Sixkill, by Robert B. Parker (Putnam; 26.95)

In January 2010, the mystery world suffered an irreplaceable loss when Robert B. Parker died. Parker wrote a series of detective stories starring Boston sleuth Spenser. Sixkill is his last.  

When a young woman is found dead in the hotel room of grossly obese actor Jumbo Nelson, most everyone thinks he killed her—by squishing her, if nothing else. Oddly, the cops aren’t totally convinced. They know the 400-pound tub of lard will probably be convicted of the crime regardless of whether he did it, so before charging him, they want to make sure he’s actually guilty. They ask Spenser to look into the case.

Jumbo’s studio wants Spenser to report that the "repellent puke" (as Spenser calls him) is innocent. The studio is backed by organized crime figures, and they can be convincing. But Spenser has befriended Zebulon (Z) Sixkill, a Cree Indian who had served as Jumbo’s bodyguard until Spenser took him down in a fight. Now Spenser has taught the younger man how to better protect himself, and the grateful Z has Spenser’s back.

It’s a terrific story, and Z is an engaging character. I would have liked to have read other Spenser stories that included the younger man.

The book’s only flaw is the excruciatingly tedious Yoda-like dialogue between Spenser and his long-time girlfriend, Susan, such as this exchange, in which Susan describes Z:

 “He sounded rather like you,” Susan says.

 “You think?”

“I do,” she said

“Who better?” I said.

“No one, if your goal is to be a wiseass. . .”

“What better?”

It would be one thing if this were atypical, but the book is full of this annoying, stilted dialogue. So much so, in fact, that I actually wondered if someone else had added some to expand the book after Parker’s death despite a press release that described the book as the “last Spenser novel completed by the legendary Robert B. Parker.” I checked with the book’s publicist, who wrote back this rather patronizing denial:

As stated, it was the last Spenser novel completed by Parker. If someone else finished it, it wouldn’t have been *completed* by Parker, would it? So that is the answer: completely finished, yes.

So there you have it: only Parker is to blame for the book’s bad dialogue. 

I’ll miss Spenser. RIP, Robert B. Parker.

Live Wire, by Harlan Coben (Dutton; $27.95)

It’s taken me a while to get around to reviewing Harlan Coben’s latest. Not due to any reluctance on my part, but just due to life getting in the way. But it reproaches me each time I see it on my shelf, so today is the day.

Coben started out writing a series of mysteries starting Myron Bolitar, former Duke basketball star turned sports agent/sleuth.  He then wrote a boatload of stand-alone mysteries, each one of which manages to pull me in from the first page.

With Live Wire, Coben returns to Myron Bolitar and his world of crazy misfits. In his latest case, Suzze T, former tennis star, now the pregnant wife of a rock star, asks for help. After posting the picture of her baby’s sonogram on Facebook she received an ominous message: “Not his.” Now her husband has run off, and she desperately needs to find him to explain.

The case takes an unexpected twist when Myron learns that the person who posted the message was his sister-in-law, Kitty. Kitty and Brad Bolitar had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth some years before after a fight with Myron in which some unforgivable words were exchanged. Now Myron’s father is dying, and wants his second son found.

The book is a solid mystery, despite its rather confusing plot. Where it fell apart for me was in the character of Bolitar’s sidekick, Win Lockwood. Win is basically a sociopath, but entertainingly so: promiscuous, cold, but always willing to have Myron’s back. As he ages, however, his promiscuity and detachment have become less entertaining and more pathetic, so that in this latest, he came across as just a dirty old man. (Though the two women he was with, beautiful Asian models named Mee and Yu, made for some humorous puns.)

Coben still writes up a storm, and his latest, though not his best, still makes for a good read.

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

John Sandford amazes me. After 21 books in a series, most authors’ books would be predictable and formulaic. But not Sandford’s “Prey” books, starring Minnesota cop Lucas Davenport. This latest is as fast-paced, engaging, and unpredictable as any of its predecessors. Perhaps even more so.

Half the book takes place many years ago, when Davenport was a patrol officer trying to move to detective. He worked a case involving two young girls, sisters actually, who went missing. While the more experienced cops on the case focused on one suspect, Davenport believed someone else might have been responsible. The investigation was closed when the cops felt they had their man. Too young to have the confidence to rock the boat, Davenport didn’t put up much of a protest. The volume of other cases quickly distracted Davenport from the disappearance, and soon he, too, moved on.

The second half of the book takes place now, decades later, when the bodies of the girls have shown up in a building being torn down. Davenport, now the top cop in the state, feels he owes it to the girls and their parents to solve the case this time. He reviews his old notes and starts retracing his steps. Soon he sees connections that he hadn’t noticed back in the day. In the meantime, he learns that there were other victims, and has to live with the knowledge that his reticence may have contributed to their deaths.

As always with Sandford’s mysteries, the book is skillfully plotted, with realistic dialogue and great characters. Sandford is one of my favorite authors, and I am rarely disappointed. This latest is a doozy.

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

Micky Haller doesn't like his latest client. Lisa Trammel had already turned to him for help when her bank threatened to foreclose on her house. When she is accused of murdering one of the bankers, she naturally expects that Mickey will represent her. But Lisa balks at much of Mickey's advice, and he occasionally sees a disturbing viciousness that she barely holds in check.

The case is made more complicated by the fact that the prosecutor is a friend of Mickey's ex-wife, Maggie, whom Mickey is trying to woo again. Mickey will take advantage of any weakness he can exploit to win his case. His cutthroat ambition, along with the prosecutor accusing him of not playing fair, threaten to undo the new closeness he's been enjoying with Maggie.

Michael Connelly, one of my favorite authors, writes two series: Mickey Haller courtroom mysteries, and Harry Bosch police procedurals. Both are terrific, and I'm hard pressed to say which series I prefer. The Fifth Witness is similar to The Lincoln Lawyer, in that Mickey has to tread a very thin line between his personal moral code and the rules governing defense lawyers. I have to say, I never pictured Mickey Haller as looking even remotely like Matthew McConaughey, so I was stunned to learn that the actor would play him in this spring's The Lincoln Lawyer. But McConaughey did a great job, tried not to look too gorgeous, and was quite impressive. Nevertheless, I still didn't picture McConaughey when I read The Fifth Witness. For one thing, it's very hard to imagine someone who looks like he does having to work so hard to win back his ex-wife. I'm hoping they turn many more of Connelly's books into movies and that eventually, I won't be able to picture anyone else playing Mickey.

Meantime, back to books: if you haven't already discovered Michael Connelly, you're missing one of the best mystery writers of our times.

Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown; $24.99)

The minute she sees the child being tormented, retired detective Tracy Waterhouse steps in. In an instant, she changes from a law-abiding, law-enforcing lonely soul to something far less predictable, on the run from the very cops she used to serve with.

The minute he sees the dog being tormented, private detective Jackson Brodie steps in. In an instant, he changes from a cold, lonely soul to someone who would nearly kill to protect his new pet.

Tracy knew the woman tormenting the child: it was a hooker very familiar to the Leeds police. She’s less certain about whether the hooker was the child’s mother. She knows something’s not quite right when she picks up a tail and finds a dead body. Jackson Brodie, meanwhile, reluctantly pursues his latest case: a woman, adopted as a child, who wants to learn all she can about her birth family.  

Kate Atkinson’s trademark is her ability to tell separate stories that end up being two parts of a third story. I really like her books, though none have wowed me to quite the same degree as Case Histories, her first Jackson Brodie mystery. This latest is most enjoyable, however, with memorable characters, poignancy, and her usual fabulous plotting.

John Le Carre, T. Jefferson Parker, and Brad Meltzer

It’s been such a long time since I’ve blogged—I don’t blame you if you’ve given up checking my site. My only excuse is the same lame excuse folks nowadays use anytime they haven’t done what they had promised—I’ve been busy. Not too busy to read, but somehow, I always find other things to do when it comes time to reviewing what I’ve read. (And it is March Madness season, after all!) So to make up for my slackerness, this blog entry will cover three books that I’ve read over the past several months: John Le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor, T. Jefferson Parker’s The Border Lords, and Brad Meltzer’s Inner Circle.

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After reading Le Carré’s latest, Our Kind of Traitor (Viking; $27.95), I was left with the same feeling I always have when I finish one of his books: I guess I’m just not smart enough to understand his books. I seem to miss key plot elements and have to retrace my steps to figure out just exactly how this character got to whatever sticky wicket he’s stuck in. In this case, a young couple on vacation in Antigua meet a Russian money launderer named Dima who insists on a game of tennis. That brief encounter is enough to raise alarm bells on the part of the British Secret Service. The agents debrief the young couple and enlist their help in getting Dima to tell what he knows about dirty money around the globe. But Dima won’t talk unless the Brits promise to get his family out of Russia, and more unlikely, Dima’s children into the top British schools.

The book took me twice as long as most, since Le Carré’s understated style means that I have to re-read important points in the action. The ending, in particular, was nearly too dense to understand, and I’d love to run my interpretation of it past someone else who has read the book. I wanted to like this book, and for the most part, I did—I just wish Le Carré could make important twists a bit more obvious, so I don’t miss them the first time around.

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T. Jefferson Parker’s The Border Lords (Dutton; $26.95) is the fourth book in Parker’s series starring ATF agent Charlie Hood. When undercover ATF agent Sean Ozburn, posing as a meth and gun dealer, drops out of sight, the rest of the Operation Blowdown team doesn’t know what to make of it. But when the team finds the bodies of the North Baja Cartel assassins in a safehouse rented by Ozburn, the team begins to suspect Ozburn of the murders. As one of his closest friends, Hood tries to reach out to Sean, but is met with suspicion and paranoia. Working with Sean’s wife, Hood keeps probing until he learns the amazing reason for why the agent has gone rogue.

And an amazing reason it certainly is. Some might say it defies credibility—and I would be among them. Parker is such a good story teller that the book held my interest, but the plot turns on what was, ultimately, a device that was simply too farfetched.

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Brad Meltzer’s The Inner Circle (Grand Central Publishing; $26.99) has at its core an unlikely hero: Beecher White, archivist at the National Archives. Beecher thinks it’s his lucky day when Clementine Kaye asks for his help in tracking down her father. Beecher had a major crush on Clementine when they were kids, and he wants to impress her now that they’re grown up. In order to impress her, he takes her into the secret room at the Archives where the President comes to review old documents. Clementine spills a cup of coffee and in the ensuing chaos, Beecher and another archivist find a 200-year-old dictionary hidden under a chair—as if the President might have been trying to hide it. When the other archivist dies suddenly, Beecher knows he’s in some deep trouble.

This is a well-plotted political novel with surprising twists and turns. Beecher is a pathetic character, but endearingly so.

                                     

  

Secrets to the Grave, by Tami Hoag (Dutton; $26.95)

Teacher-turned-child protector Anne Leone has barely recovered from her near murder when she’s called in to help on another case: a 4-year-old is found barely alive, draped over her mother’s body. The only clue is a 911 call the child made in which she said “My daddy hurt my mommy.”

Should be cut and dried, except that many men in mommy’s life were called “daddy.” The local sheriff needs help, and turns to Anne’s husband, Vince, an FBI profiler. Soon the victim’s best friend goes missing, the victim’s body parts are mailed to another friend, and the investigators learn that there are as many mysteries surrounding the victim’s true identity as there are surrounding her death.

I wish Tami Hoag would move on from the Leones. I just don’t like them. They don’t seem to fit together very well, so their dialogue is not realistic. I find Anne to be particularly unlikable. She wants to help children, which is admirable; yet she is inconsistent and does not always seem to have the child’s best interest at heart. She fought to keep a troubled child out of a juvenile facility after he stabbed a classmate, and as a result, he was housed the county mental hospital—not the best solution, in my opinion.  Anne visited him for a while, but dropped him when the 4-year-old came into her life. (Anne has lots of excuses for why she could no longer visit the boy, but I’m not buying. He was a 12-year-old surly troublemaker, and she replaced him with a 4-year-old little princess. I’d probably act out, too, which is just what the older child did, with terrible results.)

It also troubled me that Anne and Vince were allowed to take the 4-year-old home without already being approved foster parents. Perhaps the state of California, where the book takes place, is okay with well-intentioned folks stepping up to take care of children in situations like this; I’d feel a whole lot better if the parents had to undergo some screening and training in fostering first. Particularly since Vince is the first to admit that he was a lousy father to his own kids.

I’m not going to read another Tami Hoag mystery if these characters are in it.  The mystery isn’t compelling enough, there are far too many red herrings, and the romance—something Hoag used to excel at—is tepid at best.

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.