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.

 

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.

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. 

The Search, by Nora Roberts (Putnam; $26.95) and Whiplash, by Catherine Coulter (Putnam; $26.95)

I decided to review these two romantic mysteries together, since if you like one you'll like both. (And conversely, if you think one is too sappy, stay away from the other.)

Let's start with Nora Roberts, since she is, of course, the genre queen. Fiona Bristow has made a wonderful life for herself on Orcas Island, in the Pacific Northwest. She trains dogs for a living and, with her own three labs, volunteers on search-and-rescue missions. But life wasn't always so idyllic. Several years back, she was attacked by a serial killer who already had a long track record of killing his victims. Fiona managed to escape, and the killer was captured. Although he's behind bars, the killings have resumed. Someone, it seems, has picked up where the killer left off. Soon it becomes clear that Fiona is the unfinished business, and the new killer wants to finish what his mentor started.

Meanwhile, a handsome stranger has moved to the island. Brooding artist Simon Doyle has an incorrigible puppy that needs training fast. Imagine the reader's surprise when Simon and Fiona fall in love! Who would have ever guessed? (Well, I did, actually. But I've been doing this kind of work for a while!)

There's a reason why Nora Roberts is so wildly popular--she can somehow make a hackneyed theme seem fresh. (Boy meets girl, then conflict drives them apart, then they live happily ever after.) Pick up any of her books and you won't be disappointed; this one is particularly down-to-earth and exciting.

Catherine Coulter's latest wasn't quite as satisfying. Ballet teacher/sleuth Erin Pulasky's latest assignment is to obtain evidence that a drug company has deliberately caused a shortage of their cheaper medicine in order to force cancer patients to take a more expensive (i.e. lucrative) drug. She breaks in to steal documents and makes a clean getaway. In an amazing coincidence, a company official is murdered at roughly the same time and location. The police figure that whoever broke in must have either murdered the guy or seen who did it.

And here's where it gets sort of silly. One of Erin's ballet students has a father who is an FBI agent. He asks Erin, whom he hardly knows, to babysit his daughter for several days while he's out working the case of the murdered drug exec. He then compounds the problem by inviting the other agents on the case over to her house, where they proceed to discuss the case in front of her. One of the agents even invites her along when she's interviewing a witness. Although the mystery itself was sound, the absurdity of the agents' behavior ruined the book for me.

End-of-Summer Wrap-Up

Sorry for all you mystery fans who have wondered where I've been. No, I've not been kidnapped: I was actually on vacation for a while. And yes, even on vacation, I still read mysteries! Because what's the alternative? Non-fiction? Like that's gonna happen!

In my next several blogs, I'll review the books I've read while I was gone. In the meantime, my stack of books to read has grown higher, and some of the books are getting a little ripe. So I'm going to clear out the stack with these short blurbs about the books that look the most interesting.

Crossfire, by Dick Francis and Felix Francis (Putnam; $26.95):  Former jockey Dick Francis, who died earlier this year at the age of 89, left behind a legacy of wonderful mysteries set in the world of horse racing. His latest, written with his son, focuses on a soldier injured in Afghanistan. When Captain Tom Forsyth returns to England to help out on his mother's horse farm, he soon learns that his mother is being blackmailed. While learning to walk with a prosthesis, he must figure out which of his abrasive mother's many enemies are behind the threats before the focus switches to him.

Cure, by Robin Cook (Putnam; $26.95): NYC medical examiner Laurie Montgomery's first case after taking leave to deal with her son's serious illness puts her between organized crime and two nascent biotech firms.

Ice Cold, by Tess Gerritsen (Ballantine Books; $26): Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli learns that medical examiner Maura Isles and some friends have met a terrible fate when their SUV became stranded on a remote Wyoming mountain near the freaky town of Kingdom Come. Spoiler alert: since Rizzoli & Isles is now a series on TNT, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Isles may actually be okay.

Procession of the Dead, by Darren Shan (Grand Central Publishing; $19.99): YA novelist Shan, whose books fly off the shelves at the middle school library where I work, branched out into adult fiction with this strange little book. Capac Raimi can't remember anything from the time before he came to the City, a brutal, lawless place run by the ruthless Cardinal. As the Cardinal's protege, Capac becomes more and more bloodthirsty himself, while trying to understand why friends disappear as if they've never existed. I'm not one for this alternative universe, fantasy stuff, but as such books go, it was a decent summer read, but definitely not for kids.

Live to Tell, by Lisa Gardner (Bantam; $26): Three women facing dark secrets from their past must face threats that hit close to home.

Frankenstein: Lost Souls, by Dean Koontz (Bantam; $27):  Victor Leben, the creature formerly known as Frankenstein, is on a quest to populate a brave new world of superhumans using stem cells, silicon circuitry, and nanotechnology.

The Cobra, by Frederick Forsyth (Putnam; $26.95): Paul Devereaux, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division teams up with Army hero Cal Dexter to beat the cocaine industry using any means possible.

In Harm's Way, by Ridley Pearson (Putnam; $25.95):  Something's up in Sun Valley, Idaho, and sheriff Walt Fleming's not at all sure what's going on. A violent former football player has been seen in the area. A woman he's fond of might have killed a guy, or maybe the killer was a damaged young woman whom everyone in the community wants to protect. Some rich playboys are causing trouble, and a marauding bear is loose, as well. Fleming's chances of untangling the mess become easier when Seattle homicide detective Lou Boldt comes to town to help.

Six Graves to Munich, by Mario Puzo, writing as Mario Cleri (New American Library; $14):  As a captured intelligence officer in World War II, Michael Rogan and his family were subjected to indescribable horror. Now he wants to find and punish those responsible. Puzo wrote this book in 1967, two years before The Godfather, but the book quickly went out of print. According to the press packet, the book was "found by Puzo's longtime Polish publisher, Albatros, and is coming back into print." One wonders why it took so long for the publisher to "find" the book and capitalize upon Puzo's success. It must have been really, really lost.

The Other Side of the Door, by Nicci French (Minotaur Books; $25.99): When a friend is murdered, a music teacher who had hoped to spend the summer making music with friends finds a little more drama than she'd expected.

Star Island, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf; $26.95)

I think I must have the summertime blues.  I just haven't found much to love about the season's new books. Case in point is Carl Hiaasen's latest.  Normally, I find Hiaasen to be laugh-out-loud fun. This time, I just found his characters to be tiresome.

The problem might be his subject matter. Is there anything more boring than a no-talent pop-culture figure's journey of self-destruction? The train wreck here is 22-year-old Cherry Pye (nee Cheryl Bunterman), who is trying hard to rekindle the success she found at age 15 with her breakout album "Touch Me Like You Mean It" on Jailbait Records. Unfortunately, Cherry (who insists that she now wants to be called Cherish) has spiraled into a sordid frenzy for alcohol and any drug she can lay her hands on. This behavior, naturally, would drive away the tweens who currently love her, so her peeps have hired a look-alike actress, Ann Delusia, to serve as her double whenever the real Cherry Pye is too messed up to be seen in public.

When a desperate paparazzo named Bang Abbott kidnaps Ann--thinking it's Cherry--the pop star's parasitic people face a dilemma. After all, it wasn't even Cherry who was kidnapped. Bang ups the ante by threatening to release some compromising pictures of Ann posing as Cherry, and it's fun to watch everyone try to turn the situation to their own avaricious advantage.

The mayhem is increased by the re-introduction of some favorite characters from previous books. Skink, the former governor of Florida who makes routine appearances in Hiaasen's books, meets Ann and falls into paternal love with her, going so far as to clean up his act and put on a Hermes shirt and a suit by Ermenegilo Zegna. Chemo, the walking dermatology-disaster from Skin Tight who, after his arm was bitten off by a barracuda, had it replaced by a weed whacker, serves as Cherry's bodyguard.  I suspect the overly-botoxed publicists who underwent surgery to become identical twins may have made an appearance in a previous book as well.

As with many of Hiaasen's books, the normal, honorable character--in this case, Ann--is truly heroic, able to double-cross the greedy low-lifes that add the color. But the story has, as its root, Cherry Pye's destruction from her addiction to pills and alcohol. Call me a prude, but I find the real-life behavior of Brittany, Lindsay and Paris to be pathetic and tragic, rather than funny.  Hiaasen's books usually focus on retribution descending on those who are destroying the Everglades. That is a subject I can care about a lot more than I care about flash-in-the-pan rock stars killing themselves with drugs while their dysfunctional parents and hangers-on look the other way. 

Dead Line, by Stella Rimington (Knopf; $25.95)

Stella Rimington's latest shows that she's no flash in the pan. The former head of Britain's MI5 turned to writing when she retired. Her suspenseful plots are made all the more realistic by her insider's knowledge of spycraft.

With her boss out of commission nursing his dying wife, MI5 agent Liz Carlyle is charged with the daunting task of thwarting a plot by Syrian malcontents intent on disrupting a peace conference at a Scottish golf resort. The stakes are all the higher when it is announced that both the British prime minister and the US president will attend. As if she didn't already have her hands full, a former colleague asks Liz to investigate a charming guy who is paying unusual attention to the colleague's naive and wealthy mother-in-law.  This nail-biter has it all: spy vs. spy, gold-diggers preying on lonely women, and foreign agents snaring their quarry in an old fashioned "honey trap." This is Rimington's fourth spy thriller, and it's a doozy--as good, if not better, than her previous three.

In the Name of Honor, by Richard North Patterson (Henry Holt; $26)

It's about time! After several misfires, Richard North Patterson has written a book that equals or betters anything he's written before. In the Name of Honor has it all: fascinating, unpredictable characters; gripping courtroom drama; and a crackerjack twist that adds complexity and moral conflict to what was already a multi-layered plot.

Here's the back story. Captain Paul Terry of the Army's JAG Corps is two months from starting a lucrative new job with a civilian law firm when he's assigned to be defense counsel on a sticky case: an Army lieutenant accused of shooting his former commanding officer. The relationships are very confusing, so stay with me here: We've got two Army families, the McCarrans and the Gallaghers. The dads are best friends at West Point, but only Anthony McCarran comes back from Viet Nam alive. His wife dies young. So the Gallaghers and McCarrans are, for all intents and purposes, one family. Okay, fast forward. Anthony McCarran is now a general, in line to be named chairman of the joint chiefs. Brian McCarran has followed the family tradition of joining the Army, while his sister Meg is a civilian attorney. Their quasi-sister, Kate Gallagher, is married to Captain Joe D'Abruzzo, who is also'coincidentally (and conveniently for the plot) Brian's commanding officer in Iraq. McCarran and D'Abruzzo return to the states, and each is a changed man. D'Abruzzo has become violent and beats Kate Gallagher, even to the extent of holding a gun to her head. She asks Brian McCarran for help. He removes the gun from the D'Abruzzo house. D'Abruzzo realizes the gun is missing, goes to Brian McCarran's apartment, looks like he's going to attack, and Brian McCarran shoots him dead.   

And that's when the story begins. Captain Terry is charged with trying to get Brian McCarran off. Self-defense is a tough sell, since D'Abruzzo was shot in the back. Terry suspects that something happened in Iraq that changed both McCarran and D'Abruzzo and might have influenced the shooting. McCarran won't talk about his experiences, nor is he particularly forthcoming about other details that Terry needs to know in order to properly defend him. Working closely with Meg McCarran, Terry probes deeper and deeper until he finally realizes that the family secrets and shifting dynamics of the intertwined McCarran and Gallagher families form a force larger than he can surmount. 

The story is told primarily through dialogue and courtroom testimony, and the real-time revelations add to the suspense. In some of his previous books, Patterson has spent as much time on the soap box as on the plot. There's none of that in this book: it's just a terrific, perfectly crafted courtroom thriller.

The Lion, by Nelson DeMille (Grand Central Publishing; $27.99)

Some of Nelson DeMille's books are so great that I despair when I read the last page; others are so annoying that I rue the day I opened them. The Gold Coast is an example of the former, while its sequel, The Gate House, is a prime example of the latter.

His latest just manages to skirt the line. John Corey, his recurring character, can't resist being the juvenile cut-up he was when I first encountered him in Plum Island (perhaps my favorite of DeMille's books).  Fortunately, the plot is almost good enough that one can skip Corey's sophomoric one-liners and still enjoy the story.

Former NYPD detective Corey and his wife, FBI agent Kate Mayfield, both work for the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force, a joint operation between the two agencies. They met when they partnered up in The Lion's Game, in which they chased Libyan terrorist Asad Khalil in his murderous trail across the country.  Khalil's plan was to kill the pilots responsible for the bombs that took out his family many years ago. He disappeared before he finished, but Corey always knew he'd be back.

It is soon evident that Corey and Mayfield are at the top of Khalil's to-do list. But they are not alone. Khalil does not let human emotions get in the way of his jihad. Soon bodies begin turning up, many of which belonged to fellow Muslims who Khalil killed after they helped him with the logistics of his latest terrorist activities. Corey and Mayfield believe that those in the Middle East who financed Khalil's personal vengeance would only do so if he agreed to also commit a 9/11 type atrocity. The question is whether the agents can find the killer before he's able to pull off a horrifying event. The NYPD and FBI want to capture and question the killer, but Corey just wants to kill him.

The plot is very tense, but suffers when a main character takes an unnecessary risk that the reader knows will be disastrous. (You know how you laugh at the stupidity of the teenage babysitter in a slasher film who goes into the basement to investigate a noise? I laughed at this character's similar stupidity. It's that unbelievable.)  Ultimately, the book made me angry. I'm a major fan of DeMille, but my loyalty is waning. He is so incredibly talented, and his early books were so enjoyable, that it's a tragic waste that he's ruined his later books by his characters' off-putting immaturity.  One only hopes that someday he'll realize how much better his books would be without the quips.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin (Ballantine Books; $27)

What must it feel like to receive a contract for $3.75 million for three books, only one of which you’ve written, plus an additional $1.75 million for the film rights? According to Publisher’s Weekly, that’s the enviable position of Justin Cronin, English professor at Rice University, whose The Passage, its publisher hopes, may be the blockbuster novel of the summer. 

I must confess that knowing that the publisher paid an advance this huge biased me against the book from the get-go. Particularly since the book is about vampires. After all, I have vowed to never read, much less review, another vampire book.

But the vampires in this book are different. No urbane, sexy, dreamy-eyed undead here: instead, these vampires—called “virals”—are killing machines, soulless beings that resulted from a science experiment gone horribly wrong.

The start of the book was confusing, but the set up is this: four terminal cancer patients on an ecotour in the jungle contract a mystery virus that cures them. The scientists studying them learned that something in the virus had reset their thymus glands. Physically, they were as fit as teenagers. Although the patients eventually died, the main scientist figures this virus promises to be the ultimate prize: a way to cure everything. But before it can be put into general use, he needs to test it on human subjects. So of course he turns to killers on death row. (Okay, is there ANY doubt that this will end badly?!) Just to mix things up, he also selects a 6-year-old abandoned girl named Amy. The subjects are kept in a Colorado lab. Where, naturally, something goes horribly, terribly wrong—and the infected subjects escape, wreaking havoc throughout the land.

Flash forward umpteen years. The original subjects infected people, who infected others, and now some 42 million virals roam the earth. (In the good news, however, apparently that "staying young" part of the virus actually worked, since they only die if they’re shot or skewered in a specific spot on their chests.) The few remaining humans live in a highly organized colony. They keep out the virals by burning floodlights all night, since the virals can’t take the light. But in a really neat twist, the batteries are starting to run out and they need to find more. The members of the colony, located in the country that used to be known as California, don’t know if there are other human colonies elsewhere, or if they can reach an outpost to find what they need without being slaughtered when the sun goes down. 

But remember Amy? She shows up at the colony and there’s something. . .not quite right about her. For instance, there’s a radio transmitter embedded in her neck that broadcasts a signal that indicates that she needs to go to Colorado. So a band of survivors decide to walk there. They pass through Las Vegas, hit the casinos (actually, they do, in a very visual scene quite obviously written for its cinematic appeal) and hunker down wherever they find a safe spot.  And some 770 pages later, the book ends with a bang.

But now, the true test. Was it worth the incredible sum that  the publisher paid? Yes and no. The core story is pretty imaginative. The post-apocalyptic society thing was very creative, chilling, and believable. However, Cronin takes far too long to set up each stage of the story—sometimes over a hundred pages or so. Far too many sections are written without a word of dialogue or action, and it just gets boring. The voyage to Colorado and back to California, in particular, drag on about as long as it would have taken to bike the route. Had the book been 350 pages long? It would have been terrific.

Storm Prey, by John Sandford (Putnam; $27.95)

Those of you who have read my column for the past 20 years know that John Sandford is one of my most favorite authors. I can't remember ever reading a bad Prey book. It's possible that some are better than others; however, because each of them is so much better than 95 percent of the mysteries being published, they all shine. His latest is no exception: in fact, one fellow Sandford fan told me she thinks it is his best yet, and I'm not about to argue with her.

Three of the most hapless crooks you've ever met rob a hospital pharmacy with the help of a cocaine-addicted doctor. The pharmacy worker goes for his cell phone, and one of the bad guys kicks him. Unfortunately, the older guy takes Coumadin, a blood thinner, and by the time he gets to the ER, he's a goner. He managed to scratch one of the thieves so the cops can use the skin (i.e.DNA) found under his fingernails to identify the guy he scratched. 

Normally, the robbery would be a case for the Minneapolis cops. But a surgeon at the hospital got a look at the bad guys as they drove out of the parking lot after pulling the job. The surgeon, Weather Karkinnen, as Sandford fans know, is married to Lucas Davenport of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which means that Lucas and his merry band take over the case. Weather is part of a team of surgeons working to separate conjoined twins. Lucas makes sure she's protected, usually by Virgil Flowers, who has lately starred in his own Sandford series.

Kicking the pharmacist was only the first of many stupid mistakes the robbers make, each of which gets them deeper in trouble. "'The whole problem was, we're stupid people,'" one of the bad guys tells Lucas. "'That's what caused all this trouble. . .We sure as shit weren't smart enough to pull off a big-time robbery. . . I'm stupid. I know that. Everybody knows that.'"

As always, Sandford blends perfect plotting with memorable characters and enough cop banter to make me crack a smile more than once. The only thing I dislike about reading one of his Prey mysteries is that they go by too fast, and I have to wait a whole year for the next. So is Storm Prey the best of the best? It may well be.

The Whole World, by Emily Winslow (Random House; $25)

So these two American college students, Polly and Liv, meet up at Cambridge. Both have family issues: Polly is just starting to recover from the ghastly incident that landed her father in jail. Liv's father, meanwhile, lost his $4 million fortune when the dot-com bubble burst and she can't quite afford the place. She takes a job sorting old photos for Professor Gretchen Paul, who is writing a biography of her novelist mother, but is going blind.

Both Polly and Liv fall for Nick, a graduate student in paleobiology. "He's so cute!" Liv shrieks. "Do you think he likes me?" Actually, he chooses Polly, but when he kisses her, she throws up. Not, apparently, from his lack of kissing skill, but because being with him reminds her of her family tragedy. Nick, the cad, nurses his hurt ego by hooking up with Liv instead, but then is obvious about wanting to have nothing more to do with her.

Then Nick disappears.

So who did it? Polly's mother, who shows up in Cambridge and starts stalking her daughter's friends, warning them of Polly's past? Liv, who flies into a jealous rage when she learns on the news that Nick had been with Polly before their tryst?

Or is the actual mystery in this book not related to Nick at all?

Winslow's writing is fine, and she manages to sustain a level of hysteria that makes The Whole World read as if it were written by a Brit, rather than by an American living in Cambridge, which she currently is. My main complaint is that the mystery started down one path and then verged onto another. The misdirection made it seem like Winslow had started one mystery and then changed her mind. The book would have been stronger had she kept to one or the other. That being said, she shows great promise as a writer.

Stieg Larsson's Trilogy

I am happy to report that I am finally done with Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who trilogy. (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest; Knopf.) I reviewed Dragon Tattoo in 2008, and said at the time, "The story has everything: a great setting, very human characters, and a plot that becomes more intriguing with every turn of the page." I actually was surprised that the book became such a runaway best seller. It was a solid mystery, but nothing about it seemed destined to move it to the stratosphere.

But I saw the movie earlier this year, and really liked it. There were details in the movie that I hadn't remembered from the first book, so I decided to read the next book to see if those details were explained. Once I was done, I figured I may as well finish the trilogy. This review focuses on the second and third books.

Dragon Tattoo was a tidy little classic "locked room" mystery (though the "room" was actually a remote Swedish island cut off by a closed bridge.) Played with Fire and Hornet's Nest are actually one overly long political thriller separated into two books. Unfortunately, the quality of Larsson's writing decreases with each book. By the time I was about half way through Hornet's Nest, I had to force myself to concentrate. The books moved too slowly, and were filled with long passages that did nothing to further the plot. I defy anyone to find sentences like this interesting: "He got into his Volvo and drove towards the city but turned off to go across Stora Essingen and Grondal into Sodermalm. He drove down Hornsgatan and across to Bellmansgatan via Brannkyrkagatan. He turned left onto Tavastgatan at the Bishop's Arms pub and parked at the corner." And it's not the Swedish street names: substitute Rockville Pike or Main Street and the passage is just as boring. 

The two books concentrate on computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, the young woman referred to in the titles of the three books. (Spoiler alert: if you haven't read either of the first two books, you should probably skip the rest of this paragraph.) Mikael Blomkvist's magazine is about to run an expose on a sex trafficking scandal involving some highly placed Swedish officials when someone murders the reporters working on the story. Lisbeth's fingerprints are on the gun, which belongs to the perverted creep of a lawyer who had been appointed as her guardian years ago. The lawyer is also dead, and all signs point to Salander as a triple murderer.  There are lots of story lines, but the main one is that the Swedish security police have been committing some heinous crimes in their attempts to protect a really sicko Russian defector. The defector turns out to have played a role in Salander's past.

With better editing, the books could have been stronger. The final third of Hornet's Nest is actually quite compelling, but it takes too long to get there.  It is also absurdly over the top when it comes to violence. Once character is shot in the brain but makes a full recovery, and another tries to commit suicide by shooting himself in the face, but does not die. One character is impervious to pain, and when his feet are nailed to a floor with a nail gun, his biggest problem is losing his balance. The violence, particularly that which is perpetrated by men against women, is pretty gratuitous.

It seems that most everyone I know is reading one of Larsson's books right now. Of all the books I've ever reviewed, I think there may have only been one that I knew, absolutely knew, would be a blockbuster, and that was Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Certainly, if anyone had ever asked me if I thought The Girl Who series would be crazy popular I would have said it was doubtful. Too bad Larsson died before he could see how the rest of the world (everyone besides me, that is!)  is enjoying his books.

Summer Reading--Suggestions, Anyone?

So one of my fans posted his list of his planned summer reading and asked me what was on my list. (Click on the "comments" link under the posting for Strip to read his posting.)

I just finished The Girl who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson, and I'm planning to read The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I have to say that I don't totally love this series--I think it would have been stronger with better editing, and I'm not sure why the series is as popular as it is. I'm not even sure why I'm continuing to read the trilogy, except that I hate leaving things half done. I plan to blog about the series when I've finished Hornet's Nest.I actually find the drama surrounding Stieg Larsson to be as interesting as the books themselves.

The other mysteries stacked up on my "possible reads" shelf include:

The Big Bang, by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $25).  Mike Hammer and the lovely Velda take on the NYC drug trade. Outlined by Spillane in the 60s and finished by Max Allan Collins, one of the most versatile and talented writers to come down the pike. 


So Cold the River, by Michael Koryta (Little, Brown; $24.99). A filmmaker visiting begins having hallucinations that pull him into the evil history of a small town.

The Taken, by Inger Ash Wolfe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $25). Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef's latest case, a body in a tourist-area lake, focuses on the dangers of obsessive love.

The Whisperers, by John Connolly (Atria Books; $26): Private detective Charlie Parker investigates a band of former soldiers involved in a nefarious smuggling operation.

Damaged, by Alex Kava (Doubleday; $24.95): FBI profiler Maggie O'Dell's latest hunt for a killer puts her in the path of a hurricane.

Blood Oath, by Christopher Farnsworth (Putnam; $24.95). Although I have sworn not to read any vampire or zombie stories, now that they are so annoyingly, unimaginatively ubiquitous, I may relent on this one, since it's a political thriller about the president's vampire.

Strip, by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $26)

 A bar owner in Chicago witnesses a hit ordered by an OC boss. The feds relocate him, rename him Joe Carver, sell his bar and house, and send him a fat check for the proceeds. Joe moves to LA and tries to meet women by flashing some of the cash.

Meanwhile, a masked gunman robs strip club magnate Manco Kapak of his clubs' profits as he was making a night deposit.  He instructs his employees to learn if anyone has been seen holding an unusual amount of money. In no time, the word comes back that Joe Carver must be the guy.  Kapak orders a hit on Carver to signal to others not to mess with him.

The actual robber, however, was Jefferson Davis Falkins, a low-life, lying loser. When the Kapak money runs out, Jeff decides to hit him again. He brags to a woman named Carrie what he's planning. Carrie begs to go along, playing to his vanity ("I always needed a really hot, stupid guy, but never knew it until tonight.") Too bad for Jeff, Carrie turns out to be a danger addict. ("Thank you so much," she says after the robbery. "This is the best night of my whole life!")  Soon Falkins realizes that instead of being the woman of his dreams, Carrie is actually insane and that he's in way over his head.

The latest robbery, of course, inflames Kapak's rage against Joe Carver. Carver tries to prove he's not the robber, but when that doesn't work, decides to extract some payback from Kapak for making his life miserable. Kapak also has his hands full dealing with a flashy drug dealer who uses the strip clubs to launder funds. And on top of everything, the cop on the case is a bigamist facing college tuition for the oldest child in each of his (unsuspecting) families.

I loved this book. The characters were engaging and the clever dialogue kept the story hopping. Perry's convoluted plot held together well, and he tied up all the loose ends. I hate comparing authors, because doing so implies a lack of originality on the part of the author being described. But I will say this: if you enjoy Elmore Leonard's books, you'll enjoy Strip, because Perry writes with a similar dry wit and subtlety. This was terrific.

61 Hours, by Lee Child (Delacorte Press; $28)

Lee Child is one of those terrific authors who never disappoint. His main character, Jack Reacher, is a homeless guy with panache. He breezes into a town, rights the wrongs, breaks a heart or two, and moves on again.

In this latest, Reacher hops a ride on a tour bus filled with older folk from Seattle enjoying the sights of South Dakota in the dead of winter. On its way to Mount Rushmore, the bus skids and lands in a ditch. The passengers are bused into Bolton, a small town whose main claim to fame was its successful bid to land a new prison and all the jobs that resulted.

But all is not peaceful up there on the northern plains. A 100-member motorcycle gang living on an abandoned army base outside of town is dealing methamphetamine. Lots of it. A big buyer from Chicago came to town and a witness clearly saw him buy some product from one of the bikers. Now the witness, a 70-something librarian, is a sitting duck. The cops know someone is coming soon to kill her. They at first suspect that Reacher is the hitman. When he convinces them that he's not the guy, they enlist his help to protect the witness and figure out just what is going on at the biker's camp. Throughout it all, snow and record cold present a challenge to those not used to the extreme weather.

Lee Child's books are so readable, I give him a pass for the flaws in his books. There were a few scenes in this book that left me saying, "Huh? Where did THAT come from?" It's always possible that I missed something, but some of these details were pretty significant. I was also a bit disappointed to have figured the mystery out way early in the book. I much prefer to be kept guessing until the end.

Please don't let these snarky criticisms dissuade you from reading Lee Child. Trust me, there are few better.    

Bee Books by Laurie R. King

The only good thing about a blog with only a handful of followers is that I pretty much know each one personally! So that's how I know that at least two of my "fans" are beekeepers. (Jeff: meet Scott! Scott, meet Jeff! Jeff: join the blog!) See, if I had hundreds of fans, this blog wouldn't be nearly so friendly!

You might be wondering why I have this bee in my bonnet. I just received two books by Laurie R. King, who writes a series of mysteries about Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes. Beekeeping makes an appearance in both The Language of Bees (Bantam; $15; paperback) and The God of the Hive (Bantam; $25). One warning, though: although both have bee-related titles, and a disappearing hive figures in at least the first of the two, murder--not beekeeping--is the major focus of both books.  I haven't read either book, but I have read Laurie R. King in the distant past. Her books are satisfying and well-crafted.

Still Midnight, by Denise Mina (Little, Brown; $24.99)

Two masked men enter the well-kept home of the Anwar family, just back from Ramadan prayers at the mosque. The men demand to see "Bob," and when none of the Anwars know who they mean, grab Aamir Anwar, the patriarch of the family, demanding two million pounds for his release and saying the kidnapping was payback for Afghanistan. In the melee, the hapless losers accidentally shoot the hand off of the Anwars' teenaged daughter.

Glaswegian detective Alex Morrow, who rubs virtually everyone the wrong way, should get the high profile case. But it is instead assigned to DS Bannerman, a suck-up colleague with shoddy police skills but excellent skills at self-promotion.  Each of Bannerman's missed clues and mishandled interrogations reduce the chances of recovering Mr. Anwar alive. When it becomes obvious that the case is a nearly unsolvable mess, Bannerman takes sick leave, forcing Morrow to soldier on alone and solve the case. Alex's job is made more difficult by family ties she would prefer her police department colleagues not know about.

Denise Mina's latest includes the elements we've come to expect from this excellent writer: a gritty portrayal of Glasgow, an unlikable woman who forces others to take her seriously, and a great plot with a satisfying ending.  I've liked her books since first reading her Garnethill trilogy, but a warning: these books are not for those who shrink from really graphic, vulgar language. She freely throws around a word that starts with "c" that is about the last taboo, at least in the US.

New Books: March 2010

Books are stacking up on my shelves, silent evidence that I'm not reading fast enough. I know I can't get to them all, but some by popular authors look like they could be pretty good. Instead of continuing to feel guilty, I'm going to just list them here with a short blurb describing the plot. If you read any of them and find they weren't worth your time, well--sorry! 

Deception, by Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine Books; $28): Psychologist Alex Delaware works with LA detective Milo Sturgis on the murder of young teacher at one of LA's most prestigious schools. A DVD found near her body contains the record of her 18-month nightmare of abuse at the hands of three fellow teachers.

Deep Shadow, by Randy Wayne White (Putnam; $25.95): South Florida jack-of-all-water-trades Doc Ford is diving in a safe little lake when a falling rock ledge traps two of his friends. He comes up to try to get help, but runs into two low-lifes who want Doc to help them dive to the bottom of the lake to salvage a wrecked plane allegedly filled with Cuban gold. With the lives of his pals in the balance, Doc is, as usual, in a mess of hot Florida trouble.

Capitol Betrayal, by William Bernhardt (Ballantine Books; $26): Former senator Ben Kincaid is meeting with the president when a threat to Washington forces their evacuation, along with the president's advisors, to the secure underground bunker. There they learn that a foreign dictator has hacked into the US nuclear defense system and will blow the US to smithereens unless the president does his bidding.

Sleepless, by Charlie Huston (Ballantine Books; $25): When insomnia infects the Los Angeles population. LAPD detective Parker Hess goes undercover to investigate the pharmaceutical company behind Dreamer, the only drug that can help victims sleep. I like Charlie Huston. His Joe Pitt vampire books are among the very, very few vampire books that I read. His Already Dead was terrific.

Rules of Vengeance, by Christopher Reich (Doubleday; $25.95): The plan for a romantic weekend away for Doctors without Borders physician Jonathan Ransom and his secret-agent wife, Emma, come to a bloody end in a terrorist attack. Now Emma is missing, and Jonathan is threatened with imprisonment unless he aids in her capture. His only chance is to think like a spy and uncover what she's been cooking up. Soon he learns that she's in far deeper than he realized and he's been an unwitting player. My husband really liked this book.

Kisser, by Stuart Woods (Putnam; $25.95): Lawyer Stone Barrington's latest assignment, protecting a lip model (seriously!), puts him in the New York world of art, million-dollar co-ops, and family scandals.

Blood Ties, by Kay Hooper (Bantam; $26): Special Agent Hollis Templeton uses her psychic abilities to help the FBI's Special Crimes Unit solve a series of brutal murders.

Treasure Hunt, by John Lescroart (Dutton; $26.95) San Francisco detective Mickey Dade investigates the murder of Dominic Como, a prominent activist, who may have been involved in some unseemly goings-on.  

Breathless, by Dean Koontz (Bantam; $28.00): Okay, I read the flyleaf, and I can't begin to describe what this one is about. There's a dog, twins, a veterinarian, the government, a vagrant, chaos theory--I have no clue. I consider it a very bad sign when I can't understand the publisher's description of a book's plot.

Dick Francis, 1920-2010

Dick Francis, one of my favorite authors, died on February 14 at the age of 89. He had been ailing for some time.  He wrote his first mystery, Dead Cert, in 1962; in the nearly 50 intervening years, he wrote more than 40 books. The Washington Post reported that his books sold more than 60 million copies.

I first discovered Dick Francis when I began reading a copy of Banker left unguarded at a family gathering by Louis Massery, my late brother-in-law. I liked it so much that I began working through Francis' previous books, and then reading each new book he wrote. I loved how, despite being murder mysteries, the books had a gentleness to them. His male characters were strong, but not aggressive; cautious, but brave; and sweetly persistent in getting the girl. 

As most all of his fans know, he started out as a jockey, becoming so successful that in 1953 he was chosen to ride the Queen Mother's horses in British races. Riding Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National, the 35-year-old Francis was 50 yards from winning when the horse inexplicably went down. Some theorize that the horse was startled by the roar of the crowd; others thought he tried to jump a "phantom fence." Whatever the cause of the collapse, Francis' disappointment and injuries from previous falls made him hang up his racing career for good. He wrote an autobiography, and then began writing racing-related mysteries. 

Several years ago, I interviewed Mr. Francis when he came here to Washington, DC, for a book tour. I met him in his suite at a ritzy downtown hotel. He was older than he looked on book jackets and disarmingly sweet--not at all what I had expected of a wildly successful murder mystery writer. He told me that he had never been educated, having dropped out of school to be a jockey. He said that he would write his books in a very rough fashion, and then his wife, Mary, who had a university degree, would fix them up.

In an obit appearing in the Daily Mail's online edition, Graham Lord, Francis' biographer, said that it was actually Mary, and not Dick Francis, who wrote the books. According to Lord:

Mary was a crucial part of the thriller-writing 'team'. Although partly paralysed by polio and suffering chronic asthma and bronchitis, she researched all the books - in the process becoming a computer expert, photographer, accountant, painter and wine buff, even qualifying as a pilot for the book Flying Finish.

Indeed, as his biographer, I am convinced that Francis (who was poorly educated and not at all literary) did not write the books himself. I am sure that they were written by his clever, literate, university-educated wife but published under his name because as a famous jockey he would sell more copies.

In 1980, Mary told me: 'Yes, Dick would like me to have all the credit for them, but believe me, it's much better for everyone, including the readers, to think that he writes them because they're taut, masculine books that might otherwise lose their credibility.'

When I revealed the truth in my double biography of the Francises in 1999, the Mail on Sunday reported that Mary was 'evasive when asked bluntly whether she is the true author.

She said equivocally, "It is not exactly true to say that I write Dick's books ... I could get him to write you a letter and you would see he can write". The amount of sharing we do is, to my mind, sort of private. We would really like people not to press us too hard on this".' The truth is that Dick Francis hated writing and took little pleasure in the success of the books. His first love was horses and he once said: 'My life ended when I stopped racing.'

Several years ago, Dick Francis and Mary moved to the Cayman Islands.  Mary died in 2000, and for several years, Dick did not write any more books.  Recently, he began writing with his son, Felix. Their third collaboration, Even Money, came out in 2009. It centered on betting on horse racing, but also included a long-lost father, a wife with mental illness, and various other plots and subplots. The overly-busy story had a Dick Francis-like feel, but without Mary's influence, it just wasn't the same. 

The First Rule, by Robert Crais (Putnam; $26.95)

I blow hot and cold on Robert Crais. He can always be counted on for a solid detective story, and when I'm looking for a solid detective yarn, I know I can count on his LA-based Elvis Cole series to deliver. But he's no John Sandford or Michael Connelly. I don't yearn for his books, the way I do theirs.

His latest focuses not on Cole, but on his sidekick, Joe Pike. The story is good, but Pike himself is a caricature.  Pike learns from some cops that an old friend, fellow mercenary Frank Meyer, has been killed in a home invasion, along with his wife, young boys, and the nanny.  The cops think Frank must have been involved in something nefarious, because the crime fit the pattern of six previous home invasion/murders where the victim was also a criminal. But Frank lived a clean life, or so Pike thinks.  He sets out to learn why Frank was targeted and to wreak vengeance on those who killed his guy.

Pike has always been the strong, silent type, which is okay for a sidekick, but doesn't work so well for a main character. It's hard to care about a character who refuses to speak. This is a guy who has been on "missions as long as a week, and never uttered a word." A good guy to have watching your back, but not very compelling as a main character. He does warm up a bit when he meets a pit bull and a baby, but these flashes of humanity are too rare to compensate for the over-the-top taciturnity. (If that's not a word, it should be.)

Recent comments

Two comments from mystery lover DB:

1.  Alan Furst has a new title coming out in June, titled Spies of the Balkans. He is always worth a read. Great atmosphere. DB

2.  Has anyone heard anything about Robert Harris' new title Conspirata? I have enjoyed his earlier works. DB

Twisted Tree, by Kent Meyers (Houghton Mifflin;$24)

I have to admit, the cover of this book initially kept me from reading it. The photo of a horse, taken at sunset or sunrise, seemed more like something trying to appeal to the tweens who watch Saddle Club on Discovery Kids than to grownups looking for a good read.  And it wasn't just the cover art that was off-putting: the jacket describes the plot as revolving around the kidnapping and murder of a young woman suffering from anorexia. Like many people, I generally hate books in which children or teens are the victims.  So it's a wonder that I read the book at all.

But I'm so very glad that I did. Twisted Tree is one of the best books I've read in a long while.  I'm hard pressed to choose what aspect of the book I liked the most: the structure, the setting, the language, or the characters.  The weakest part, actually, is the murder plot.  It ended up being almost unnecessary, and the book would have been stronger had Meyers found some other way to unify the vignettes that comprise the book.

So here's the set-up.  Hayley Jo Zimmerman is slowly starving herself, with the encouragement of the people she's met on a "pro-Ana" website. (These are sites on which, unbelievably, anorexics support each other in their quest to continue to lose weight.) Hayley Jo doesn't know that the virtual friend with whom she's become closest (and shared a fatal amount of identifying information) is actually a fat creep who has been murdering other anorexics in the northern plains. By the end of the first chapter, Hayley Jo is basically out of the book.

Each subsequent chapter focuses on someone else living in the area around Twisted Tree, South Dakota. Although each person has had some tangential contact with Hayley Jo in her short lifetime, she is certainly not central to the action. There's the story of Angela Morrison, a young bride (later, the mother of Hayley Jo's best friend) who slowly goes crazy living on a rattlesnake-infested ranch with her husband Brock. Or Sophie Lawrence, who looks to all of Twisted Tree like a saint for tending to her disabled stepfather, while actually tormenting him in private to make up for how he abused her when she was a girl. And one of my favorites: crazy Shane Valen, whose great-grandfather settled the land, and who--well, I'm not going to give his story away.  ("The thing about weird sonsabitches is they stick to their weird," the sheriff muses about Shane. "You can trust them. Normal people keep their weird hid, so if it ever gets out you have no idea where it'll go.")

The aspect of the book that I found the most amazing, however, is how each detail, no matter how small, ends up being significant in some way.  A marble, two dusty golf bags, some old names carved in a school desk--they appear, and reappear, in a way that speaks to Kent Meyers' precision and--for lack of a better word--control over his writing. I cannot even contemplate the effort it must take to keep track of so many of what might just seem like throw-away details. It reminded me of the movie Crash, one of my favorites, where all the stories end up with overlapping details that you don't even pick up on until you see the movie for a second time. In a similar fashion, my second reading of Twisted Tree unearthed details that I missed the first time because I hadn't realized their significance.

If I were Kent Meyers, I would demand that my publisher change the cover art, rewrite the flyleaf, and pay for a huge book tour in which the book gets as much publicity as is possible. This book simply blew me away.

Doors Open, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown; $24.99)

Three guys, three different reasons to steal priceless art.  Former software whiz kid Mike MacKenzie can buy most anything he wants, but he's bored, restless, and looking for adventure.  Boring, divorced banker Allan Cruickshank needs cash to pay for his sons to attend their outrageously expensive private school.  And Professor Robert Gissing has a cause: the "repatriation" of art being stored or displayed privately.

The three joke about how to go about stealing art from the storage rooms of Scotland's National Gallery, but soon their talk moves from fantasy to an actual plan. They can't pull it off on their own, however, and turn for help to Chib Calloway, a rough type with ready access to extra manpower.  Adding Chib to the caper is a mistake-he's a cutthroat, take-no-prisoners gangster with money problems.  Add an art student with a demanding girlfriend, a detective trying for advancement, a Hell's Angel nicknamed Hate (due probably to the fact that both of his hands are tattooed with the word) to the mix and the plot just gets better and better.

In 2007, Ian Rankin retired Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus after more than 20 books written over 20 years.  Doors Open, a stand-alone mystery, was published as a 14-week story in the New York Times Magazine.  The story's origin as a series is clear from each chapter's cliff-hanger ending. Rankin is beloved among mystery fans on both sides of the pond. Even if you thought Rebus was a bit of a crank, you'll love his latest.  

Poe No-Show

There's a real mystery afoot in Baltimore this week. For the past 60 years, a mysterious figure has visited the grave of Edgar Allan Poe on January 20, his birthday, leaving three roses and a half-full bottle of cognac. 

This year, no one came.

According to the Washington Post, the Baltimore Evening Sun first reported on the mysterious offerings in 1949.  The tradition has continued since then, with the identity of the stranger the subject of intense speculation on the part of Poe fans.  One "suspect" mentioned fairly recently is Baltimore poet/performance artist David Franks, who, according to the Post, "once photocopied his private parts on a Xerox machine at a Social Security office and put the images on display. Decades ago, he posed as a disabled poet in a wheelchair, solicited donations from the crowd, then thanked everyone and got up and walked away."

I couldn't make that up if I tried!

Franks died last week at age 60. If he was the mysterious visitor, his death would explain the no-show on Poe's birthday Tuesday.

I guess we'll have to wait for a year to learn if the tradition was merely interrupted this year, or if Poe's birthday will be celebrated (wait for it!) nevermore. 

Robert B. Parker, 1933-2010

One of my favorite authors, Robert B. Parker, was found dead this morning at his Cambridge, Massachusetts home.  According to news accounts, Parker, age 77, was found by his wife, slumped over his writing desk.

Parker wrote over 50 novels, 37 of which starred Boston PI Spenser. Other series included the Jesse Stone mysteries, some of which were made into t.v. movies starring Tom Selleck, and the Sunny Randall series.

I liked his books for their well-plotted mysteries and the consistency of his books. Although tending to be a tad formulaic, fans could count on Spenser to speak with a directness that was endearing, even if his girlfriend,  psychologist Susan Silverman, was a neurotic pain in the neck. Perhaps my favorite character, though, was Spenser's sidekick Hawk, whose supreme coolness was unmatched in the mystery world.

Parker has long been a mainstay of the mystery world, and I'm so sad that he's gone.

The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow; $27.95)

I didn’t get to Dennis Lehane’s latest when it came out in 2008, but since he’s one of my favorite mystery authors, I decided to get caught up. The book is quite a departure from his previous books— Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island (soon to be in theatres)—all fabulous, all on my mental list of the thousand or so best mysteries of the modern era.

The Given Day  is not a mystery, but is instead a historic novel focusing on the rise of labor unions after World War I. Officer Danny Coughlin is Boston Police Department “royalty”: the son of captain and the godson of lieutenant. The department has reneged on its pre-war promise of raises, sick pay, and covering the cost of uniforms and weapons, and Danny and the rest of the rank-and-file are getting tired of hearing the excuses.  Dad and Uncle Eddie promise Danny a gold shield if he brings them information about the what officers are involved with the increasingly militant Boston Social Club (and other “Bolsheviks.”) As Danny tries to infiltrate the budding union, he finds more sympathy for their cause than for the need of department management to maintain control. The beat cops and management are on a collision course that threatens to alter the course of labor history.

Lehane skillfully weaves several subplots into the story of the police unions. Luther Lawrence, pitcher for a black baseball team, winds up on the lam in Boston after some trouble in Tulsa, where he had to leave his wife and baby. Nora O’Shea, a young Irish woman living with the Coughlins loves Danny but is engaged to his toady of a brother, Connor. And Babe Ruth, who plays against Luther in a pick-up game one day, learns that he might not always be a Yankee. Set against the backdrop of the influenza epidemic, the upcoming Volstead Act, and the racism of the early 20th century, The Given Day is a richly textured, well-plotted joy.

Deeper than the Dead, by Tami Hoag (Dutton; $26.95)

Tami Hoag’s books are one of my few vices. Equal parts mystery and romance, they are long enough to last a whole snowy weekend, infinitely readable, and with plots that don’t require a lot of effort to figure out. So I was thrilled to learn that, after a two-year hiatus, Hoag was back with a new mystery. In Deeper Than the Dead, four 5th-graders stumble upon the body of a dead woman in the woods, her eyes and mouth glued shut and her ear drums ruptured. (A nod to the “no evil” monkeys.) The students’ teacher, Anne Navarre, does what she can to help them through the aftermath of this horrific discovery. She works with the local cops as well as a FBI agent, Vince Leone, who examines the pattern of this and similar murders to make conclusions about the killer. This being 1985, profiling was just starting to be used to help solve crimes, and not everyone is on board with the help Leone can offer. Faced with a handsome young cop or an injured FBI agent twice her age, I’ll leave it to you to guess which one the lovely Ms. Navarre falls in love with. Alas, the book is not one of Hoag’s best, but it’s still a decent page-turner.

Hollywood Moon, by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown; $26.99)

Former LAPD detective Joseph Wambaugh earned his literary stripes with The Choirboys and The Onion Field. More recently, he’s written a series of police procedurals based on the “new” LAPD: a department whose cops must operate with their hands tied due to restrictions and increased paperwork imposed as a consequence of past abuses. Hollywood Station and Hollywood Crows, the first two books in the new series, were terrific. The latest, Hollywood Moon, falls far short.

As with the other two books focused on the cops working out of Hollywood Station, Moon has one plot at its core, but with short anecdotes about Hollywood and the cops’ lives filling out the pages.  The plot involves a couple of flim-flam artists made up of a chain-smoking “coppery blonde with gray roots that she seldom bothered dyeing any more until there was at least an inch showing” and her husband, a washed-up actor whom she has totally emasculated.  They work a couple of scams using LA college kids and petty crooks, including one deranged character who addresses his mommy issues by attacking women. 

Most of the cops are repeat characters from the two previous books: surfers Flotsam and Jetsam, “Hollywood” Nate Weiss, who is trying to break into movies, and various others. But whereas the anecdotes in the previous books were ripe with black humor, they just fall flat in the latest. Similarly, the cops’ street talk seemed fresh and realistic previously, but clichéd to the point of cringeful here. (I simply don’t believe that surfers have said “Cowabunga” since the late ‘60s.)

Wambaugh is still worth reading, but don’t waste your time with this one.

My favorite books of 2009

Here is a list of the nine best mysteries and thrillers I read since January 2009. (Sorry, but I just couldn't come up with one more!) Do you agree? Were there books you read that you think were outstanding?

1. Safer, by Sean Doolittle (Delacorte Press; $24). A newcomer who refuses to kowtow to the demands of the head of the neighborhood watch committee finds his life in ruins in this harrowing tale of suburbia at its ugliest.
2. Spade & Archer by Joe Gores (344 pages; Knopf; $24.00. The back story of Sam Spade’s life and career, told through his earliest cases.
3. The Birthday Present by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine (Shaye Areheart Books; $25). A fantasy kidnapping meant as a birthday present for a woman with unusual tastes goes terribly wrong.
4. Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard (Morrow; $26.99). Three characters from earlier Leonard mysteries plan joint capers and individual double crosses.
5. Gone Tomorrow by Lee Childs (422 pages; Delacorte Press; $27). Jack Reacher tries to stop a woman he suspects of being a suicide bomber, only to learn that she’s part of a larger plot with international security implications.
6. The Defector by Daniel Silva (Putnam; $26.95). Israeli art restorer/spy Gabriel Allon must again face the Russian arms dealer who blames Allon for his lost fortune and family.
7. Wicked Prey, by John Sandford (Putnam; $27.95). Lucas Davenport has his hands full dealing with thieves targeting moneyed conventioneers at the Republican National Convention, and an evil pimp out for revenge.
8. Hardball by Sara Paretsky (Putnam; $26.95). V.I. Warshawski’s latest case promises little money, lots of headaches, and the risk of permanently destroying her family.
9. Risk, by Colin Harrison (Picador; $13.00; paperback). A New York insurance company lawyer’s life goes from staid to perilous when he investigates the death of a man involved with a Czech hand model and the Russian mob.