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.

Ruth reached over a[nd] covered one of Katy’s hands with hers. She spoke very softly, saying, “Forgive me if this hits a little close to home, but I just have to ask: What good are the things that Jesus said and did if they make no difference in how people live?”

You’d have to go far to find a braver Christian novelist than Athol Dickson. As I’ve written in previous reviews of his books, I consider him far above the average CBA writer in terms of craftsmanship and depth. They Shall See God is actually a reissue (slightly re-worked) of one of his earlier novels. I don’t think he’d reached his full powers when he wrote it. Sometimes (and I’m not sure this isn’t just an emotional reaction to my own tensions about the issues) I think the dialogue is a little awkward, but that may just be that he’s accurately inventing conversations that are awkward in themselves.

In any case, They Shall See God is a bold (and generally successful, I think) attempt to deal with one of the touchiest possible issues in theology – the relations between Christians and Jews.

Kate Flint, New Orleans antique shop owner, mother, and recent widow, is a Christian desperately trying to hold her life together. Ruth Gold is a Reformed rabbi. Long ago, as little girls, they were best friends, until they witnessed a horrible murder and their parents determined to separate them.

But now the man who went to prison on their testimony has been released from prison. And people are being killed – beginning with Ruth’s boyfriend. As they come to realize that their lives are in danger, these two women must push past their mutual fears and guilts to try to form an alliance to save their own lives and those of others, and to unravel the deeper mysteries of the old crime.

I won’t say there’s no preaching in this book, because there are preachers here (good and bad), and they do their thing. But the preaching is preaching, and the dialogue is dialogue, and the human depictions cut right down to the heart. I found They Shall See God hard to read – simply because of hard truths – but moving and rewarding. Cautions for some pretty intense violence.

Before author Max Allan Collins hit the big time with his Joe Heller novels and The Road to Perdition, he wrote several novels about an Iowa mystery writer with a sideline in real-life sleuthing, called Mallory (no first name; his friends call him Mal). Judging by A Shroud for Aquarius, Collins was already at that point an excellent writer.

Mallory is called in by the county sheriff to view the scene of the violent death of Ginnie Mullens. Ginnie was Mal’s oldest friend (never a lover). Though estranged in high school, after which Ginnie became a hippie and got into the drug world, they’ve kept in touch, and Mal has always intended to try to mend fences. He never quite got around to it.

The scene looks like a suicide by handgun, but the sheriff isn’t sure. Ginnie is known to have had dangerous connections, and he suspects foul play. There’s also a double indemnity insurance angle. Mal, partly from feelings of guilt, agrees to look into it. Danger, ugly revelations, and a new love await him on his quest.

One thing that’s especially interesting about this book, written in the ʼ80s, is that today’s reader has to view it through a double lens of history. A Shroud for Aquarius is largely a meditation on the aftereffects – which Mal sees as mainly bad – of ʼ60s counterculture.

But for the reader in the 2010s, the ʼ80s setting is in itself a distant mirror, and it’s hard not to think that the hippies won after all, considering that we have an acolyte of Bill Ayers in the White House right now.

Which is a melancholy thought, at least for me.

But the book is good, and is recommended. The usual mild cautions for language and themes apply.