This will be a short review – probably shorter than the book deserves. But I’m busy playing Viking in Minot, snatching a few minutes before bedtime, and I’m kind of tired (the festival is going fine; thanks for asking). Anyway, I love all the Mike Romeo books, so what is there new to say about Romeo’s Justice?
Mike Romeo, erudite Los Angeles private eye working for Ira, an ex-Mossad attorney, beats up an obnoxious type at the very start of the book, just to set the tone. The guy deserved it. Then he has a date with his girlfriend Sophie, who is learning to coexist with Mike’s forceful ways.
Ira asks Mike to take on a case from Noel Auden, a mother whose son recently (ostensibly) committed suicide. He had left their Catholic faith to explore spirituality at a school called the Roethke Spiritual Center, out near the Salton Sea. According to his suicide note, he did it because of global climate change, but Noel wants to be sure, in light of the seriousness of suicide in Catholic doctrine.
Mike goes out and starts poking around, asking questions. As you’d expect, there is pushback from some nasty characters, as well as from the police, most of whom are in the pay of a local energy tycoon. But that’s all in a day’s work for Mike Romeo.
Romeo’s Justice was not full of surprises, but it was full of Mike’s personality and Bell’s prose, the things that bring us back. Important issues are addressed. A resolution is found in the end.
Sometimes somebody has an idea that just works. When an author comes up with a series character who engages mind and heart, and places him or her in stories that mean something to the reader, he’s got gold. James Scott Bell has produced gold in the Mike Romeo series, about a one-time cage fighter and certified genius on a quest for virtue. Romeo’s Rage entertained me and moved me.
Mike Romeo gets a call from a friend, a reformed gang member who now does Christian ministry with urban youth. It’s a hush-hush thing – the friend knows about a “package,” a child being delivered for prostitution purposes. He doesn’t have to ask twice for help in intervening. Mike and his friend execute a professional extraction and get the little girl to an “underground railroad” site.
Then things turn bad. The girl is taken again, and Mike’s friend is killed. They underestimated the bad guys.
Mike was mad about this criminal operation from the start. Now he’s really mad. And they won’t like him when he’s mad.
As Mike makes his plans and implements them, he’s assisted and restrained (somewhat) by his boss, Ira Levin, a wheelchair-bound ex-Mossad agent and current lawyer. Also he’s reevaluating his relationship with his girlfriend Sophie. He truly loves her, but feels her being close to him will make her a target – if not now, someday. If he loves her, he feels, he’s got to break it off.
Of course, Sophie might have something to say about that herself.
I want to be Mike Romeo when I get younger. Romeo’s Rage was thrilling and moving. I shed manly tears. Highly recommended.
I didn’t grow up here, but when you come to stay in L.A. it adopts you. It’s a wild crazy aunt of a town, dressed up in boas and bangles and laughing too loud, sometimes getting angry for no apparent reason and throwing a screaming fit, only to calm down and pull you in for a forgiving embrace even though you haven’t done anything to be forgiven for.
I genuinely love James Scott Bell’s Mike Romeo novels. As I’ve said too many times already, there aren’t a lot of Christian writers today who can write a story worthy to play with the big kids in the industry. Bell’s books are that good, and they manage to keep the language mostly PG. Mike Romeo is a particularly interesting hero, a genius, a Harvard drop-out, a martial arts expert and former cage fighter. He’s on a spiritual journey, facilitated now by his new employer, a disabled Jewish lawyer named Ira for whom he serves as investigator.
As Romeo’s Town opens, Mike rescues a clerk in a bookstore from a knife-wielding attacker, braining him with a large volume on Shakespeare by Harold Bloom. Almost predictably, it’s Mike who ends up in trouble with the law. Then he and Ira go to see a new client, a teenaged boy attending an elite private school, who has confessed to dealing drugs. His mother, who hired them, thinks the boy is covering for another student. Mike’s investigation (punctuated by frequent fights, sometimes to the death) leads him into the intersection between the social elite and the narcotics rackets. With some nasty surprises for him personally. Plus a reunion with the love of his life.
Mike Romeo is a fascinating character, and (in my opinion) author Bell does hard-boiled narration better than anybody writing today, but with a sly personal slant. Highly recommended.
“Ah, something my dad told me to say instead of the S word.”
I said, “You don’t say the S word, but you’ll shoot a man?”
“I know,” Sam said. “It’s effed up.”
“I approve of his language choices,” Ira said.
Mike Romeo, James Scott Bell’s improbable intellectual tough guy detective, is back for more fun in Romeo’s Stand, Book Five in the series.
Mike is on a passenger flight that makes an emergency landing in the Nevada desert. The woman sitting next to him has a rough landing, and he helps her get off the plane. Then she’s driven away. When Mike gets to the nearby town of Dillard, he asks about her at the hospital, and they give him the runaround.
Then a local tough guy tries to beat him up.
Then the sheriff tells him to get out of town by sundown.
This is not the way to get Mike Romeo out of your hair.
Through a series of unlikely fights, captures and escapes, Mike discovers and, working with the FBI, brings down a major criminal operation centered in Dillard. While making a couple new friends along the way.
Lots of fun. No bad language. Recommended. Maybe not as good as the earlier Romeo books, but plenty good for a summer read.
A bookstore is the best place to be lost. There’s always a volume to grab, and inside there may be pleasures awaiting, wisdom to be gained, or at least something to make you mad. If you’re mad, you know you’re alive, which is a good thing to know from time to time.
I’d heard of James Scott Bell (he used to write the monthly fiction column for Writer’s Digest). I had an idea he was a Christian. I also had a vague idea I’d tried one of his books and didn’t care for it. But now I don’t think I did, because I’m suddenly a fan.
I’ll admit I was skeptical of Romeo’s Rules, the first volume in his Mike Romeo series, initially. I thought it a little ham-handed, working too hard to be amusing. But I kept reading. And the more I read, the better I liked the book. And the one that followed. And so on.
Mike Romeo (not his real name) is a genius. He was admitted to Yale at 14, but left at 15 due to a personal tragedy. Then he knocked around, learning the trade of private investigator, training his body, and becoming a champion cage fighter for a while. Now he’s drifted into Los Angeles, where he’s staying with his only friend, Ira, a wheelchair-bound former Mossad agent, now a rabbi. Mike has begun to think he’s stayed in one place too long. People are hunting him, and he needs to keep moving. But life keeps holding him here.
InRomeo’s Rules, Mike is out jogging one day when a woman approaches him, asking his help in looking for her children, who have disappeared. Then a nearby church blows up. Mike goes inside to make sure the kids aren’t there, and finds a dead body. This brings attention from the police, something Mike does not want. He gets sucked into the woman’s problems – she’s trying to get custody of her children from her powerful husband, who may have kidnapped them. In any case, they’ve gone missing.
In Romeo’s Way, Mike is hired to go to San Francisco as a mole in a political campaign, working for the opponent, whom he considers a rare decent candidate. San Francisco will be everything he expected (that is, just as bad as he expected), but he will meet an interesting woman who may or may not be on his side.
In Romeo’s Hammer, Mike finds a beautiful woman on the beach, naked and disoriented, and rushes her to a hospital. Then she disappears again, and her father appears to ask Mike to look for her. The trail will lead to radical environmentalists and a cult that’s even weirder than the usual California variety.
Finally, in Romeo’s Fight, Mike gets an offer that’s hard to refuse. A big fight promoter wants him to do a major cage match for him, for a lot of prize money. Mike knows he can beat his opponent, but he desires neither the fight nor the money. However, an old friend, another fighter, is arrested for murder and begs Mike to help clear him. That involves getting involved in the fight world again, only this one will be a fight for his life.
Once I developed a taste for the Mike Romeo stories it was like eating potato chips. I devoured them one after the other. Mike is a guy who’s forever citing philosophy and mythology to people, and they never get it. I can identify with that. He was almost the perfect male fantasy character for me. There were echoes of Travis McGee and Spenser here, but the ideas were conservative.
I enjoyed these books a lot, and recommend them highly. The Christian themes are only implicit, but the books are delightfully devoid of profanity. That’s hard to do well in a realistic story, but author Bell carries it off admirably.
