Tag Archives: Jeff Shelby

Fiction, Reviews

‘Thread of Danger,’ by Jeff Shelby

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Thread of Danger

I was almost surprised there was a new installment in Jeff Shelby’s Thread series. Thread of Danger is a well done, exciting book, though it seems to me the series is looking to find a new direction.

Years ago, Joe Tyler’s daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped. He left his job as a Coronado, California policeman and devoted himself to hunting for her, financing his existence by searching for other missing children as well. He succeeded well (except, for a long time, with his own daughter), but his marriage fell apart.

Over the course of several books, he finally located Elizabeth, and managed to bring her home and reestablish a relationship. Now he’s adrift in life, not looking for work, caring about little except his daughter, who – he can hardly bear to think about it – will be going to college soon.

So he gives in when she asks him to help him look for her boyfriend. The boy went camping in the mountains with a friend, and now the friend says he’s disappeared. Without enthusiasm, Joe drives to the camp site and starts searching with the two young people – and soon discovers something that puts them all in imminent peril.

Thread of Danger is a well done novel, like all Jeff Shelby’s books. Joe’s scenes with Elizabeth are especially memorable and poignant. But Shelby is either going to have to find a new direction for the series, or leave his characters in peace. A new character who appears in this installment may provide a way for him to do that.

I recommend Thread of Danger (though you ought to read the series in sequence. Don’t start with this one). Very little objectionable content.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Locked In,’ by Jeff Shelby

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Locked In

Author Jeff Shelby has several mystery series going, but my favorite is his Noah Braddock series, featuring a surfer/private detective in San Diego. Noah defies all your (or at least my) presuppositions about surfers, being a thoughtful and highly ethical character.

A couple books ago, Noah killed the man who murdered his girlfriend, who was a San Diego cop. The last novel found him living incognito in Florida, surfing unfamiliar waves. But now his ethics have caught up with him, and the beginning of Locked In finds him heading back to San Diego with his friend Carter. He has decided he can’t live as a fugitive. He needs to face up to this.

He contacts his girlfriend’s old partner, who puts in a word with the District Attorney’s office. The DA, an imperious woman, offers him a deal – an “assault” is rumored to have happened at the University of San Diego, during a party involving the baseball team. He is to find out what he can about it. She will tell him nothing more. If he satisfies her with his answers, she’ll see that the charges against him are dropped (he killed a cop killer, after all). He agrees, with some discomfort, and steps into a world of lies, cover-ups, and self-serving deception, all the while mourning his lost love.

Noah Braddock is an excellent, sympathetic continuing character, and I enjoyed Locked In very much. Cautions for language and adult subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Assisted Murder,’ by Jeff Shelby

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I’m a fan of mystery writer Jeff Shelby, especially his Noah Braddock novels (of which I’ll be reviewing the latest tomorrow). He also writes a “cozy series” called the Moose River Mysteries. This is probably a good economic decision – “cozies” written for a female audience comprise, as far as I can see, more than half of the mystery market. I keep trying to cultivate a taste for this genre, but alas, no joy.

The Moose River series involves the Gardner-Savage (blended) family, Jake, Daisy, and four kids, who live in Moose River, Minnesota. But in Assisted Murder they fly to Florida, for Jake’s grandmother’s 100th birthday, and also to do Disney World. They encounter Grandmother Billie (grumpy) and Aunt Gloria (high-energy and ditzy), who both live in a retirement community. They also encounter several of their friends, who prove as driven by competition, lust, and jealousy as any assemblage of younger people. This is underlined when Aunt Gloria’s worst enemy is discovered murdered in her (Gloria’s) house, and the police make her their chief suspect.

I suspect that Assisted Murder would be a highly amusing read for members of its intended audience, with the cute, bickering kids and the not-so-cute, bickering geriatrics running amok in their various ways. Didn’t work for me, of course, but I have no objection to make for those who like this kind of thing. Pretty family-friendly.

Fiction, Reviews

Thread of Suspicion, and Thread of Betrayal, by Jeff Shelby

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One of the delights of owning a Kindle is that often, when you’ve finished a book in a series and just have to find out what happens next, you can go online and download it in a couple minutes. That’s what I did when I’d finished Jeff Shelby’s Thread of Suspicion, and went on to Thread of Betrayal.
I reviewed the first book in this series, Thread of Hope, last year, and gave it high praise. It was the story of a driven man, Joe Tyler, a former San Diego cop whose life got upended when his daughter was kidnapped from his front yard just before Christmas. He stopped being a cop and he stopped being a husband. Instead he became an investigator searching for lost children. He found every one he looked for – except for the one who mattered most.
But at the end of Thread of Hope he got a surprise – a cop friend handed him a photo taken from a seemingly unrelated missing child file. The photo was taken in Minneapolis, and showed two little girls, one of whom was clearly Elizabeth, his own daughter.
Thread of Suspicion finds him in Minneapolis in the bitter mid-winter, trying to locate the family of the other girl in the picture. When that trail fades out, he’s referred to a local woman who’s devoted her life to helping street kids. She agrees to use her contacts to help him, but in return she wants a favor. A homeless boy she’d been particularly close to has disappeared, and because of his very special family situation he may be in serious danger. Solving that problem, Joe discovers a new trail of his own to follow. But he also gets a surprise that causes him to suddenly mistrust people he’s believed in up to now.

In Thread of Betrayal he teams up with his ex-wife Lauren in Denver, again on the trail of a daughter who now seems to be on the run from something. Repeated near-misses and disappointments make this one a real nail-biter. It ends with a kind of a resolution, but unanswered questions remain, so I suspect there’ll be at least one more book in the series.
I highly recommend all the books in Jeff Shelby’s Thread series. I agonized with these people and sometimes wept with them. Jeff Shelby creates characters with blood in their veins, and that blood sometimes gets shed. Also I may have missed something, but I thought the language was pretty restrained.
My highest recommendation. Loved them.

Fiction, Reviews

Jeff Shelby’s Noah Braddock novels

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I reviewed Jeff Shelby’s Killer Swell a while back, and reported my surprise at finding such quality in a novel about a surfer detective, something that just struck my prejudices as inevitably lightweight.

Recently I got the opportunity to pick up Drift Away free or very cheap (I forget which) for Kindle, and I read that. It turned out to be a minor mistake. The problem is that Drift Away is the fourth novel in the series, and a very important character had died in the third novel. So that was spoiled for me.

Nevertheless, I went back and bought two and three, Wicked Break and Liquid Smoke.

And my conclusion is that Shelby is a very good author indeed, producing a substantial series here. Noah Braddock, the hero, is a tough guy with serious life issues (his mother is an alcoholic and his felon father abandoned them). But he works hard to live with integrity and be useful through his detective work (which, it must be admitted, he only does when he feels like it). He’s capable of great empathy and great courage. There’s a mix of nobility and cynicism in his character that’s worthy of classic hard-boiled. His relationship with his dangerous giant friend, Carter, is great buddy stuff.

The direction Shelby chose to take in the third Noah Braddock novel raised it, in my opinion, to the level of tragedy, and Drift Away, which entirely alters the setting, follows that up very effectively.

I found a few flaws; homonym errors and a tendency to fall back on stock (minor) characters and detective story tropes. But all in all I was most impressed, and sometimes genuinely moved.

As usual, cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.