Vincent Zandri is producing a series of novels about Albany, NY private eye Dick Moonlight (I’m not kidding. That’s his name). Murder by Moonlight was the first I’ve read, and although I read it through and enjoyed it a fair amount, I find I didn’t really like it much.

Dick Moonlight is a private eye with a difference (aren’t they all nowadays?). He attempted suicide a couple years back, leaving himself with a .22 bullet in his brain which the doctors can’t remove. At any moment it might shift and kill him, so he lives with that.

In Murder by Moonlight, he is hired by Joan Parker, who was horribly injured in an ax attack in her home, one which killed her husband. At the time she told the police that her son Christopher was to blame, but now she’s changed her mind and wants Moonlight to prove the young man innocent.

A number of things irritated me in this book. One is the present-tense narration, which doesn’t actually spoil the story, but which I find an irritating affectation that adds nothing.

Secondly, the story wanders into the realm of ancient conspiracies, which I don’t believe in. People aren’t that good at keeping secrets, especially in large groups.

But most importantly, the hero/narrator, Dick Moonlight, got on my nerves. Many people in the story tell him he’s a jerk (they generally use more colorful language), and they’re right. He claims he has a built-in lie detector (again, he uses an earthier term), and feels that gives him the right to be insulting to anyone he doesn’t like on first sight — even when he needs a favor from them. That’s just bad detective procedure. What he is, is judgmental and tactless.

So though the story kept my interest (in spite of some weak writing moments and needless complications at the end), I don’t recommend it highly. On the other hand, it’ll keep your interest on a plane, if that’s what your needs are.

Cautions for language and adult themes.

Former journalist Andrew E. Kaufman has managed to jump from self-publishing to a major house contract on the strength of three novels, two of which involve the character Patrick Bannister. It’s those two, The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted, and Darkness and Shadows, that I’ll tell you about briefly today.

I was drawn to the Patrick Bannister novels because the main character is a fellow I can identify with. Though a successful journalist for a national magazine (OK, I don’t identify with that), he suffers from deep insecurities and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, brought on by a childhood dominated by a loveless and narcissistic mother. Patrick is, indeed, unusually unfortunate in his relationships with females, because the second book involves his disastrous first love relationship, with a girl who had a terrible secret.

In The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted, Patrick goes home for his mother’s funeral, and retrieves a single box of his childhood possessions from the house where he grew up. In it he finds a couple odd things – a piece of paper bearing a name, which a little research tells him belongs to the victim of a child murder in Texas years back, and a St. Christopher medal. When he finds a picture of that dead boy and sees that the boy is wearing the same medal in it, he starts on a desperate search to discover his mother’s and uncle’s relationship to the crime.

In Darkness and Shadows, Patrick finds himself out of a job, having allowed his emotions to overcome his journalistic good judgment. Then he sees a news report about the murder of a wealthy woman, and realizes that she is the same person as a girl he dated in college, who had (he thought) died in a fire before his eyes. Forging an unexpected alliance with a disturbed female criminal, he uncovers a sinister conspiracy and learns truths that could tear up his personal world.

Author Kaufman has had considerable success with readers, so I’m not alone in finding these books fascinating. Speaking for myself, I found the description of the inner life of an abuse victim extremely well-rendered. I was less impressed with the stories themselves. The writing was good – perhaps it could use a little pruning – but the plotting seemed to me weak. The first book, especially, ended with a big action scene that got resolved by pure luck. And the big surprise at the end was one I had guessed in about the second chapter. The second book was a little better.

Still, the characters were fascinating, and if the psychology of abuse interests you, these are a pretty good read.

I’ve been meaning to post a very short review of three of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole mysteries. There’s a whole list of books in the series, but the trilogy of The Redbreast, Nemesis, and The Devil’s Star form a self-contained unit within it, and make an interesting read in themselves. I reviewed Redbreast sometime back, and read The Devil’s Star without reviewing it. Recently I read Nemesis (out of order), and gained a new appreciation.

Nesbø’s Oslo police detective character, Harry Hole (pronounced “hoo-leh”) is difficult to evaluate. He pushes credibility, because it’s hard to believe that anyone this alcoholic and reflexively self-destructive has managed to maintain a career in a modern police department. But in these books Hole has begun a difficult — but promising — relationship with a single mother, which inspires him (intermittently) to attempt to reform himself. This would give him one added thing he actually cares about in his life, beyond police work.

The running narrative in this trilogy involves another detective, a popular and charismatic one, whom Hole suspects of illegal activities and the murder of a colleague. Hole hates him, but is almost seduced into corruption by him.

What’s fascinating about the Harry Hole books is the multiple layers of mystery involved. Once the mystery is solved, there’s plenty of book left, and the reader discovers there’s a mystery within the mystery. Then there’s a further mystery within that. It unpeels like an onion.

This may relate to one of Harry’s mottos — “There is no such thing as a paradox.” Someone informs him in the third book that paradoxes do in fact exist. It seems to me possible (I’m not sure) that that discovery is the whole point of the books.

Recently I’ve read a few Scandinavian mysteries, and I’ll review them as I find time. I downloaded this one, Chasing the Storm by Martin Molsted, because it attempts to do something highly counterintuitive – creating a modern Norwegian action hero. Also this hero is named Torgrim Rygg, and Rygg is one of my ancestral names.

The story starts in Hamburg when Rygg – a former soldier in some sort of special force, now working in business and missing the action – witnesses an assassination attempt on a man, and instinctively sets out in pursuit of the assailant. He doesn’t catch him, but the intended victim, a Russian named Marko Marin, is so impressed with his response that (after doing some research on him) he asks him to help him with a dangerous project. This leads to perils and complications, and soon Rygg has happily bid farewell to conventional life and joined forces with Marko, who is a “journalist” of some sort, investigating an international conspiracy connected with the hijacking of a ship in the Baltic.

The whole thing is a little overcooked for my taste – frequent hops from one exotic place to another, danger at every turn… I had trouble believing the characters’ motivations and persistence. Also there are some odd sexual elements, such as Rygg’s cold-blooded seduction of a lonely, middle-aged woman in pursuit of information, and the three-cornered relationship he comes to enjoy with Marko’s beautiful girlfriend, Lena.

Entertaining in a Hollywood action movie sort of way, I found Chasing the Storm good enough for passing the time in the hospital, but nothing I strongly recommend. Cautions for just about everything you imagine.

Recently I’ve read a few Scandinavian mysteries, and I’ll review them as I find time. I downloaded this one, Chasing the Storm by Martin Molsted, because it attempts to do something highly counterintuitive – creating a modern Norwegian action hero. Also this hero is named Torgrim Rygg, and Rygg is one of my ancestral names.

The story starts in Hamburg when Rygg – a former soldier in some sort of special force, now working in business and missing the action – witnesses an assassination attempt on a man, and instinctively sets out in pursuit of the assailant. He doesn’t catch him, but the intended victim, a Russian named Marko Marin, is so impressed with his response that (after doing some research on him) he asks him to help him with a dangerous project. This leads to perils and complications, and soon Rygg has happily bid farewell to conventional life and joined forces with Marko, who is a “journalist” of some sort, investigating an international conspiracy connected with the hijacking of a ship in the Baltic.

The whole thing is a little overcooked for my taste – frequent hops from one exotic place to another, danger at every turn… I had trouble believing the characters’ motivations and persistence. Also there are some odd sexual elements, such as Rygg’s cold-blooded seduction of a lonely, middle-aged woman in pursuit of information, and the three-cornered relationship he comes to enjoy with Marko’s beautiful girlfriend, Lena.

Entertaining in a Hollywood action movie sort of way, I found Chasing the Storm good enough for passing the time in the hospital, but nothing I strongly recommend. Cautions for just about everything you imagine.

This new novel by Derek B. Miller, of whom I’d never heard (he’s an American living in Norway, and the book was first published in Norwegian), was recommended to me as something well-written and interesting in the Leif Enger mode. And it is, except that Enger’s work is mainly rooted in Christianity, while Norwegian by Night is essentially Jewish, though with some genial nods to Christianity.

Start with a sort of homage to Huckleberry Finn, and to Mark Twain’s idea of God. Mix in the Book of Job. Move it all to Norway, of all places. That’s what you’re dealing with in Norwegian by Night.



Sheldon Horowitz is an old, embittered New York Jew, still grieving the death of his wife and – years before – his guilt at encouraging his son to enlist for service in Vietnam, where he was killed. His only surviving relative, his granddaughter Rhea, who loves him dearly, asks him to come and join her new husband Lars in their home in Oslo. Sheldon goes, but feels unconnected. There are only about a thousand Jews in the whole country. His wife thought – and Rhea is unsure – that he’s sliding into dementia. He claims to have won medals as a sniper in Korea, though he’s lost the evidence. He sometimes thinks North Korean snipers are hunting him. Now and then he gets visits from a dead friend, who seems to be speaking for God.

Then, one morning while Sheldon is alone in the house, he overhears a violent fight between two neighbors – immigrants from the Balkans. When the woman runs downstairs and he sees her through the peephole, looking for a place to hide, he opens his door to her. She has her little boy with her.

Before that terrible morning is over, the woman will be dead, and Sheldon will have decided to go on the run with the boy, to keep him out of the hands of the murderer, in a country where neither of them speaks the language. In this iteration of Huckleberry Finn it’s Jim who speaks, and Huck is silent, but the great issues of life are confronted just the same.

There is much talk of God in Norwegian by Night, and I generally don’t endorse it. It calls up the liberal Jewish arguments (I think they’re liberal Jewish arguments) that man has become better than God, and God owes man an apology (Mark Twain would have loved it). But the questions are important, and Sheldon is a man worth getting to know. I enjoyed the book, but it’s not for everyone. Cautions for language and violence.