Here’s a first class historical mystery. Mark Dawson’s The Black Mile takes place against the dramatic backdrop of the London blitz in 1940. Things are chaotic enough in the city, and plenty of people are dying, without the Blackout Ripper running around murdering prostitutes.

Charlie Murphy is the youngest son of a highly honored, almost legendary, London police detective, now a highly ranking officer. We first meet him in a squad of bobbies trying to put down an anti-Italian riot. Completely out of his element and disoriented, he ends up running away. Back at the station, he observes the abuse of some Italian prisoners by other policemen, and reports them, leading to the dismissal of two of them. This earns the anger of his older brother Frank, their superior.

Frank is a hard man, but no villain. A World War I veteran with facial scars from mustard gas, he orders his teenage daughter to stop seeing her Italian boyfriend, and she responds by running away. For the rest of the story he searches the streets for her, remorseful and terrified that she might be the next victim.

There’s also a newspaper man, only moderately honest, who sees the Ripper story as his ticket back to the front page. He knows things the police don’t, but he’s not sharing.

The most fascinating thing about this story (which is not to say the drama is weak—this is a book fit to be made into a thriller movie) is the depth of the character depiction. These are the kind of people we all know—essentially decent but flawed in various ways, caring for each other but wounded in their pride.

The prose slips occasionally, in terms of word choice. I noticed two instances where author Dawson repeated the same descriptive metaphor twice.

But those are minor problems. All in all a gripping, fully rounded, well-told story, which I recommend.

Cautions for language, violence, and sexual situations.

I’m half ready to become a big fan of Lawrence De Maria just on the basis of having read Sound of Blood. The other half is ready to cast him into utter darkness for a couple mistakes that seemed to me bush league.

The story concerns Jake Scarne, a New York private eye with military and police experience. Jake is no Philip Marlowe, smoking a lonely cigarette in a seedy office. Jake recently moved into the big leagues. He has a nice office, a beautiful secretary, an expensive apartment, and a babe-magnet car. He’s approached by a wealthy man named Sheldon Shields, who believes his son Josh has been murdered. Josh was a reporter working on a story about a mysterious Australian business tycoon, Victor Ballantrae. Jake’s investigations lead him into a world of corruption, violence, and sex. They also introduce him to Alana Loeb, Ballantrae’s associate, a beautiful, seductive, dangerous, yet strangely sympathetic character. Continue reading Sound of Blood, by Lawrence De Maria →

If you’re looking for a Christmas entertainment in the same vein as A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life, you could do much worse than picking up a copy of The Santa Shop, by Tim Greaton (if you’ve got a Kindle, it’s a free download as of the time of this posting).

The main character, Skip Ralstat, is a homeless man on the streets of Albany, New York. When he’s invited into a church by a kindly priest on a cold night, he refuses all suggestions as to how he might regain a normal life. He doesn’t want a normal life. He blames himself for the death in a fire of his wife and baby son, and he embraces social ostracism and suffering as his deserved penance.

But when he meets a strange homeless man who wears a dirty Santa wig, he hears of the town of Gray, Vermont, where there’s a bridge called Christmas Leap. Every year one homeless man leaps to his death from that bridge on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is the anniversary of Skip’s family’s deaths. It just seems right to him that he should go up there himself and pay the ultimate price at last.

He doesn’t understand the forces at work around him, though. There’s a conspiracy—a good conspiracy—of caring people who will force him to face the truth of his life and to understand the real value of what he’s lost and what he’s trying to throw away.

I found flaws in The Santa Shop (you guessed I would, didn’t you?). The book seemed to me overwritten in places, and sometimes the diction could be imprecise. But I was nevertheless wholly engaged in it, and I’d be lying if I denied that my eyes were damp when the story closed up (I should note that it’s a novella. A sample of the follow-up book takes up nearly half of the Kindle version file). The story is notable for having the feel of a supernatural story when in fact the only magic is the magic of God-inspired human love and kindness (exaggerated, I would say, but moving).

I think most Brandywine Books readers will enjoy The Santa Shop.

John Sandford is a darned good mystery/thriller writer, and more than a one-note performer. While the Lucas Davenport “Prey” novels that made his fortune continue to draw readers, he’s added a second, related series character, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers, who looks like a surfer boy, practices journalism as a sideline, and is pretty successful with the ladies (which explains the obscene nickname his colleagues use on him, which I won’t share here).

The Flowers books have a different flavor from the “Prey” books. They’re mostly set in rural Minnesota, and as you’d expect the crimes are generally more conventional, with less sociopathy and sadism.

I have to commend Sandford particularly for the way he handles politics in these books. If I were a lefty or a greenie, I might consider him a sellout (my spider sense tells me he’s a lefty in real life), but he passes by all kinds of opportunities to treat conservatives as idiots or monsters. In Shock Wave, his characters are well-rounded, credible, and generally sympathetic. Even Willard Pye, founder and CEO of “PyeMart” (obviously a stand in for Walmart), is not a caricature but a believable guy who has his own story.

The first crime is a bombing in the board room of PyeMart’s headquarters in Michigan, but when a second fatal bombing occurs at a building site for a new store in Butternut Falls, Minnesota, Virgil Flowers is called in to coordinate with the ATF and local police. The investigators figure there are two possible motives—environmental radicalism, or fear for their livelihood by local businessmen. Virgil and his allies set to work examining evidence and assembling lists of suspects (at one point by a radically novel method), and before long it looks like they must be getting close, because Virgil himself becomes a target.

Shock Wave is exciting, engaging, well-crafted, and politically even-handed. Setting aside the usual foul language and sexual themes, I recommend it pretty highly.