Leo Banks Returns in Benediction

This is another fine, very gritty police procedural by Robert Sims Reid featuring Rozette, Montana homicide detective, Leo Banks.

A piece of L.A. scum named Johnny Perbix has shown up in Rozette. But Perbix is a rich piece of scum--a record producer turned-real estate developer. Perbix has bought a piece of prime real estate, Bride's Canyon, that overlooks Rozette and the valley below. The property was once a beautiful, forested park-like area that the original owner had allowed the local citizens to enjoy. The original owner had hoped to donate the land as a public park, but he fell on hard times financially and had no choice but to sell. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife died in a tragic accident.

Now Bride's Canyon has been clear-cut and Johnny Perbix is planning an upscale housing development there. Since the local economy is depressed and the new development will pump a lot of money and jobs into the area, some citizens are willing to forgive Perbix for desecrating such a beautiful spot and for being less than an upstanding citizen.

Not Leo Banks.

Banks is particularly upset because Perbix had earlier corrupted a local young woman and got her into drugs and porn films. She later died of an overdose, and Banks has been determined to bring Perbix down ever since.

As the book opens, a woman is brutally assaulted by two men who not only violate her but videotape the assault. The woman was once married to one of Perbix's employees and she is also the daughter of the original owner of Bride's Canyon. Banks sees Johnny's fingerprints all over this crime and is determined to use it as a wedge to bring Perbix down. The only obstacles in his path would appear to be his bosses in the department, the townspeople who still want to placate Perbix, and the victim herself who blows hot and cold with regard to Banks and to the crime that was committed against her.

It all makes for a volatile mix, and Banks is determined to get to the bottom of the seamy mess, no matter the danger or the personal cost to himself. This is a good read that should appeal to anyone who enjoys their crime fiction dark and nasty.

Gravedigger

First published in 1982, this is the sixth entry in Joseph Hansen's series featuring Dave Brandstetter, the first openly gay detective to inhabit the world originally occupied by Philip Marlowe and other such giants of the P.I. genre.

Dave is now working for the Banner Insurance Company. A young woman named Serenity Westover has been missing for a couple of years, after falling under the spell of a nutcase named Azrael, who is something of a mash-up of Jim Jones and Charles Manson. The cops have invaded the ranch occupied by Azrael and his followers, and they have discovered the graves of several young women, one of whom may be Serenity.

Serenity's life had been insured by Banner and her father, Charles Westover, a disbarred lawyer, files a death claim. But when Dave attempts to interview her father, Westover is nowhere to be found. His house is empty and apparently hasn't been occupied for at least a couple of weeks.

Naturally, Dave is not going to sign off on the claim unless and until he can interview Westover and ensure that Serenity is, in fact, dead. But Dave's effort to discover the missing father leads him deeper and deeper into a world of old secrets that a lot of people would rather not see exhumed, and before long, he finds himself in serious trouble. At the same time, he's settling into a new relationship with a much younger man, and that is causing him problems as well.

This is a very entertaining book from a day and age when P.I. genre novels were still relatively short and tightly focused. Brandstetter is a character unique in the annals of crime fiction, especially for the early 1980s, and this is a book that should appeal to anyone interested in the evolution of this genre.

Lucas Davenport Chases After Brutal Killers and a Lot of Missing Money

Lucas Davenport is back on the job for the twenty-second time, and as the book opens Lucas is himself the victim of a crime. Out for a run, he stops by an ATM and withdraws $500.00. Moments later, a pair of tweekers rob him at gunpoint. They take his five hundred bucks and knock him down, breaking his wrist. Lucas will have to be in a cast for three months and, needless to say for those who know him, he's going to be seriously angry about this.

Lucas is determined to find and arrest the robbers and since they are apparently from a rural area out of town, he delegates the task to Virgil Flowers, who will report in periodically. Lucas will be constantly on Flowers' case about this and will insist on being their when the offending tweekers are finally run to ground.

Meanwhile, a family in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb is brutally tortured and murdered. It's perhaps the worst crime scene that Davenport has ever encountered and it bears the signature of a Mexican drug gang. The father of the murdered family was the last to die and owned a software company that sells Spanish-language software in Mexico. Lucas wonders if perhaps the company was laundering money for drug lords.

As it turns out, the drug lords seem to be missing $22 million, and they would like it back. The trail leads to Minnesota and the head of the cartel has dispatched a trio of cold-blooded killers to find it. Lucas is faced with the task of finding the killers and tracking down the missing money.

This is a fun read, but to my mind, it's not up to the usual very high standards of the series as a whole. The book seems somehow a bit flat, not as exciting and not as witty as most of Davenport's other adventures.

As an example, when Lucas gets the cast on his wrist, he naturally bitches about it and you expect that this is going to be a humorous subtheme that Sandford will use through the rest of the book, as he often does with something like this. After a few pages, though, he drops any reference to the cast. Then, finally, as the book ends, the three months are up and the cast come off. At which point, the reader smacks himself in the head and says, "Oh yeah, right. He's had a cast on his wrist through the whole book!" As quickly as Sandford lost interest in the cast, one wonders why he even bothered with it in the first place.

Another problem lies in the fact that the villains in this book are not up to Sandford's usual standards. Sandford is know for creating great, nasty, smart antagonists who are always a good match for Davenport. In this case, though, the trio of killers, while brutally nasty, are just a bunch of dumb thugs who stay one step ahead of the cops more by luck than anything else. The people who stole the $22 million are not all that interesting or challenging either. They're good at manipulating computer code and stealing money out of bank accounts, but they're certainly not in a class with Clara Rinker or many of Sandford's other antagonists. And the investigation of the theft is not all that riveting.

Finally, many of the usual cast of characters are missing here. A few, like Davenport's favorite undercover investigator Del Casplock, will put in a token appearance now and then, but without the normal group that usually surrounds Davenport, the banter is not nearly as sharp and amusing as it normally is. One character, in particular, has been out of the lineup for the last couple of books and is very sorely missed.

Still, even though Sandford and Davenport may not be at the top of their game here, I enjoyed the book and am very much looking forward to Davenport's next outing, Silken Prey.

A Farewell to Spenser

Forty years ago, in The Godwulf Manuscript, Robert B. Parker introduced his first and most popular protagonist, Spenser, a tough, witty Boston P.I. Sixkill is the fortieth and last entry in the series (at least the last written by Parker himself), and the series, like its lead character, has had its ups and downs.

The early books were terrific. Spenser was a very engaging character and his early cases were often complex and thought-provoking in addition to being a helluva lot of fun. Later, though, Parker began to coast and wrote a number of books that did not live up to the promise of the early novels and that were often little more than an excuse for Spenser and his sidekicks to exchange snappy dialogue for three hundred pages or so.

In particular, the series seemed to wander off the track when Spenser, who had enjoyed relationships with a number of women in the early books, settled down into a monogamous relationship with Susan Silverman, a Harvard-educated psychologist. Increasingly, the relationship between Spenser and Susan became as much of a focal point of the books as the crime or other mystery that Spenser was investigating at the time. And, to be honest, reading about the two of them became extremely tiresome in a pretty big hurry.

As someone who has read the entire series, I really would have hoped that Parker’s Spenser would go out on a high note, in a book that recalled the glory days of the series. Sadly, though, Sixkill is not such a book. In fairness to Parker, though, I assume that he did not expect to die suddenly at his desk without having the opportunity to give Spenser a proper sendoff.

That is not to say that Sixkill is a bad book. Like most of the later entries in the series, it’s a fun read, and certainly a quick one. Spenser’s long-time sidekick, Hawk, is traveling somewhere in Asia and so, unfortunately, is MIA for this last book. Unhappily, Susan Silverman is not traveling in Asia or anywhere else, and so a fair amount of the book consists of Spenser and Susan having world-class sex and telling each other how wonderful they are. (This, in spite of the fact that Spenser is a veteran of the Korean War, which would mean that he’s pushing eighty by the time he gets to this adventure.)

The case itself is patterned after the scandalous 1921 murder trial of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. At the time, Arbuckle was a huge Hollywood sensation, and in this case, the term refers both to his popularity and to his size. “Fatty,” as one might gather, was not a small man. The victim, a young starlet, died after partying with Arbuckle and others over several days in a San Francisco hotel room. Though there was little evidence to support the charge, the more sensational newspaper accounts insisted that Arbuckle had raped the woman and, in the process of doing so, had squashed her. In the end, Arbuckle was tried and acquitted, but his reputation was ruined.

In Sixkill, a huge movie star named Jumbo Nelson (again, “huge” in both senses of the word), invites a young woman names Dawn Lopata up to his hotel room. She dies there after having sex with Jumbo. Though the evidence is far from clear, many in the media insist that Nelson, a particularly unappealing character in person, is guilty of murder and should be tried and put away.

Such an outcome would be very bad, both for Jumbo and for the studio and others who have a great deal riding on his career. They would not like to see him prosecuted. Captain Martin Quirk of the Boston P.D. is in charge of the case and isn’t sure that the evidence supports arresting Jumbo. But the public is demanding Nelson’s head on a platter and Quirk apparently feels that he’s not in a position to stand in front of the oncoming train. He’d prefer that Spenser do so. (One might think that the job of the Police Department in this or any other case, would be to pursue justice irrespective of what the larger public might want. But if that were the case, there would be no book, so never mind.)

Spenser takes the case and, as is his habit, he will pursue it to the end, no matter where it takes him and no matter the danger. The real fun of the book lies in the character of Zebulon Sixkill, a Cree Indian who, when the book opens, is serving as Jumbo Nelson’s bodyguard. Sixkill is a behemoth and, naturally, has never been bested by any mortal man. When Spenser annoys Jumbo, Jumbo orders Sixkill to get rid of Spenser. As any reader would expect, Spenser, of course, mops up the floor with Sixkill.

Jumbo fires Sixkill for this gross incompetence and Spenser takes him on as a substitute Hawk, teaching him the ways of the world. The character is one of Parker’s best inventions, smart and funny and a joy to watch in action. It would have been nice to see him appear in later books.

Unhappily, that won’t be the case, at least not for this reader. And as much as I have enjoyed this series through the years, it’s really sad to imagine that there will never again be a fresh Spenser adventure. Susan Silverman, I can happily do without. But Spenser, Hawk, Rita Fiore, Belson, Quirk and all the other characters who have populated these books have become part of my crime fiction universe and I will sorely miss them. The Parker Estate has commissioned Ace Atkins to continue the series, and while I greatly admire Atkins’ own books, I have never liked the idea of another author taking over a series that I really enjoyed once the original writer has gone to Crime Fiction Heaven. So in the future, I will content myself with re-reading the best books of this series and for me, that will suffice.

R.I.P., Mr. Parker, and thanks for all the great books.

Lucas Davenport, Meet Clara Rinker

This is probably my favorite book in John Sandford's Prey series, featuring Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolis P.D. and, later, of the Minnesota State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Sandford is famous for creating terrific villains and the main antagonist here, Clara Rinker, is perhaps his best. Actually, Lucas is up against two great antagonists in this story: Rinker, who is a particularly deadly professional hitwoman and Carmel Loan, a man-eating, ass-kicking Minneapolis criminal attorney.

As the story opens, Carmel Loan has fallen madly for Hale Allen, a sexy but rather dimwitted attorney who also works in her firm. The problem is that Allen is married and thus, for the moment at least, unavailable. Carmel has kept her desire for Allen a secret and, through the intercession of a drug dealer she successfully defended, she hires Carla Rinker to kill Allen's wife, Barbara. Once Barbara is out of the way, Carmel figures to help Hale get over his loss ASAP.

Rinker arrives in Minneapolis and smoothly dispatches Barbara Allen. She then collects her money and returns to her home base in Wichita, Kansas, where she owns a bar. But then, everything turns to crap on a variety of fronts when Carmel's ex-client tries to blackmail her over the hit. Rinker returns to the Twin Cities and together, she and Carmel attempt to tie up the loose ends.

Davenport and his team are on the case, but as the bodies continue to pile up, there's precious little evidence pointing toward the killer or killers. Davenport, though, is one of those detectives who works by inspiration as much as anything else, and when he gets a sense of what might be going on, the fun really begins.

As is always the case in this series, the action moves rapidly. There's a great deal of humor, and it's great fun to watch Lucas and his usual cast of characters at work. It's especially fun to watch the by-play between Lucas and Carmel Loan, and Clara Rinker is an inspiration. On the one hand, she's a truly bad person who's killed a couple of dozen people just for the money. On the other hand, though, you can't help but love her, just as you can't help rooting for Lawrence Block's great professional hitman, Keller.

This book does depend on at least one pretty amazing coincidence, but by the time it occurs, you really don't care. You're having so much fun by that point that you're perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and happily go along for the rest of the ride. This is a great read.

Leo Banks Tackles Homicides Old and New

After twenty years of service, Leo Banks is recently retired from the police department in Rozette, Montana. Having married and divorced three women, he's living quietly and happily alone, fishing and doing some amateur geology. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, his old friends from college, Sarah and Gerry Heyman, show up in Montana on vacation, along with their two kids. Years ago, Sarah was Leo's first lover, but they split up when Banks joined the Navy against her wishes, and she ultimately married Gerry, who had been Leo's best friend.

After all the time that's passed, their reunion is awkward, and it's clear that Gerry is a troubled man. He's now a successful doctor in Mauvaisterre, a tiny river town in southern Illinois, and he's recently acquired a new elderly patient who's just been released from prison and moved into the nursing home in Mauvaisterre.

The new patient, Mickey Cochran, is mildly retarded, and fifty years earlier, he pled guilty to the murder of the wife of one of the town's most prominent citizens. Now Cochran insists that he did not commit the crime and Gerry Heyman believes him. Gerry wants Leo to come to Illinois and investigate the old case.

Banks refuses for a variety of reasons, some of them practical and others emotional, given his ancient history with Sarah and Gerry. Gerry returns to Illinois and attempts to investigate the case himself and a few weeks later is found on a lonely road, beaten to death.

Sarah believes that the local cops are not up the challenge of solving the crime and begs Leo, an experienced homicide detective, to come investigate it himself. Reluctantly Leo agrees, and before long, he finds himself knee deep in two homicide cases, one knew and one old, in a town where there are lots of buried secrets.

This is a great book with an excellent cast of characters, some of who are more than just a little off-center. There's a lot of local color and the Banks character, who was first introduced in Cupid, is now given a great deal of additional depth. The plot is intriguing and moves along at just the right pace.

I've insisted earlier that Robert Sims Reid is one of those writers who, sadly, did not enjoy nearly the reputation he deserved. It's hard to imagine anyone who might read this book and think otherwise.

Nick's Trip

This is the second installment in George Pelecanos's trilogy featuring Nick Stefanos, who lives in Washington, D.C. When last seen in A Firing Offense, Nick had left his job at Nutty Nathan's electronic store and had gotten his license as a P.I. Clients are few and far between, though, and so Nick takes a job as a bartender in a dive bar called the Spot where there's never a lack of clients.

There's no lack of booze at the Spot either, and Nick seems in danger of watching his young life slip away in a sea of whiskey and a cloud of cigarette smoke. He has his music and a girlfriend of sorts, but that's about the sum of his life at the moment. Then one day, a long-lost friend named Billy Goodrich walks into the Spot. Back in the day, Nick and Billy were tight and once took an infamous road trip that Nick has never forgotten. It seems that Billy's wife, April, has disappeared and Billy wants Nick to find her. He insists that he just wants to know that she's OK.

As Nick begins to dig into the case he discovers that April is not the only thing that's missing. She'd been seeing a small-time numbers runner named Joey DiGeordano who suddenly seems to be missing $200,000 that disappeared along with April.

The plot begins to thicken and soon Nick and Billy are on another road trip into a rural area south of D.C., hot on April's trail. In the meantime, Nick has also agreed to look into the murder of a newspaper reporter named William Henry. The cops have written off the crime, but Henry was a friend and Nick refuses to let the murder go unsolved.

As is always the case with a novel by George Pelecanos, the book is very atmospheric. All of the characters are well drawn; music infuses the story, and you can practically taste the liquor and smell the cigarette smoke. The search for April Goodrich is an interesting and colorful tale, and along the way, Nick learns a great deal about the nature and value of friendship.

If I have any quarrel with the book, it would be that the second case, involving the murder of William Henry, seems tacked on to the plot and does not flow as smoothly as it might. One also wonders how anyone, even a person as young as Nick Stefanos, could possibly function at a reasonable level, given the amount of booze, cigarettes and dope he consumes during the course of the book. But these are minor complaints; in this book, as always, George Pelecanos demonstrates that he's a master of the craft and Nick's Trip is a great ride.