Last Minute Gift Suggestions for Mystery Lovers

Hear that sound? It’s the clock ticking down the days, hours, and minutes until Christmas morning! Don’t despair—you already know what to get the mystery lovers on your list! There are lots of good books out, some with the ink barely dry. So print out this list, head for the bookstore, and while you’re there, buy yourself a little something, too!

Dead or Alive, by Tom Clancy (Putnam; $28.95) Hot off the press, this huge thriller brings together Jack Ryan and the rest of the Clancy crew to fight a sadistic killer known as the Emir who is intent on destroying the US.

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carré (Viking; $27.95): A young vacationing English couple’s tennis game with a Russian money launderer puts them in the middle of a tug-of-war between the Russian mafia, the City of London, and the competing arms of the British Secret Service.

Port Mortuary, by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam; $27.95): Kay Scarpetta’s training in virtual autopsies come in handy when a young man drops dead near her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with befuddling internal injuries.

Secrets to the Grave, by Tami Hoag (Dutton; $26.95): When a young mother is murdered, the cops in a small California town ask a child advocate to help with the victim’s four-year old child, but her work soon puts her and the child in the path of the killer.

Hollywood Hills, by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown; $26.99: LAPD “Hollywood Nate” Weiss’ stint keeping an eye on the Hollywood Hills mansion of a wealthy widow puts him at odds with her ex-con butler and conniving art dealer.

Christmas Mourning, by Margaret Maron (Grand Central Publishing; $25.99): Judge Deborah Knott and her husband, Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant put their dreams of a homey Christmas on hold when a horrific accident turns out to be not an accident.

What the Night Knows, by Dean Koontz (Random House; $28.00) A series of murders seem to mirror killings some years before, and the homicide cop on the case suspects his own family might be next.

In Too Deep, by Jayne Ann Krentz (Putnam; $25.95): An investigator of the paranormal and his new assistant with powers of intuition must battle the dark energy of the secret powers afoot in their small California town.

And now, two favorite authors of mine whose books were disappointing:  

Worth Dying For, by Lee Child (Delacorte Press; $28): As Jack Reacher passes through a small town in Nebraska, he crosses paths with the Duncans, a villainous family with a deadly secret. The book is almost a parody of Childs’ usual Reacher mysteries, with a ludicrous body count, numerous mountainous Cornhusker football players overcome by our middle-aged hero, and one ridiculous scene of Reacher setting his own badly broken nose.

Djibouti, by Elmore Leonard (Morrow; $26.99): This book is, quite simply, a mess.  The plot, such as it is, has a documentary filmmaker trying to film Somali pirates stumbling upon a plot to blow up a tanker carrying liquid natural gas. Instead of Leonard’s usual brilliant dialogue, the conversations in this one are nearly incomprehensible, and none of the characters are at all memorable. I love Elmore Leonard, but this book was a stinker.

The Hilliker Curse, by James Ellroy (Knopf; $24.95)

I don’t often read memoirs. But I picked up Ellroy’s latest because I have always been interested in his backstory. Briefly, his mother was murdered in the late 50s, and the crime was never solved. As an adult, he hired a homicide cop to try to solve the case, but he never found the killer. I’ve also enjoyed some of his books, particularly The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential.  But some of his other books were pretentious and nearly unintelligible. Those books, along with The Hilliker Curse’s subtitle of My Pursuit of Women, should have been a warning to proceed carefully. But nothing, nothing could have prepared me for the total crazy self-absorption that is this book. 

The plot, in short, is this: Ellroy’s parents divorced when he was about 8 years old. He lived with his mother, Jean Hilliker, who started drinking and sleeping around fairly openly. Jean tells her little boy that his father has been peeping in their windows, watching her with other men.  The younger Ellroy starts peeping in his neighborhood, graduating to breaking and entering the homes of wealthy young women. Eventually, Jean Hilliker asks the now teenaged James if he’d rather live with his father, and hits him when he says yes. He curses her, and she was murdered three months later, “at the apex of my hatred and equally burning lust.”

And so begins a downward spiral of alcohol, drugs, and bottoming-out that, amazingly, didn’t kill him. Instead, he became a writer, achieving no small amount of success. Had that been the end of the story, it would have been a Hallmark Hall of Fame holiday special. But the hook here is Ellroy is obsessed with absolutely everything: a woman named Marcia Sidwell who spoke kindly to him in a laundromat back in 1973; Beethoven; Anne Sofie von Otter; his salivary glands. He works like a dervish, he cuts his skin to release the cancer that isn’t there, he breaks down. 

The overriding element here is sex, rooted in his feelings for his mama.  “Jean Hilliker and I comprise a love story,” he writes.  “It was born of shameful lust and shaped by the power of malediction. Our ending was not and could never be the apprehension of a killer and a treatise on the victim-killer nexus. My precocious sexuality pre-shaped The Curse and preordained the resolution as my overweening desire for women.” The question for me was why any woman, including those he married, returned this desire. He just sounds like a guy with an interesting history who has turned into a dreadful bore.

I’d be lying if I said that I don’t like his writing style: I do. He calls it “loony language loops,” and I can’t find a better way to describe it. It’s rhythmic and staccato and beautiful in its own idiosyncratic way. I’m not sure, though, that, having read this memoir, I’ll ever be able to read another of his novels without feeling a vague ickiness.