Sheriff Tom Jessup is investigating the death of an elderly man, a loner, in Whitman County, Washington state, as The Blind Trust begins. It could be natural causes, but something doesn’t seem right. His investigations will put him in touch with Detectives Quinn Delaney and Marci Burkett in Spokane, who are investigating another death. Gradually a picture develops of an extremely dysfunctional family, of five siblings who haven’t communicated in years, suddenly dying out at the same time. What no one can figure out is why anybody would go to the trouble of killing them.
As the story unrolls, they’ll cross paths with another Spokane detective named Morgan, a corner-cutter neither Delaney or Burkett likes. They have the same objectives, but will their mutual mistrust delay the resolution of the case?
As with all the books in Colin Conway’s The 509 series that I’ve read so far, I relished The Blind Trust. I especially enjoyed the fascinating, layered characters. I was particularly intrigued with the dubious Detective Morgan – a lesser writer than Conway might have made him a caricature, but when we spend time in his head, his thinking makes perfect sense – from his own point of view.
Only mild cautions are in order for language and mature subject matter.
“The 509” is the eastern, more rural part of Washington state, where Spokane is the big town. I’d already read one of the books in Colin Conway’sThe 509 series, The Long Cold Winter, and liked it very much. So I picked up the first installment, The Side Hustle.
Quinn Delaney and Marci Burkett are homicide detectives in Spokane. When they’re called to view the body of Jacob Kidwell, online financial guru, they find him with his neck broken at the bottom of a stairway in his apartment building. It could easily be an accident, but the detectives suspect he was pushed. The suspicion is increased when they learn that one of his two computers has disappeared.
Young Kirby Willis, an Uber driver and budding entrepreneur, idolized Jacob, who was his friend, and can’t resist making his own investigation. In theory, the cops should resent his interference, but he has sources of information unavailable to them, and anyway, Marci thinks he’s kind of cute.
Quinn, meanwhile, is having trouble concentrating on his work because of personal problems that he won’t discuss with Marci. When he does finally open up to someone, it’s almost the last person you’d expect… but that could be the very person who can offer him hope.
Author Colin Conway excels at portraying three-dimensional characters. I liked Quinn, Marci, and Kirby very much, and followed their adventures with just as much interest as if the book had been a blood-and-thunder thriller. The Side Hustle has the added value of actually offering good advice for living, at no additional charge.
I liked The Side Hustle even more than The Long Cold Winter. I’m officially a fan of this series.
I’m still getting accustomed to Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels, set in New Orleans. They’re not my usual kind of fare; I like my heroes to have a little more existential angst and shining armor on them. But the series is growing on me.
In Trick Question, Tubby gets a desperate plea for help from a fellow lawyer. That lawyer is working a murder case as a court-appointed advocate. His problem is that he’s a hopeless lush, and he’s done almost no prep work, and the trial is about to begin and the judge won’t postpone. Tubby’s a sucker for an old friend, and he hates the idea of a defendant getting railroaded, so he agrees to do the best he can in the few days available.
The defendant, Cletus Busters, is the janitor at a medical research facility. One night he opened a freezer door, and a man’s frozen body tipped out onto him. The body was that of a scientist who’d been using that laboratory. He had complained in the past about Cletus playing with the laboratory mice. Also, drugs stolen from the lab were found in Cletus’ apartment.
In addition, Tubby is doing some estate work for a young female boxer, and he gets a peek into the world of that rising sport.
The whole subject of women’s boxing gives me the willies, personally, so that was uncomfortable. But eventually (spoiler alert), Tubby comes over to my view, so that was OK.
Cletus the defendant turns out to be a voodoo practitioner, but that’s played mostly for laughs, so I didn’t mind that too much either.
Trick Question was entertaining. Still not exactly my cup of jambalaya, but I can see why people are fans. Only mild cautions for subject matter are in order.
“Matt Scudder meets Father Brown” is what the Amazon blurb says about Owen Parr’s Joey Mancuso-Father Dominic mystery series. I suppose you could say that about it, assuming the two classic detectives met in an auto collision and both got stunned a little. I got a free copy of Murder on Long Island, and I read it all the way through just to give it a chance. It didn’t get better as I read on.
Joey Mancuso and Father Dominic are half-brothers, we are told, sons of the same mother, one with an Italian father, the other with an Irish one. Through some sorts of shenanigans in the previous volume (Murder on Long Island is volume two in the series), they ended up running a bar and cigar club together, and solving murders on the side, using the establishment as their office. Though Father Dominic, to his credit, devotes most of his time to his church.
A Long Island property developer is accused of murdering his wife. He claims he found her shot to death, but the timeline shows that he waited 20 minutes before calling the police. Also, he was found covered in her blood and had gunshot residue on his hand. The man’s daughter persuades their lawyers to ask Joey and Father Dom to investigate, and they agree to look into it. Joey begins to suspect that those lawyers haven’t been working very hard on the case. There are plenty of leads to follow up, but the trial has already begun.
There is the germ of a good story in this book, I think. Joey and Father Dom could be interesting characters (though I get uneasy when I’m told a priest is “adapting his ministry to the 21st Century”). But the writing simply isn’t very good. Misplaced modifiers are common. Word meanings are confused. Many passages are clumsily written and/or too wordy.
There are courtroom scenes, and (perhaps this was aggravated for me by the fact that I recently read a very good legal thriller) those scenes struck me as highly inauthentic, Perry Mason Show stuff.
There are also technical problems with the text. The paragraphs (without indentations) are separated by multiple spaces, so that many whole pages contain just one paragraph and a lot of white space. Also, oddly, there are occasional digital footnotes which seem to be notes from preliminary readers. These should have been stripped out, if any care at all had been taken with the publication.
Overall, this reader was not much impressed with Murder on Long Island.
Felix “O” O’Connor, hero of Dustin Steven’s novel, 21 Hours, is an ex-con, now a cowboy in Wyoming. He rarely gets back to Columbus, his home town, but keeps in touch with “Lex,” his twin sister. He doesn’t much care for her husband, but he adores their daughter Annie, his niece.
He gets a call from Lex one day, asking for help. She and her husband were attacked, and Annie was abducted. There’s been no ransom demand, and they don’t have a lot of money anyway.
O gets into his car and drives straight to Columbus. If it’s not a ransom kidnapping, it must be human traffickers. Investigating that will mean going to bad places and dealing with very bad people. O can handle himself, and he won’t let anything stand in his way.
Essentially, this is “Taken,” with an uncle instead of a father, and the locations changed.
21 Hours is another example of the recent phenomenon I guess I’d call the “made for the movies thriller.” It involves the sort of action we usually accept in the rushed context of a movie, but (at least for me) doesn’t work as well on the printed page. Our hero suffers excruciating, repeated physical trauma over the course of his adventure, but just keeps on coming, killing multiple enemies who are fresher and in better health than he is.
I suppose that’s all that’s left for the male hero these days. We’ve decided, as a culture, that women can fight men on equal terms, that there is no male strength advantage. All that’s left to a man is his ability to take punishment. So he gets punished beyond all plausibility.
One other quibble I have with this book is that on two occasions the hero opens padlocks by shooting them with a pistol. I’ve never tried the experiment myself, but I have it on good authority that you can’t actually do that.
But other than that, the writing was good. 21 Hours is an entertaining book, if you’re into this sort of thing.
Cases are seldom won on cross but rather are more likely to suffer serious setbacks. Most seasoned trial lawyers will admit that a successful cross is one that did not assist the other side. A good cross, like a good plane landing, is one you can walk away from.
You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of negative reviews recently. This is because, due to circumstances I won’t discuss in detail, I’ve been reading a lot of books I get free for my Kindle through promotional offers. The bulk of these books is from independent authors, and (I must confess, though I’m now one of the club), independent authors tend to be amateurs. People who haven’t paid their dues and learned the craft.
So it’s a pleasure to happen on a book that’s published by a genuine publisher, and eminently worthy of that publication. I’m delighted to recommend Cost of Arrogance, first in a coming series starring California attorney Jake Clearwater.
Jake Clearwater used to be a prosecutor in a county (fictional, I believe) north of Los Angeles. He left after a new district attorney proved more interested in chalking up convictions than in seeing justice done. Now he teaches trial law at a small university. It’s a good life, but lately he’s noticed he misses the excitement, the cut-and-thrust of courtroom work.
He’s not enthusiastic at first when he’s approached by representatives of an organization committed to filing appeals for convicts on death row. As an old prosecutor, Jake rarely loses much sleep over condemned murderers. And the convict they want him to help, Duane Durgeon, is no poster boy. He’s a hulking career felon and open racist who actually asked for the death penalty during his trial. Nobody wants his case. That, the activists tell Jake, is precisely why he needs an advocate.
A classroom discussion touches Jake’s legal conscience, and he agrees to hold his nose and go to work on Duane’s case. He little suspects that he’ll soon earn the hatred of an entire grieving town, or that he’ll suffer assault and attempted murder before he’s done. But he’ll also regain his moral center and get his appetite for life back. With a beautiful new girlfriend to top it off.
A book like Cost of Arrogance could have easily been preachy and predictable. Author H. Mitchell Caldwell avoids those pitfalls by writing it right. His characters are not caricatures, but many-faceted humans who often surprise us with their depth. We sympathize with them, even when we disagree (and you can disagree in different ways; there’s scope here for a range of opinions). The writing is clear and workmanlike, the dialogue realistic. The author’s experience as a lawyer and law professor is readily apparent in the obvious authenticity of the courtroom scenes. The plotting is excellent, too. The story kept me fascinated from beginning to end.
The love story was also good – maybe too good to be true. Jake meets a gorgeous woman who is fearful of commitment and needs a sensitive, decent man to teach her to trust again. I can speak authoritatively when I say this is an archetypal male fantasy. But it added to the fun of the story, so I’m not complaining.
Highly recommended. Cost of Arrogance is honestly one of the best legal thrillers I’ve ever read.
The temporary relief of the rain hadn’t lasted long. The thick heavy heat had spread itself over the city again, like a fat woman face down on a mudbank.
Another non-McGee MacDonald, an early one. I think Murder For the Bride is one of John D.’s less celebrated books, but I liked it fine.
Our hero, Dillon Bryant, is an oil engineer. When Murder For the Bride opens, he’s in South America on a job, thinking every minute about Laura Rentane, the beautiful woman he married just before he left the country. It was a whirlwind courtship, but she was the girl of his dreams. More than one friend expressed doubts about her character, but Dill wouldn’t hear of it.
Then a letter comes. Dill had better come home to New Orleans. Laura is in big trouble. When he arrives, he finds a police detective outside their apartment door. Laura is dead, he is told. Strangled with a length of wire.
Dill has to do something about it. He starts asking questions. The more questions he asks, the more he’s forced to realize that Laura lied to him. Her name wasn’t Rentane. She was older than she looked. Her background wasn’t what she claimed. When the FBI takes over her case, the cops toss Dill some clues, just to spite them. They think they know what Dill is likely to do, but they’re not prepared for how far he’s willing to go.
As in any John D. MacDonald book, the prose in Murder For the Bride is crisp and compelling. There’s just enough sex to satisfy the original paperback audience, which is pretty tame by today’s standards. And beneath it all, a story of integrity and coming of age.
As an added bonus, Commie spies are involved, and there’s no moral ambiguity in their depiction. This is anticommunism at its best, circa 1951.
Detective Jericho (first name never given) used to be a cop in Harlem, but ended up with PTSD. Not coincidentally, his marriage fell apart, and his wife moved with their daughter to East Hampton on Long Island. Jericho joined the force there to be close to them.
The novel Death Hampton begins with Susannah Cascaddan, the beautiful, abused wife of a property developer in East Hampton. She’s contemplating leaving her husband when, in defending herself against an attack, she knocks the man out with a wine bottle. In desperation she drags him from their beachside home to the ocean and drowns him.
When Jericho comes to question her, there are immediate romantic sparks. But there are secrets which neither of them knows that will put both their lives in danger before it’s all over.
When I started reading Death Hampton, I marked the book down as a competent story written by a less than professional writer. The writing wasn’t awful, but it was very, very pedestrian.
However, that changed when it got to the sex scenes. The sex scenes in this book are needlessly explicit and remarkably clumsy: “The spark of connection that had flashed between them over the past few weeks burst into an engulfing flame” isn’t even the worst of it.
Also the gun stuff was badly researched. Two of the characters carry .50 Glocks (a huge pistol, if it existed), with silencers (handguns can only be suppressed, not silenced, and that works best with small calibers).
I have reached the fourth and final volume of the set of Hooley and Roper mysteries I acquired. I’ve got no major complaints to make about The Case of the Exploding Shop, but I can’t praise it very highly either.
Just to remind you, Brian Hooley and Jonathan Roper are London police detectives. The gimmick of the series is that Roper is on the autism spectrum. He’s brilliant at analysis, but other cops resent his tactlessness. Hooley is an easygoing sort who manages to get along with him, profiting from his investigative insights. Their current friction rises from the fact that Roper has noticed (correctly) signs of incipient heart disease in Hooley, and is nagging him to eat better and get more exercise.
During a single morning, a world-famous computer mogul is severely burned by a bomb detonated while he’s making a presentation on a new product. Then an Italian politician visiting London is murdered with a shotgun. And a bomb kills a number of shoppers at a fashionable Sloan Square boutique.
Hooley and Roper go to work, assisted now by a new female team member.
I guess, when I pick up a story about an autistic detective, I’m always looking for something along the lines of Monk on TV. Hooley and Roper are just not as much fun (at least to me). Roper’s value is now pretty well acknowledged on the Force, so there’s not a lot of office opposition. Roper, we are told, has been working on his social skills as well. I’m happy for him, but it makes the story less interesting.
Another thing that didn’t work well for me is Roper’s “rainbow spectrum,” a mental filing and classification system he uses to organize his thinking on complex problems. It’s a useful fictional device, I guess, but it’s also a sort of a black box – the reader can’t follow the logical process. That, I think, sacrifices intrigue.
Also, I’d like to see Hooley have more of a life off the job. Give him a girlfriend or something.
I didn’t hate The Case of the Exploding Shop, but it didn’t raise my pulse rate either. No major cautions for language or subject matter are called for.
I’d read one of John Carson’s Harry McNeil mysteries before. I reviewed it as being a decent police story, but I thought the cop banter was inexpertly done.
In Return to Evil, Edinburgh Detective McNeil, fresh off Professional Standards (what we’d call Internal Affairs in the US), has been assigned to Cold Cases. The officers he works with there are not happy – it’s considered a squad where careers go to die. They’re looking at the murder of a girl in a cemetery, some years ago. She was 15 years old and pregnant, and someone tipped a gravestone onto her. It happened during the shooting of a science fiction movie, now considered a classic.
And now the movie is being remade on the same location, and another girl is found dead in the same way. The cold case becomes a hot one.
My main problem with this book is one I’ve complained about in other books recently – most of the characters aren’t described. I had trouble keeping them straight. The cop banter didn’t annoy me as much this time out, but I still thought the male and female characters were excessively interchangeable.
Not bad, but I can’t recommend Return to Evil highly.
