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.

Stephen Hunter continues to delight with his bestselling thrillers, centered on veteran Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger and members of his family. It would be an exaggeration to say there’s no formula at work here – but the formula is in the characters, not the plots. Hunter loves to surprise his readers with fresh situations. He’s put Bob Lee into NASCAR races, samurai sword fights, and terrorism scares. In The Third Bullet he uses the thriller format to examine the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, something that was hinted at, but not developed, in the first BLS novel, Point of Impact.

The first neat trick here is that Hunter inserts himself into the story. Not in the Clive Cussler manner, portraying himself as a suave and admirable deus ex machina who shows up to get his hero out of a tough situation, but in a real writer’s way. Hunter paints himself, under a pseudonym, as a semi-comic hack with a drinking problem – he’s recognizable through his career arc and book titles. His character plays an initializing role at the start of the book, and then exits. Which is precisely the way to handle it.

As a result of the writer’s experience, old Bob Lee Swagger is enticed out of retirement by a woman who asks him to examine a new theory about the Kennedy assassination. And Bob Lee agrees, for reasons he keeps to himself until the end. On the way there are murders and close calls, and a dangerous trip to Moscow. Bob Lee comes up against a criminal mastermind to beat all criminal masterminds, and there’s a dramatic – and revelatory – final showdown.

I can’t say much about the theory author Hunter proposes here. It’s not entirely clear how seriously we’re meant to take it – this is fiction, after all. To me it seemed, at least, to raise interesting possibilities.

I’ve never been a Kennedy conspiracy aficionado. I know a man who is, and I’ve never argued it with him, because a) I haven’t studied it closely, and b) this guy is a veteran sniper himself, someone who looks at the problem from a shooter’s point of view.

Which is precisely what The Third Bullet does.

Recommended. Minor cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.

What this country needs, in my opinion, is more cheerful tough guys. Probably in real life, certainly in literature. Much fine work has been done in the realm of the grim and tragic hard-boiled mystery, but there’s no actual law that says a detective who can handle himself in a fight has to be an emotional wreck. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser was a happy exception (for a while, anyway), and Bob Burton’s (with L. J. Martin) bounty hunter hero Brad Benedict is another. Quiet Ops is the first novel I’ve read from this team (Bob Burton is a real life bounty hunter), but I want to read more.

Brad Benedict is a man with a good life, and he enjoys it. He makes a nice income as a high-end skip tracer, enough to have a comfortable life, a nice office, a couple of expensive cars, and a succession of beautiful girlfriends. With the help of his regular associates Cocoa and T-Rex, and the lovely Monique who runs his east coast office in Florida, he goes after rapper Jo Jo Bling, who has drugged and kidnapped the twin daughters of Florida billionaire Grenwald Stanton. The girls are restored to their family, and their father (not to Brad’s surprise) balks at paying the fee, but before Brad can begin applying pressure (something he knows how to do, even with billionaires), Stanton himself is kidnapped, and Brad and company go to work again – though Brad still finds time to romance a pretty female cop.

There’s a sunny quality to this book that surprised and pleased me. Brad doesn’t waste our time bellyaching about past traumas and existential guilt. He’s also an actual nice guy – capable of making a genuine gesture of grace to a former enemy at one point. (His giant associate Cocoa, by the way, is described without irony or sarcasm as a church-going Congregationalist who doesn’t stand for foul language. Brad notes that he himself doesn’t swear much, which is generally true.)

There are weaknesses in the book. The spelling and grammar sometimes could use correction, and I thought the plot was unnecessarily complicated. But I came away from Quiet Ops feeling good. That’s pretty rare in my reading.

Cautions for language (there’s some rough language in spite of what I said above), violence (not over the top) and adult themes (but nothing explicit). Recommended.

As a hardcore fan of Stephen Hunter I am willing to stipulate that he’s pretty shameless as far as the concepts for his novels goes. He stretches credibility with the insouciance of a Hollywood producer, mixing westerns and samurai stories with the basic thriller form, and messing with his own chronologies whenever it suits him. But I think Soft Target is his first actual allegory (he admits it in the Afterword). That, my friends, takes guts. Especially when the allegory works against the current party in power.

This isn’t a Bob Lee Swagger story, but the old Marine sniper’s DNA is all over the thing. Bob Lee’s recently discovered natural son, Ray Cruz, now retired as a Marine sniper himself, just happens to be inside “America, the Mall,” a huge (but fictional) mall in suburban Minneapolis, when Somali jihadis start shooting shoppers and herding the survivors, about 1,000 of them, into the amusement park at the facility’s center. Soon, overhead, who should show up but his half-sister Nikki Swagger, now a TV reporter for a St. Paul station, in a broadcast helicopter?

Ray, of course, can’t stay hiding in the Victoria’s Secret store where he and his fiancee have taken refuge. He has to go and scout out the enemy, see what damage he can do. He’s his father’s son, a congenital hero. And having a hero there means a lot – not only to the hostages in the amusement park, but to the mastermind of the attack, who has dark motives of his own, different from those of the clueless Africans he’s exploiting.

But an even greater threat may be the head of the Minnesota state police force, a man incompetent on a massive level, who will look pretty familiar to most readers.

Bottom line – if you’re a Democrat you’ll hate this book. If you’re a Republican you’ll probably love it. I loved it. It’s not deathless work (I caught Hunter in a couple rookie writing errors – using “enormity” wrong and writing “stridden” [is that a word?] as a past perfect form of “stride”), but Soft Target is a lot of fun, with plenty of Hunter’s trademark thrills and improbabilities. Recommended.

Cautions for language, violence and adult topics.

There’s much to enjoy in Keith Houghton’s thriller Killing Hope, the first in a series about Los Angeles police detective Gabe Quinn. Too much, in fact.

The story’s exciting, the main character interesting, the dialogue generally sharp and satisfying. Gabe Quinn, a cop with a personal tragedy in his past (they all do nowadays, don’t they? I used to like that, but it’s getting to be a trope), is cynical and has a good noir voice: “Like I say, I don’t believe in coincidences – especially when it comes to homicide. Coincidences are for people who think the universe is cute. It isn’t.”

But the whole thing is loose. Too many plot branches, too many characters who show up for a while and then never appear again (or do after so long that you’ve forgotten who they were). And the prose needs editing. Bad imagery like, “Flung my eyes wide open.” (Imagine doing that.) Misuse of the word “enormity.” Misplaced hyphens. Consistent misspelling of words, like “devises” for “devices.”

Also he inserts a plot point in which the FBI, most of whose agents are depicted here as thugs, beat a suspect nearly to death to get a confession, something that would have the ACLU on their backs with grappling hooks in the real world. Points lost for believability.

I have an idea – I’m not sure from where – that the author is an English native. The prose definitely supports that. He spells “gray” with an “e,” and calls a yard a garden and a scarf a muffler. But if that’s true I have to generally praise his command of American idiom. Only a few slips come through. Mostly the dialogue is note-perfect.

My uninformed judgment is that Houghton is a writer with great talent, much in need of an old fashioned editor. Such an editor would have instructed him to cut this very long book down by about a third, remove extraneous scenes and characters, and focus, focus, focus. There’s good stuff here, but I got tired of it after a while.

Oh yes, consolidate chapters. There’s too many very short chapters in Killing Hope.

Still, worth reading if you have the patience for it.

Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Getting free book offers for my Kindle has expanded my opportunities for writing snarky reviews. Take No More by Seb Kirby is far from being the worst written e-book I’ve read, but I can hardly recommend it.

James Blake, a London radio executive, comes home to his apartment one day and finds his wife dying just inside the door, shot in the head. Not only can he not imagine why anyone would have killed her, but he didn’t even know she was in town. She was supposed to be in Florence, looking for lost art masterpieces.

Naturally he comes under police suspicion, but he manages to flee to Florence where he discovers that his wife has crossed immensely powerful people, and he soon becomes a target himself.

I’d say the problem with Take No More is that the author is an OK storymaker, but an amateur storyteller. He often commits the sin of having his narrator inform us what other people are thinking, something he can’t know for sure. And the prose is… maddeningly pedestrian. There’s plenty of danger and action, but the words don’t serve the story. It occurred to me that the book read like a second-rate translation – all the words are right, but the music is absent. One of the reviewers on Amazon actually said something about it being originally written in another language, but “Kirby” sounds like an English-speaking name to me.

There was one trick employed for losing a tail that did impress me, though.

Cautions for the usual stuff, but nothing radical. If you can get it free like I did, you might care to give it a try if this sort of thing interests you. Otherwise, I’d say pass.