel and Iran. In each one he has avoided most of the cliches of the genre and brought to life a truly frightening story.
For his 17th book, Seymour takes on Al Qaeda--in the person of Caleb, an apparently harmless cab driver from Kabul, Afghanistan, who spent two years in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay because he looked suspicious and now wants only to get back to his family. But Caleb is really a powerful Al Qaeda agent known as the Outsider, a type of character often flat or ludicrous in other thrillers but believably riveting here. A series of plot twists show that the Outsider's terrorist skills are impressively efficient. But equally impressive are the actions of the team of American and British counterterrorists who search for him, using hard-won intelligence and ultramodern technology. Their job is to keep the Outsider from delivering to his "family"--Al Qaeda's leaders--a small, deadly weapon that would make real-life terrorist scenarios pale by comparison.
What Seyour does so well in "The Unknown Soldier," as he has done so many times before, is take an already frightening world and make it even more terrifying. It isn't the least bit comforting, but it certainly gets your attention.

2006-07-05T15:13:00.000-07:00

Amazingly, this is just the second of Miyuki Miyabe's 36 mystery novels to be translated into English; the other was the best-selling and critically acclaimed All She Was Worth which in 1992 received Japan's equivalent of the National Book Award for fiction. Imagine the reverse happening to Ruth Rendell--just two of her dozens of books being available in Japanese.
The Rendell comparison is particularly apt: Shadow Family starts like one of her Inspector Wexford police stories and then slides gradually into the kind of dark psychological mystery she often writes, especially under her Barbara Vine pen name.
Etsuro Takegami is a not-very-distinguished Tokyo police detective sergeant who inherits a high-profile, double-murder case when his superior is hospitalized. A 48-year-old food-company executive named Ryosuke Tokoroda is found stabbed to death in his comfortable house in a farming district being turned into homes. His murder is soon linked by forensic evidence to the strangling death a few days before of a young woman, a college student and karaoke-club employee who was Tokoroda's lover.
On this familiar foundation, Miyabe begins to build a bizarre structure. Takegami and his sharply drawn team discover that the murdered man had created a fantasy life on the Internet: a subtle, frighteningly detailed fictional family where he was the perfect father, unlike the cold and frustrated man he was with his own wife and daughter. Tokorada was also a serial philanderer, so when a stalker begins to threaten his daughter, the police suspect this might be connected with the murders.
Miyabe blends her two styles with impressive ease as the answers and villains are revealed. Of special interest is a portrait of a part of Tokyo--a long way from the sleek electronic metropolis depicted in films like Lost in Translation--where ordinary people live, work and play out their dark fantasies.

2006-07-05T15:10:00.000-07:00

Wallace Stroby's first book about ex-New Jersey State Trooper Harry Rane, The Barbed-Wire Kiss, found some tough, sharp new things to say about the often-cliched character of cop gone wrong. Stroby's second Rane storm is even better, as he gets involved with a dancer named Nikki Ellis who used to work at the scuzzy Heartbreak Lounge in Asbury Park.
Ellis' husband has been released from prison in Florida, and she thinks he's coming back to South Jersey to settle some scores--with her for putting their son up for adoption, with some treacherous former gangster colleagues and most of all with Rane, who once again lets himself be sucked into a mess of danger by doing a favor for a friend.

2006-07-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

Judy Clemens has a new Stella Crown book out in hardcover in August: until then, you can enjoy her first two in paperback.

Here's what I wrote about Till the Cows Come Home:
You might learn more than you want to know about some of the nastier aspects of running a small dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania in this pungent, promising first mystery: In the opening pages, there's a messy calf-birthing scene as well as an overflowing manure pit. But Judy Clemens gives us in return an absolutely original lead character: Stella Crown, who runs her old family farm with the help of a veteran hired hand and an eager young neighbor, fighting off the developers who want to turn the remaining local dairies into housing estates. Crown takes great pleasure from her 1988 Harley-Davidson Low Rider, which she rebuilt from a wreck, and from sexual encounters with a hunky, itinerant barn painter she can't really afford to hire.
On Crown's 29th birthday, which she'd prefer to forget but which a giant clan of family friends insists on marking, it becomes obvious that something worse than ordinary hard times or bad luck is going on. A mysterious, flulike disease has struck the area, especially its children, and someone is devoting a lot of time to subtly attacking Crown's farm and its inhabitants.
Clemens' plotting is solid and unexpected, and all her characters--the desperate farmers, their frustrated families, even the local biker fraternity--come quickly to life. Especially Crown, who confesses that she keeps her hair short "to show off the cow skull tattooed at the base of my neck" but who so far has resisted suggestions to have "Got milk?" engraved somewhere on her body.

2006-07-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

"I had grown up convinced that the slow procession of the postwar years, a world of stillness, poverty, and hidden resentment, was as natural as tap water, that the mute sadness that seeped from the walls of the wounded city was the real face of its soul," remembers Daniel Sempere of his native Barcelona in 1945, when he turned 11. That's the year his widowed bookseller father takes him to an ancient repository called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he is allowed to choose one volume from the shelves to own and protect. The book Daniel picks is "The Shadow of the Wind," a novel written in 1935 by Julian Carax.
Little is known of Carax, whose few novels never sold many copies but who seems to have stirred up enough anger in at least one reader to make him or her intent on acquiring and burning every last copy. Over the next 20 years, Daniel's fate will be linked with Carax's in many ways--some obviously melodramatic, in the best tradition of writers like Dickens and Dumas, such as the stranger with the burned face who tries to buy or steal Daniel's copy of the book, or the vicious police inspector who dogs everyone's heels; others more subtle, including the way the book teaches Daniel about sex, trust and life in a repressive country.
Small wonder that The Shadow of the Wind has already been a huge best seller in Spain and other European countries. Ruiz Zafon has captured the magic of books as objects of love and as cultural icons, and has managed to combine our fascination with them (Why else are we writing and reading this?) with a story of tremendous scope and precise focus.

2006-07-03T15:09:00.000-07:00

Maurice Valentine is a slick operator, an equal mixture of talent and compromise, a former World War II flying hero and Menninger Clinic mental patient who at 40 is ready to sell--and resell--his soul. He's also a hugely successful architect: a surprising occupation for the lead player in a superb crime novel.
Valentine, born Maurizio Viglioni, has traded more than his birth name for the money and fame of being one of the design elite of Los Angeles and Las Vegas in 1956: He is married to the daughter of a wealthy and powerful Joseph Kennedy Sr. figure who is a U.S. senator from Nevada and wants his son-in-law to be the state's other senator. It's a move approved of and probably even engineered by Valentine's wife.
One of Valentine's pork-barrel government jobs is designing and building the fake houses used in atom-bomb tests in the desert. As a crowd of celebrities, power brokers and high rollers gathers on the top-floor lounge of his Las Vegas icon hotel, El Sheik, to watch a test, shots are fired. Wounded, Valentine gets more involved than he should by digging into the past lives and crimes of the leading players--uncovering all sorts of ghosts.

2006-07-03T14:58:00.001-07:00

As everyone from Thomas Harris, begetter of Hannibal Lector, to Dan Brown can attest, creating a believable villain is the hardest work in the artistic world. How many recent thrillers have been spoiled--or almost derailed--by a character who won't come alive on the page, or who immediately goes over the top into the credibility gap?

All of which makes Neil McMahon's success with one of the main characters in his fourth book about Dr. Carroll Monks--a doctor who just can't stay out of trouble--so stunning. McMahon pulls off the virtually unthinkable here: He creates a terrorist so authentically motivated that he quickly becomes touchingly real.
Freeboot, as the leader of a band of drugged-out, deranged outlaws who live on an isolated tract of land deep in the mountains of Northern California calls himself, is a true lunatic of epic dimensions, a "macho speed freak who dominat-ed his followers, made allusions to Machiavelli, and hinted at the grandiose importance that he would enjoy in the eyes of history." These things are necessary but not sufficient to explain the immediate fascination we have with Freeboot, nor the unmistakable shiver of sympathy we feel wen we hear him speak.
In McMahon's assured hands, the duel between the rational, scientific doctor and the fascinating, frightening Freeboot--who fizzes with rampant electricity like a short circuit--is an absolutely riveting read.

2006-07-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

Don Winslow uses a quote from Psalms to give his powerful new thriller a title: “Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog.” It's an extremely apt frame for this heartbreaking chronicle of the drug wars between the U.S. and Mexico: Biblical in its dramatic scope and the classic beauty of its prose, which rumbles in the background like heavenly thunder. (Readers might remember feeling the same emotions when they began Mario Puzo's The Godfather.)
Choosing to tell a story that takes place over 25 years in the present tense is an act of considerable courage, but Winslow has created a lead character who can carry it off: a DEA agent named Art Keller who is a walking monument to the dedication and futility of those people who spend their lives fighting drugs. As a rookie posted to Culican, Keller makes friends with the Barrera brothers - who turn out to be related to Mexico's leading drug dealer. One of the brothers, Adan, takes over the family business: both he and Keller are contenders for the favors of Nora Hayden, a call girl with a heart of pure cocaine. And a hired killer named Sean Callan is the official ambassador of the American Mafia to the Latin American narcotics scene.
Using these four main characters, Winslow (whose 1998 thriller THE DEATH AND LIFE OF BOBBY Z is one of the classics of the crime genre) manages to cram into over 500 pages enough new information about how and why the drug wars have gone so badly that we want more - especially the explosive poetry of his writing.