I’m pretty sure I’d read this one before, but I’d forgotten it enough to enjoy a second reading. Free Fall is one of Robert Crais’ earlier Elvis Cole novels. I personally think the later ones are richer, but this is a good mystery by a skillful author.

Jennifer Sheridan comes to see Elvis in his office. She’s young and beautiful and fresh, and Elvis half falls in love with her at first sight, but her mind is on her fiancé, Mark Thurman. Mark is an LA cop on an elite squad. He’s been acting strangely recently, and she’s grown convinced he’s gotten himself involved in something illegal.

The case seems to have solved itself a few minutes later, when Mark himself, along with his sleazy partner, walks into the office. He tells Elvis he knows why Jennifer was there, and that it’s all very simple. He’s fallen in love with another woman, and is just waiting for the right moment to break up with her. Elvis passes this on to his client, but she doesn’t believe him. She insists he look a little closer. That closer look eventually uncovers police brutality and a cover-up and gang violence, and leads to the deaths of innocent people and Elvis’ arrest. He’ll need all the help he can get from his fighting machine friend, Joe Pike, before he can get himself out from under a very nasty conspiracy.

Pretty good. There’s a strong element of morality in this story that pleased me a lot. Elvis informs us that LA cops respect and admire anyone who helps put a crooked cop away, which strains credibility a little, but that’s a small point. Minor cautions for the usual stuff, but nothing heavy.

“I’m jealous,” she said, pretending not to be. “You could have had room service with me.” She said that flatly, without stressing the innuendo – but the “nuendo” was in there, all right.

“Kill your darlings” is writers’ jargon for one of the hardest lessons of the craft – that the particular passage you worked hardest on and are proudest of is very likely the one you need most to cut.

Max Allan Collins’ early novel Kill Your Darlings is another of his Mallory books, about an Iowa mystery writer who gets involved in real life mysteries. This is the second I’ve read of this series, and I liked it very much. Collins (it seems to me) writes meta-mysteries, mysteries that work on the surface level, but also comment on the genre and its conventions. This particular book is literally about a convention – Bouchercon, an actual writers’ and fans’ convention, fictionalized here. Collins takes the opportunity of writing about hard-boiled mystery authors to place his hero in a genuine hard-boiled adventure. As hero/narrator Mallory notes to his own amusement, every event in the story follows hard-boiled conventions plot point for plot point, until he himself decides to break the pattern, in a scene that might irritate some fans but pleased me greatly.

Anyway, in this story Mallory goes to Chicago for Bouchercon, and there reunites with his mentor and hero Roscoe Kane, a sort of Micky Spillane-esque writer who’s fallen on hard times. When Kane is drowned in a hotel bathtub, Mallory has suspicions, but he can’t convince the police to look closer. He suspects a sleazy publisher with mob connections whom he hates, and uncovers a literary fraud inspired by greed and arrogance, traits not uncommon in gatherings of writers.

Kill Your Darlings is a thoughtful, well-written, fun mystery with only mild objectionable language or subject matter. Mallory mentions at one point that his politics are not conservative, but that’s all there is about that. Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy the golden age of Hard-Boiled.

The bomb was interesting. I thought about the fact that it was interesting, and my first encounter with Vega and Castro had been interesting, and being followed by the guy with the medallions and the other guy was interesting, and I decided it was a good thing to be interested in something. It was a relief, and I had a feeling I should try to make it last.

Is there anything Athol Dickson can’t do? I’ve already praised his magical realism novels, like River Rising and The Cure, so you can imagine my delight to discover he’d written a mystery, my favorite reading genre. I downloaded it (got a free review copy), and it was no surprise – though a delight – to discover that January Justice is very good indeed.

The hero is Malcolm Cutter, a marine veteran. He got a dishonorable discharge under circumstances that made him briefly famous, and left him with a horror of the public eye. He’s not exactly a private detective now – he’s actually a chauffeur and bodyguard. But sometimes he looks into things for people. He worked for a top movie star named Haley Lane, and their relationship developed into something closer than employer/employee. But Haley’s dead now. Somebody drugged their food, and Malcolm himself barely survived. Today he’s still fighting flashbacks, struggling to find something real he can hold on to, so that he can orient his thoughts when they go crazy, and deal with his guilt over Haley’s death.

Malcolm is approached by two men from Guatemala, former rebels, now “politicians.” Their government has been accused of the kidnapping and murder of a former leader of the previous Guatemalan junta. The leader was married to a famous American movie star, who was kidnapped, the ransom drop used as an opportunity to assassinate him. They tell Malcolm their government was not involved, and they want him to prove it. He doesn’t like the men much, but when other men start pressuring him to stay away from the case it raises his curiosity, and he plunges into an investigation that will get him shot at, beaten up, and arrested before he figures it out. He’ll also meet a nice girl.

Dickson writes with all the style and macho you’d expect from the best in the hard-boiled genre. Malcolm Cutter is an appealing hero, with interesting vulnerabilities and flaws. His relationships with his two fellow employees at Haley Lane’s estate are sketched with wry humor and sensitivity. The Christian message is subtle and organically part of the story. I hope very much there will be more Malcolm Cutter novels.

Highly recommended. Mild cautions for adult themes.

Once again, we contemplate a novel with promising writing and some good elements, but the the author doesn’t know how to bring it up to its potential. Sometimes There Really Are Monsters Under the Bed is mostly a disappointment, except for a surprise appendix. (Also the title’s too long.)

Former FBI agent Michael O’Leary left the agency in despair after failing to save the life of a little girl. Later the girl’s mother, the wealthy Annabelle Reardon, pulls him out of his self-destructive funk by giving him a job in her new foundation, devoted to rescuing children in danger – and, incidentally, marrying him. Their work is aided by a psychic empathetic gift that Annabelle possesses – she can learn a person’s secrets by touching their hand. It’s through this gift that she gets a clue to something terrible going on at an orphanage run by a wealthy philanthropist. Going to investigate, they encounter danger and uncover a horror.

There’s not enough story here, in my opinion, for what the author’s trying to do. The book is really a novella, and the story arc is too steep. Annabelle’s “gift” really does little for the story beyond providing a shortcut to giving the heroes a reason to investigate. Some real detective work would have lengthened a story that badly needs lengthening. Also there’s too much emotion here, and the characters talk about it too much. Some of the boy-girl material was moving, but more time should have been spent developing the couple’s relationship in more subtle ways.

In contrast, the short story appended to the back of the book – “Perception” – was excellent. Tight, well-drawn, terrifying, and it provided a neat twist ending that T-boned me completely. That story’s really the best reason to buy Sometimes There Really Are Monsters Under the Bed.

Some intense situations, but no really objectionable material.