Saturday, October 23, 2010

The Last Talk with Lola Faye, by Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $25)

Over the past 20+ years that I've been reviewing mysteries, there is one writer who I would put near the top of the list of the all time best mystery writers. That writer is Thomas H. Cook. Although he's won awards from his peers (nominated for an Edgar seven times, won once for best novel), he hasn't received the popular attention he deserves. The reason may be that his books are not page turners, filled with gratuitous violence, police procedure, and steamy sex. Indeed, his books work best if you read them slowly, deliberately relishing the language that he uses and pausing frequently to try to enjoy the skill with which he builds up to his stories' final "reveal."

The Last Talk with Lola Faye is a perfect example. Luke Page, once the academic shining star of Glenville, Alabama, never lived up to his early promise.  A historian, he'd written books in which he'd "hoped to portray the physical feel of American history, its tactile core. . .mine would be histories with a heartbeat--palpable, alive, histories with true feeling." His books, however, never conveyed this sense of life. He describes writing each book as "beginning with a passionate concept, then watching as it shrank to a bloodless monograph." He knows now that he probably will never write the books he intended to write, and has become, as his estranged wife described, "a strangely shriveled thing."

Invited to a St. Louis museum to discuss his latest book, Luke is startled to see Lola Faye Gilroy in the audience.  Now a faded, middle aged woman looking a little off, Lola Faye bears little resemblance to the spirited young woman whose jealous husband had murdered Luke's father so many years earlier.

"Are you proud of what you did?" she asks Luke, causing "a quiver of anxiety" to rush through him. Although she explained that she meant getting a fancy education and leaving Glenville, his reaction is a clue that there is much more to her question than what is obvious on the surface.

Luke and Lola Faye meet for a drink, and over the next few hours--and the rest of the book--they talk about the past: what led up to her husband murdering Luke's father, and the tragic events that followed that tragic event. The story unfolds through Luke and Lola Faye comparing notes and filling in information that one or the other did not know at the time. When their conversation and Luke's memories uncovered the whole sad and chilling story, I was in awe of Cook's ability to weave it together so seamlessly.

"'It's Southern gothic, that's for sure,'" Luke tells Lola Faye.'"Families with dark secrets. The war between fathers and sons. Selfishness. Greed. Violence. The debts of the past. Old bills too high to pay, but which keep coming in.'" With Luke's words, Thomas H. Cook neatly sums up his incredible body of work. I simply can't get enough of his books.




Sunday, October 17, 2010

The Reversal, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown; $27.99)

A few books back, Detective Harry Bosch and defense attorney Mickey Haller learned they were half brothers. In Michael Connelly's latest, the two join forces to re-secure the conviction of a man who murdered a young girl some 25 years earlier.

Tests on the child's clothing have shown that the DNA did not come from Jason Jessup, the man convicted of her murder. The court has released him pending a retrial, and the District Attorney has asked Mickey Haller to serve as a special prosecutor. Haller agrees, upon the condition that he can pick his own team. He chooses his ex-wife, Maggie McPherson as his second chair, and Bosch as his investigator.

Jessup is a total creep, and the three know he's guilty. But he's managed to get public sentiment on his side, and there is strong support for letting him go. Bosch has the police department follow Jessup to make see what he's up to, and the case turns personal when he shows up outside of Bosch's house, with the detective's teenaged daughter inside.

Haller, Bosch, and "Maggie McFierce" make a great team, and it was fun to see them work on the same side of the courtroom. As always, Connelly's plotting and pacing are superb. 

Blind Man's Alley, by Justin Peacock (Doubleday; $26.95)

When an accident at New York's Aurora Tower condo kills three workers, attorney Duncan Riley's workload becomes almost exclusively devoted to defending Roth Properties, the developer. The only other case on Duncan's plate is a pro bono case defending Rafael Nazario, a young guy from a public housing project, who, along with his grandmother, is about to be evicted because of a trumped up marijuana case.

Just as the eviction case is about to be dropped, someone murders the security guard who made the accusation against Rafael. A witness claims to have seen Rafael running from the murder, and he's immediately arrested. When Duncan learns that the security guard was employed by the firm that provides security for the Aurora Tower condo project, he expects to be pulled off the murder due to a conflict of interest. So he's perplexed when his boss tells him to defend Nazario on the murder charge, but to get a quick plea. 

Duncan believes in his client's innocence, and wants to find out why Rafael is being framed.  Meanwhile, a newspaper reporter investigating the Aurora Tower accident learns that Roth Properties is trying to force evictions from the public housing project so they can turn it into higher-rent apartments. Her investigation and Duncan's proceed on parallel tracks until finally the two compare notes and work together to expose the Roths' corruption.

Justin Peacock's believable legal thriller takes unscrupulous developers, unprincipled lawyers, and blood-thirsty security consultants and weaves them together into an exciting, terrific whole. I really enjoyed this book.