I’m not sure what to think about Harry Hole (pronounced “WHO-leh.” You’re welcome), Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s series detective who’s catching on very well in the current vogue for Scandinavian mysteries.

In The Devil’s Star, Harry displays one characteristic that I’ve grown very weary of in fictional detectives. He’s a mess in his personal life. He’s an alcoholic, it’s ruining his job and his relationships, and he doesn’t care enough about himself to fight for his life. He’s a superior police detective, but lately he hasn’t come to work for days at a time. He loves a woman who loves him – and her son adores him – but he’s stepping back from them, afraid of commitment and failure, haunted by profound fatalism.

But it’s high summer, “holiday season” in Oslo, and the police are operating with a skeleton force. When his supervisor (who’s name is Bjarne Møller – an homage to the 1970s American cop comedy?) needs to send two detectives to a murder scene, he can find no alternative to calling Harry, and teaming him up with his worst enemy – Detective Tom Waaler, who Harry is convinced is not only corrupt, but a murderer.

The murder victim shows marks of ritual – one finger has been cut off, and a star-shaped diamond left on the body. Soon there’s another similar murder, and another, and it becomes a full-fledged serial case.

I was fairly impatient with the first half of the book, where Harry stumbles (sometimes literally) around, either drunk or hung over most of the time, pushing away all attempts to help him. But in the second half things start moving, and Harry comes to life at last, and I was pleased pretty well by that part. The final showdown was exciting and effective.

Attitudes toward religion are interesting in The Devil’s Star. Christians (Pentecostals and Orthodox) show up – I’m not entirely sure why, actually – and are not depicted as entire idiots. Harry does take one swipe at Christianity (unfair, in my view), but we are also told that he believes in the soul, and a formula he often repeats, “Paradoxes don’t happen,” is flatly contradicted by another character, who seems to know what she’s talking about.

All in all I liked The Devil’s Star better than I thought I would. Cautions for language, gore, and mature themes (some of them pretty kinky).

The theme song above will be familiar to many Americans of my generation. I was in junior high in 1963 when it first appeared on Walt Disney’s TV show, and it left a vivid impression. The Scarecrow of that series was a hero and a benefactor, a quiet vicar in a village church in coastal Kent who helped his parishioners earn a decent living through smuggling, while striking a blow against high tariffs (hurrah for free trade!).

The hero of Doctor Syn: A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh (the last book chronologically in the series, though first written – author Russell Thorndike had not intended to create a series character) is no particular hero. He seems to be a complete hypocrite in his Anglican ministry, as he is perfectly capable of casually ordering an innocent man murdered for “knowing too much.” He has certain positive traits too, but all in all he’s a particularly devilish example of what used to be known as a “picaroon” in fiction – an unapologetic rogue.

His Scarecrow costume serves a purpose – he rides with his cohorts in frightening disguises in order to scare people off the marsh on the nights when his pack trains are carrying contraband to and from the beaches. He is little concerned by the arrival of a naval ship to investigate smuggling in the parish, but a particular member of the crew – a mute mulatto with his ears cut off – sets fear in his heart. For Doctor Syn has a dark secret, and the mulatto knows it.

A particular weakness of this book is that author Thorndike seems to want to be Dickens. He loads his story with comical “characters” who slow the story down considerably with their long stories and speeches. Another problem (which I noticed years ago when I read the next book, Doctor Syn on the High Seas), is fairly vicious racial attitudes (though this was softened when I realized that the vicar was not intended to be a role model). This racism seems to be mostly directed at black people, as Imogene, the female ingenue of the story, is said to be half Incan Indian, and gets no less respect for that.

I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed in Doctor Syn, but I still plan to buy and read the rest of the series. Maybe Thorndike will develop his character into something a little more like the one Patrick McGoohan played back in the ʼ60s.

Dooley Ashe is a former Seattle police detective who has taken early retirement. His nickname is “the kiddie catcher,” because he once talked a confession out of a little boy who had committed a cruel murder. Now he’s gotten a call from the police in the town of Bartlett, where another murder involving children has taken place. A vicious bully has been killed with a baseball bat, and the fingerprints of six children – all of them victims of his harassment – were found on bat. The kids aren’t talking. Can Dooley come and look into it?

In Bartlett, Dooley meets Mary Austin, the students’ teacher. She’s the kind of teacher every parent wants for their child – someone who loves children deeply and is capable of inspiring underachievers to focus and discover their gifts. She’s also very attractive, and Dooley is drawn to her, knowing he shouldn’t be.

All the elements of a very good thriller are here in All For One, and yet… it doesn’t quite work. Author Ryne Douglas Pearson states in his introduction that this was a book he wrote early in his career and set aside, and he offers it now without a re-write.

He should have done the re-write. He’s a successful thriller and motion picture writer now, and I’m sure he could have turned this story into an effective narrative. But as it is, it’s just… too much. Too many characters, too much information about them. He takes us into the stream of consciousness of almost every important character, and that just slows the story down. There are other ways to provide insight into characters – word choices, telling gestures and habitual movements, things said and not said. All For One is just too much book for the amount of story here. Too much soap opera passion, and a contrived climax. Also, I figured out whodunit about half way through.

Not top notch, but I got it free for Kindle, and I did finish it. Cautions for the usual stuff.

My office was directly opposite. It was a cubicle really, eight feet by eight, with a ten-foot ceiling that always made me want to tip the room over so I’d have more room and more heat.

Set in Vermont in the winter, Open Season is the first in a series of police novels starring Joe Gunther, a detective in the town of Brattleboro. This book goes back to the ʼ90s (Joe is a Korean war veteran; you don’t run into many of those in stories anymore), and I have some reason to believe that author Archer Mayor has moved it in a politically correct direction since then. So I may be unhappy with later books, but I’m likely to give the series another chance, because I enjoyed this one quite a lot.

As the story begins, Joe is called to a sort of a murder scene – a local man, known to be very kind and tenderhearted, has broken into an old woman’s house and been killed by her with a shotgun. Soon other local people become the victims of attacks, and it’s discovered that they all have something in common. They were all on the jury that convicted a black man of killing a white woman in a famous local murder case. Joe has no choice but to re-open that case, quickly learning that it was shoddily investigated. So it becomes a double investigation, trying to find the real murderer while trying to stop an avenger who is no sweetheart himself.

One thing I particularly liked about Joe Gunther was an element of realism that rarely appears in fictional detectives. Having been injured in an accident, Joe is told by a doctor to stay in bed for a couple days – and he actually stays in bed! How many times have you seen that happen in a mystery?

Mild cautions for language and adult themes. Recommended.

One of my weaknesses as a reader and reviewer is that I’m essentially a prig. I don’t like criminals, and (though there are certain exceptions) I don’t much care for stories where criminals are the main characters. In stories, criminality is always being explained by creativity and a hunger for excitement, but I have a strong suspicion that there are lots of ways to skate close to the edge in life without stealing and murdering.

Still, when Andrew Klavan announced the publication of his story, “The Christian Killer,” in the anthology, The Crooked Road, Volume 2, I downloaded the Kindle version. And Klavan’s story is almost worth the price of the volume in itself. It’s a Christmas story that plays deftly on holiday tropes, managing to be cynical and sentimental all at once. And funny.

As for the rest of the stories, I liked some and didn’t like others. I found Janice Law’s “The City of Radiant Brides” pretty satisfying, a story with a surprise. Also Peter Lovesey’s “The Best Suit” completely confounded my expectations, in a good way.

Other stories went the sociopath path, and I generally didn’t take to them. Particularly Lawrence Block’s “Keller in Dallas,” another pleasureless (for me) outing with his stamp collector/assassin character. Dana Cameron’s “Disarming” left me entirely confused.

And some stories just broke my heart, especially Clark Howard’s long final story, “The Street Ends at the Cemetery.”

This is a pretty good collection, if you like this kind of thing. My problem is that I generally don’t.

Reviewing a Dick Francis book is almost a pointless exercise. I’ve only read one book of his that actually disappointed me, and you can be sure that the writing will always be professional and satisfying. But I’ve had a couple criticisms of his attitudes now and then, and Hot Money calls for one such, so I guess that justifies a critique.

It’s always interesting to discover by what angle Francis will approach his always racing-related plots. This time around the unique element is complicated family relationships, what psychologists call “constellations,” where parents and children fall into predictable roles, into which they tend to relapse whenever they get together.

In Hot Money the constellation is more of a supernova. Multimillionaire gold trader Malcolm Pembroke has been married five times, and has sired a number of children, most of whom resent each other and their siblings’ other mothers. One thing most of them agree on is their hated for Ian, the narrator of this book, whom their father seems to prefer. They’re all certain he’s plotting to cut them him out.

But when Malcolm’s latest wife is murdered, and a couple attempts are made on his own life, he goes to Ian and asks him to become his live-in bodyguard. Ian agrees, and commences picking through the minefield of his family’s loves and hates in order to stop a killer and save both their lives.

The large number of characters in this book make it sometimes hard to follow (make sure to bookmark the character list). That also goes for the superfluity of murder motives – everybody has one, but none of them seem adequate to murder. Sometimes I found the sheer volume of “soft” data kind of overwhelming.

And again, as I’ve seen at least once before in Francis, there’s a tolerant attitude to adultery that displeased me. On the other hand, there wasn’t any explicit sex, and the language wasn’t bad.

Not top drawer Francis, but good.