This is another installment in Colin Conway’s The 509 series, about policing in the Spokane area. I like Conway’s novels very much, his short stories (oddly) not much at all. But The Graffiti Conspiracy is a novel, and a pretty good one from where I sit.
Detectives Quinn Delaney and Marci Burke are assigned to the murder of Earl Ricci, a maintenance man for a real estate management company, who was shot to death while covering up graffiti painted on the back of a vacant building.
There are several suspects, including the talented young man who painted the graffiti, and former associates of Ricci’s (at one point he was accused of stealing money from an fleabag hotel, the Hope, which has since been gentrified. This theft, the subject of one of the 509 short stories, shows up in one way or another in several of these novels).
The solution, once it is found, does not involve any shooting or chases. Just a sad story in a sad world, where confused people take the line of least resistance.
Like all the other 509 novels, The Graffiti Conspiracy is character-driven and highly believable. Cautions for adult matter, and moral ambiguity.
I have bestowed glowing reviews on previous books in Colin Conway’s 509 series of police procedurals set in Washington state, east of the Cascades. When I purchased When the Wicked Rest and Murder by Any Other Name, I didn’t realize that they were not novels but short story collections set in the 509 area.
I discovered I don’t enjoy Conway’s short stories nearly as much as I enjoy his novels. The novels are well-written, character driven, and compassionate. The stories (at least in these collections) are more concentrated. They mostly deal with criminals – either losers who have no hope, or successful ones who make you fear for the world. Neither is much fun, at least for this timid reader.
One story in particular, in Murder by Any Other Name, is especially horrific. It’s called “Angel.” It’s a prison story, a short peek into Hell. Well done, but the stuff of nightmares.
My bottom line on these two story collections is that they’re good (in Chesterton’s sense of being good shots) but also not good (in Chesterton’s sense of shooting one’s grandmother from a distance of 500 yards).
Maybe you appreciate this kind of stuff more than I do. Cautions for extremely disturbing content and lots of bad language.
“This isn’t the fifties, man. Planning a murder is fairly easy now because of TV and the movies. All anyone has to do is pay attention and take notes. Hollywood has done the heavy lifting for them.”
I’ve recently rediscovered Colin Conway’s 509 series, about law enforcement in eastern Washington state. Most of the stories take place in Spokane, but rural areas come into it at times. My personal favorites are the Dallas Nash stories, but all the main characters are good.
The Path of Progress plays out against the backdrop of Camp Faith, a homeless encampment in a distressed part of Spokane. Both political parties are doing their best to exploit the situation, but the neighbors are increasingly unhappy and demonstrative. Lately, area businesses have been experiencing a string of burglaries.
Leya Navarro is a detective on the Property Crimes squad. She’s a conscientious cop, a married working mother (and a church member), not sure what to think about Camp Faith. She’s assigned to the burglaries and given a partner to work with – a detective named Damien Truscott. This doesn’t delight her. Everyone’s suspicious of Truscott, because he used to be in Major Crimes and then transferred to Property. Nobody goes from Major to Property, a step down in status, unless they’ve screwed up somehow.
Their investigations gradually home in on a local pawnbroker, but all his records seem solid. In time the situation escalates to murder, and then the Major Crimes guys enter the story. The chief MC detective here is a somewhat driven fellow named Andrew Parker, and the focus mostly shifts to him.
There are no gunfights or car chases in The Path of Progress. Just realistic police work performed by well-rounded, believable, and sympathetic characters. I like this approach very much.
I also appreciate that, although no preaching is done, Christian characters are treated with respect. You might think a book focused on the homeless problem would involve a lot of politics, but the ordinary people in The Path of Progress seem mostly troubled and confused. Like the rest of us.
I recommend The Path of Progress, along with the whole series. I really can’t think of any content warnings, though I may have missed some rough language or something.
I was reading Colin Conway’s 509 series, about policing in eastern Washington state, for some time, and enjoying the books. I’m not sure why I lost track of the series – maybe because the books feature revolving main characters and I had trouble keeping track of them. But I need to get back to them. They’re really good. I liked The Fate of Our Years a lot.
Dallas Nash is a detective. He lost his wife a while back, and is mourning hard. He talks to her (when no one’s listening) and avoids music generally, because so many songs remind him of her. But this doesn’t interfere with his work – in fact, he works obsessively, because it’s the only thing that keeps his mind off his grief. Nevertheless, he’s afraid the other cops will learn that he’s seeing a psychologist – it marks you as weak and unreliable.
In The Fate of Our Years, he has to investigate the stabbing death of an old man who was once accused of rape, and the beating death of a homeless man. Neither of these cases are the work of super-criminals. We’re dealing with plain, unromantic police work here, the grinding away until something comes loose.
But the real interest is in the characters. I particularly like it when characters surprise you with unexpected character facets – there are a couple such instances in The Fate of Our Years.
Also, it featured a born-again Christian character who is presented in an entirely positive way. There’s no incentive to do that in today’s publishing world, so I was grateful.
I have enjoyed Colin Conway’s 509 series, detective novels set in the Spokane, Washington area. When the story collection, The Eviction of Hope, showed up, I realized I hadn’t read one of the books in a while, so I got this one.
The concept (based on a real-world situation) is that “The Hope,” a residential hotel, once a grand place but now home to transients and drug addicts, is being sold for gentrification. That means the residents, some of them hard-luck civilians, others low-level criminals, are being thrown out onto the streets. Author Conway gathered a group of established crime writers to imagine some of the stories of those dispossessed people.
I am of two minds about the stories in this book. They are well-written. Several of them grabbed me.
However, most of them are downers. One, in particular, involves a Christian woman who disappoints us morally.
All in all, The Eviction of Hope was depressing but well done.
I suppose it’s better to tell a good story with occasional lapses in diction than to write flawless prose but fail as a storyteller. Colin Conway is a good storyteller who could use a better editor. I’ve grown quite fond of his The 509 series, but I liked The After-Hours War less than the previous books, for various reasons.
Several men are found robbed and shot to death in an after-hours smoking club in the Spokane area. Then another group of people are shot in an after-hours, unlicensed bar. The police suffer the embarrassment of investigating crimes committed in private clubs they didn’t even know existed. Turns out that, even though Prohibition has been gone a long time, people still like to break the liquor and tobacco laws with strangers, especially the rules about closing times. It’s a modern form of speakeasy.
The investigation is further hampered by interdepartmental rivalries. The county detectives hate the city detectives, thinking the investigation belongs to them. The city detectives feel the same way, the other way around. And they all hate Morgan, the Crime Task Force cowboy who breaks all the rules and steps on everybody’s toes.
What I like most about the 509 books is the faceting of the characters. We see each cop through the other cops’ eyes, and then we get to see through their own. There’s a lot of human understanding here.
But there were a couple things I didn’t care for. One was the sheer number of main characters in this book. I don’t like jumping back and forth between too many points of view.
The other problem (for this reader) was that it got into politics. When a couple white supremacists are arrested and interrogated, the accused bring out a lot of talking points, some of which they have in common with ordinary conservatives. I don’t know whether this is intended to suggest that conservatives in general are racists – but there are certainly a lot of people on the left who think so.
As before in this series, there were too many typos and word confusions. The author uses “ascetically pleasing” when he means “aesthetically pleasing,” and “a different tact” when he means “a different tack.” He could use a better proofreader.
Still, The After-Hours War was a good book and worth reading. I hope the politics don’t become a permanent fixture in the series.
Another installment in the 509 Series by Colin Conway, about a rotating cast of cops in the Spokane area. I’m enjoying them immensely, and The Mean Street is, I think, the best so far.
The hero this time out is Dallas Nash, who was also the hero of The Long Cold Winter, which I reviewed some time back. Dallas is a senior detective, but his work has been slipping. He lost his wife to an auto accident a year ago, and he’s not handling it well. He gets auditory hallucinations. It used to be songs in his head when he woke up in the morning. That was rather nice; he imagined them as messages from his wife in the Great Beyond. But now it’s hard rock music, blasting in his ears. It’s painful and he can’t hear other people talking over the noise. He’s lost a lot of weight, and his personal grooming has declined. His colleagues and superiors are noticing. But he doesn’t want to see a therapist. If word of that got out, he’s convinced, he’d be marked down as weak and they’d restrict him to desk duty.
When a local pimp is shot to death on the street, Dallas is determined to treat it like any other murder. But a lot of people seem to disagree with that approach. Fellow cops consider the death good riddance. The prostitutes on the street don’t miss the guy at all. And advocates for prostitutes and battered women accuse the police of not doing enough to protect women. Oddly, the dead man didn’t seem to be on the outs with the other pimps. Meanwhile, people are starting to comment on Dallas’ unusual behavior on the job. It’s hard to explain a fainting spell.
I suppose the general theme of this book, considering the subplot involving a woman who kills herself under pressure from a man, is the power imbalance between men and women. I’m generally allergic to that sort of stuff, but it didn’t seem too heavy-heanded in The Mean Street. What I appreciated most was author Conway’s treatment of his characters. We get to see new facets of people we thought we understood; that’s one of my favorite experiences in a novel.
I enjoyed The Mean Street excessively. Recommended.
I’m quite taken with Colin Conway’s The 509 series of police procedurals, set in eastern Washington state. It deals with cops in the Spokane area, and the cast of officers tends to change from book to book. In The Value in Our Lies, we have a new hero – or at least a new main character. If he’s shown up in the series before, it was only as a minor player.
James Morgan works on the Spokane PD Criminal Task Force. He’s corrupt, but not by his own standards. If he pockets some of the drugs found at a crime scene, it’s not for his own use or profit – it’s to pay off informants. If he takes a sexual favor from a prostitute, who does that hurt? If he cuts procedural corners, that’s just part of the game. In his world there’s only Us and Them – working cops vs. the crooks (and often the Brass). For Morgan, there’s pretty much nothing in his life but the Job.
Word on the street says a new gang has moved into town, but nobody seems to know anything tangible, not even his snitches. A prostitute informant of his is being beaten by her pimp, and Morgan cares about this more than he ought to. A friend of a friend is getting blackmailed and comes to Morgan to get him out of the jam. And Internal Affairs is giving him heat.
Morgan is a liar. Lying is part of the way he does his job. But the lies are starting to pile up on him. Will they get somebody killed?
The writing in The Value in Our Lies is sometimes rough. An editor would be a good investment. But the characterization in the book is big league. Morgan isn’t a likeable character, and he’s clearly self-destructive. But one can’t help sympathizing with him sometimes, and occasionally he even earns our fleeting admiration. The plot was pretty gripping too.
I recommend The Value in Our Lies, with cautions for language and mature subject matter.
I’ve skipped a few episodes in Colin Conway’s excellent The 509 series of police procedurals. That was because The Only Death That Matters became available free. But they’re stand-alones, so it was all right. I enjoyed this book just as much as its predecessors.
Ray Christy is a police volunteer. He’s 72 and an army vet. Every day he visits his wife, who’s in a care facility for memory loss. His only son became a cop and died in the line of duty; Ray volunteered to help the Spokane police in an effort to understand his son’s commitment. He doesn’t carry a badge or a gun; he does routine work to take pressure off the real cops. It fills his time and gives his days a purpose.
One day he’s called to pick up a “found” item, a woman’s wallet found in a parking lot. On a whim, he decides to take it back to the owner, at the address on the ID. But when he gets there, he learns the woman is dead, drowned in a bathtub. This is a group home for the elderly, and the owner treats him rudely. Surprisingly, that owner is a cop.
Ray is immediately suspicious. He starts doing research on the man and his business dealings. And then everything blows up…
The 509 series, set in eastern Washington state, is a top-rank mystery series, in this reader’s view. Emphasis is heavily on character. The people in the story are faceted and relatable; I wanted to see how things worked out for them. Detectives Quinn and Burkett are here again, welcome like old friends.
The Only Death That Matters is highly recommended.
Even though Matt was younger, Craig admitted his brother was the smarter one. Now, many years after high school, Matt still read books when no teacher was making him.
Another novel in the 509 series by Colin Conway, which I’m enjoying very much. This is Number Four, and it’s called The Suit.
Times are tough for cocaine dealers in Spokane just now. The cops have shut their supply down, and nerves are frayed. One frustrated junkie, Craig, takes it into his head one day to stick a knife into a random guy walking past, a guy in a suit. But the “suit” surprises him by defending himself quickly and efficiently, leaving Craig with a broken nose. Video of the incident goes viral.
Craig’s brother Matt, meanwhile, is trying to keep his “crew” of coke dealers under control. To focus their attention, he suggests they play a game. It begins with “the knockout game,” a fad from a few years back where street punks punched strangers, trying to knock them out with one blow. But Matt adds a new wrinkle. They pool their money, film each attack, and then award points by vote. The winner takes the pot.
Detectives Quinn Delaney and Marci Burkett are on the case, but it’s a tough one. The attacks are random, scattered all over the city. But once the game finds a focus – once the attackers start targeting “suits,” men in business attire, alone, they begin finding a few leads. Which will lead them to, among other people, the original hero “suit” of the video – a man with secrets.
Another good book in an outstanding series. I personally enjoyed The Suit a little less than the previous books, because it required the reader to spend a lot of time with Matt and his “crew,” who are not pleasant company at all.
I also have to admit – and this will surprise no one who follows these reviews – that I have a little trouble with Detective Marci Burkett. I dislike the cliché of the kick-butt female cop who can beat any man. Marci is definitely one of those – I still insist that size and strength count for something, and such characters often seem to deny the laws of physics.
On the other hand, Marci is a better crafted character than most of her sisters in literature. It’s clear she has anger management issues, that her emotional ducks aren’t all in a row. That helps.
But mostly I put up with her because the books are so good otherwise.
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