Benjamin Tucker is a true crime writer living in North Carolina. He’s the divorced father of a teenage daughter, and has recently been remarried, to a woman who is both beautiful and very rich. His new wife and he love each other – though they fight a lot – and he mostly lives in the guest house behind the mansion, just because it’s convenient for his work. He’s fond of his mother-in-law, an elegant alcoholic (sort of a mature Nora Charles, and her name is indeed Nora), and devoted to his goofy dachshund. The key to his personality is the teenage trauma of the murder of his girlfriend, of which he was briefly suspected. He spent some time in a mental hospital, overcoming the shock.

Now a serial killer has started murdering women in Ben’s town. Because Ben writes about these things, he gets involved with the investigation, and it soon becomes clear that the killer has fixated on him and his loved ones. All Ben’s brains and courage will be needed if he’s to protect the women he loves.

That’s the premise of Vengeance is Mine, by Harry James Krebs. It was an enjoyable novel, with engaging characters I learned to care about. Ben isn’t always prudent in his decisions, and I didn’t always approve of his moral choices. But he was relatively believable, and quite likeable.

I hope there will be more novels featuring him.

Cautions for the usual stuff.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mark Yost has written a really gritty detective story, Cooper’s Daughter. I’ve talked about Raymond Chandler’s rules of private detectives before in this space. Max Allan Collins has commented on this blog about his creation of a detective who would break those rules, but Mark Yost takes it further. His private eye, Rick Crane, who operates in upstate New York, extorts sexual favors from straying wives in return for his silence to the husbands who’ve paid him, and also acts as a collector for organized crime bosses.

But his life takes a turn when an old man asks him to investigate the beating death of his daughter, who had been dating a local minor league baseball star. His investigations cause him to step on important toes, and guys with heavy fists try to persuade him to stop poking into the matter. But he’s moved by his client’s grief, and seeks a kind of personal redemption in finishing the job.

The morals of this story are interesting. Rick commits adultery both recreationally and romantically, but also tells us he’s a regular churchgoer.

Rick Crane is an interesting and complex hard-boiled gumshoe, and I look forward to further stories about him. Cautions for adult themes and language.

I read a couple Elmore Leonard novels decades back and concluded that, although he was a good writer, I just didn’t like him. He knew his business, but he wasn’t a somebody whose company I enjoyed.

After I started watching the FX TV series “Justified,” based on his character Raylan Givens, US marshal, I decided to give him another try. I think the series is pretty good. I especially like the way “rednecks” are treated as actual human beings, with a range of IQs and wisdom levels. So I tried Leonard’s novel Raylan.

Consumer report: Nope. I still have the same reaction to Leonard that I had when I was younger. I can’t say precisely why he rubs me the wrong way, but he does. The same characters I enjoy on TV get on my nerves in this book.

Which is not saying it’s bad. It just doesn’t please my palate.

It’s about lawmen and drug dealers in Kentucky coal country. Some plot lines are discernible from the TV series, but in a much modified form. Cautions for adult themes and lots and lots of rough language.

My plan was to handle the stack of book reviews I’ve been planning in chronological order, so I could tell you about the oldest books before I forget them completely.

But Diamonds and Cole by Michael Maxwell, which I finished yesterday, changed my plan. I’m so excited about this book that I want to tell you about it right away. Also, you can get it for Kindle (it’s only available in electronic format) free, at least as of the date of this review.

Cole Sage is a Chicago newspaper man. There was a time when he was a Big Deal. War correspondent, investigative reporter. But the fire went out of him, and for the last couple years he’s been reduced to writing filler stories thrown to him, like bones, by his editor.

Then one day he’s sent to cover the rescue of a cat from a tree. Only, by the time he gets there, it’s become a hostage situation. Cole is shocked back into his old consciousness, and writes a great story.

But when he gets back to the office, he finds a phone message on his desk. Ellie has called – Ellie, the love of his youth, the one who got away, the woman he thinks about every day. All the message says is that she needs help. He gets on a plane back to California, his home, without delay. Continue reading ‘Diamonds and Cole,’ by Michael Maxwell →

I should probably apologize for promoting John Sandford’s Prey novels, of which Field of Prey is the latest installment.

I mean, I always have to warn you about the language, which can be pretty coarse, and the psycho serial killers, who just get more and more creepy. In a way you could call these books horror novels (Psycho seems to be an inspiration for this one), and I don’t even like horror.

But… but I like the writing and the characters. Sandford deftly relieves the horror with episodes of mordant cop humor, and some dissing of political correctness.

And most importantly of all, he writes about Minnesota!

At one point in Field of Prey, Dr. Weather Davenport, wife of the hero, says, “TV. It’s like if you’re not on it, you don’t exist. The single most pernicious idea in our culture.”

I’m kind of like that with books. Those of you who live in Manhattan or LA or Chicago are used to seeing stories set in your home towns. But I’m a boy from Goodhue County, Minnesota, and Field of Prey is set precisely there, mostly. My home town isn’t mentioned (though I’m pretty sure Lucas Davenport drives through it at one point), but the story starts in Faribault, and then there’s Owatonna, and Red Wing, and Zumbrota, as well as a fictional town called Holbein.

My home area is in a bestselling book! We exist!

Also the book is pretty exciting, if you can put up with the rough elements.

I was alerted to this book by Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall, and you can read his review for a more detailed discussion.

The Marshal of the Borgo is an interesting book, a combination of modern mystery and supernatural novel. I suppose it would be called a work of “magical realism.” The mystical elements aren’t specifically Christian, although a Catholic bishop plays a positive role.

It’s about a policeman from Rome who was severely injured and reassigned to be the top cop in an Italian small town, or borgo. A foreign immigrant worker is found murdered in a field, and the cop, Matteo Scarpone, sets about investigating, stepping on some important local toes in the process. But he also meets a beautiful woman, who is unfortunately married.

What amazed me about The Marshal of the Borgo was that as I read it I was certain it was a translation from Italian. It had the perfect feel of a translation. But on finishing it I discovered the author is an American, and it was written in English. Which makes it a tour de force of literary tone.

Cautions for language and adult situations, and occult references.

And here we have another Bob Lee Swagger book from Stephen Hunter. I might be tempted to say it was another improbable Bob Lee Swagger book, except that a) I loved it, and b) it still fails to reach the heights of improbability achieved by The 47th Samurai, which I also loved.

So it’s like this. At the beginning of Sniper’s Honor, old Bob Lee is mooning around his Idaho ranch, at loose ends, bored. Then he gets a call from a woman reporter friend in Europe, who wants some technical advice on a story she’s researching – the mysterious disappearance of a female Russian sniper in World War II. This sniper, “Mili” Petrova, was renowned as much for her beauty as for her deadly efficiency with a rifle. Sent on a mission to assassinate an important German general, she disappeared from history.

Suddenly Bob Lee is energized with curiosity. He flies to Ukraine to help the reporter investigate, an action which causes them to run afoul of mysterious, powerful personages who want the dead past to stay dead. Soon Bob and his friend are running through the Carpathian Mountains, hunted, with no resources to rely on but Bob’s instincts and experience. And some remarkably good luck stage-managed by the author.

I’ll admit there’s a lot of manipulation in the plot. Author Hunter works pretty hard to arrange things in such a way as to believably manipulate the satisfying outcome we expect and get. Plausibility is pretty low.

But it’s a Bob Lee Swagger book and it’s fun. Educational too. Good enough for me.

Occasionally you run into a writer who approaches an old genre from a fresh angle. And occasionally you run into a writer who, though perhaps not a perfect stylist, knows how to create interesting, appealing characters and exciting stories that draw you in. It’s delightful when both those writers are the same person.

So it is with Brett Battles and his Jonathan Quinn novels, beginning with The Cleaner.

Jonathan Quinn (not, we are told, his real name) is not a spy. He’s not an assassin. He’s a Cleaner. Once the spies and assassins have done their jobs, Jonathan comes in and cleans up the mess. Blood gets washed off the walls, bullet holes get spackled, and bodies are disposed of. Jonathan is the best at his work. It pays very well, and he doesn’t have to risk his life… much.

But all that changes at the start of The Cleaner, when he goes to Colorado to examine the site of a fire where a man died. He finds a mysterious bracelet in the ashes, and when he goes back home to Los Angeles somebody tries to kill him. Attempting to find out why, he’s drawn into a confrontation with a world-wide conspiracy, and sets out on a journey that leads him to Ho Chi Minh City and Berlin, to a reunion with a woman from his past, and into a desperate attempt to save a kidnapped child.

This is the first in a series of Jonathan Quinn novels, all extremely readable as far as I’ve gotten. Credibility is a little weak – it’s hard to imagine a man of Jonathan’s humane character getting involved in a job like the one he holds (we’re told he was born in Warroad, Minnesota, and like all native Minnesotans he’s a prince among men). But the characters and relationships are vivid and interesting, and the dramatic tension never lets up.

Recommended. Cautions for language and mature themes, but fairly mild by contemporary standards.

Ed James’ novels on his police detective character Scott Cullen can’t help but be compared to a more famous series about an Edinburgh detective, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus. And the books have some commonalities – gritty, urban crime settings, and tough, grim main characters. But James adds his own twists, and I found his stories pretty satisfying.

Scott Cullen is a new, inexperienced detective constable, but he’s still the smartest guy in the room – not because he’s a genius, but because his colleagues are generally pretty ineffectual – loafers and drunks (except for the female officers, who, in line with contemporary standards, are more or less exemplary one and all). Cullen’s worst trial is his superior, Inspector Bain, whose approach to any crime is to rush in, identify the most likely suspect, then turn all his (and his subordinates’) energy to building a case against that individual – even when there are other possibilities.

And yet… and yet, what I liked best about the books is that these characters, who could so easily have been caricatures, turn out to be more complex than they appear. Even Bain, when compelled to face the evidence, is capable of real police work, and even a measure of graciousness. Inconsistently, but now and then. In other words, he acts like a real human being. And Cullen has his own flaws, especially in his drinking and relationships with women.

I read the first two books in the Cullen series. Ghost in the Machine involves a missing person case which turns into a murder investigation, involving people who meet each other on a social networking site called “Schoolbook.” In Devil in the Detail Cullen and his colleagues are called out to a smaller town, where they investigate the disappearance of a mentally challenged girl. This story involves allegations of child abuse by a priest, but author James softens the possible offense but setting that abuse in a syncretist cult rather than a Christian church.

Well-written and tech-savvy, the Scott Cullen books are timely works in an old tradition. Cautions for language (the British police seem to have solved the problem of male language in female company by teaching the female officers to swear like the guys) and adult themes.