This is another very good installment in John Sandford's Prey series, featuring Minneapolis police detective Lucas Davenport. As the book opens, Davenport's team takes down a crew that's been holding up credit unions. In the shootout, two women are killed--the wife and sister of a violent criminal named Dick LaChaise.

LaChaise is halfway through a nine-year prison term and is not thought to be a major flight risk. He's allowed to attend his wife's funeral with only one escort. As any reader will understand the moment he or she is introduced to LaChaise, this is going to be bad news for the escort, who's soon lying dead on the floor of the funeral parlor.

LaChaise is in the wind with two equally messed up associates, determined to wreak revenge on the members of Davenport's team whom he blames for the death of his wife. He will attack and kill their loved ones as they have killed his, an eye for an eye as he says.

The principal target, of course, will be Davenport's fiance, surgeon Weather Karkinnen. What follows is a particularly gripping game of cat and mouse as the cops attempt to fend off the attacks and recapture LaChaise and his associates. And before it's over, virtually all of the characters, good guys and bad, will become sudden prey.

There's a great cast of characters in this book. Lucas, Del, Sloan and the other members of the team are all in fine form. Weather reacts to the situation exactly as readers of the series would imagine, which only adds to the tension and the fun. As always, Sandford does a great job with the villains, and Dick LaChaise is one of his most inspired creations. All of the action leads to a great climax and both long-time fans and first-time readers will be turning pages well into the night, racing to get there.

This is another excellent entry in Michael Connelly's series featuring LAPD homicide detective, Harry Bosch.

Bosch, who had earlier retired from the department is now back under the Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP). He has a little more than three years left before he will be forced to retire for good and he is anxious to accomplish as much as he possibly can in the time he has remaining.

Harry is now working in the Open/Unsolved Unit, investigating cold cases, and as the book opens, he and his partner, David Chu, are assigned a particularly interesting case from over twenty years earlier. A child was sexually assaulted and murdered and now DNA evidence has linked the crime to a convicted sex offender. It seems like an open and shut case, except for one small problem: at the time of the crime, the offender whose DNA was found on the body was only eight years old.

While Harry pursues this puzzling cold case, he's assigned to a new live case by special request. The son of an old nemesis, city councilman Irvin Irving, has dropped to his death from a balcony at a posh hotel. The councilman insists that Bosch investigate the death personally. While he and Harry may have at times been bitter opponents, Irving knows that Harry is a man of integrity and that he will find the real truth, irrespective of whether the son's death was an accident, suicide or murder.

Inevitably, Harry will face any number of obstacles in both investigations and in the end, he has to wonder whom, if anyone, he can trust. Both cases are very interesting and as always, it's enormous fun to watch Harry work. Michael Connelly, like his fictional detective, seems to just be getting better and better with age. This is a real page-turner that should appeal to anyone who enjoys crime fiction and that will be treasured by fans of this great series.

Fame and fortune came much too early and much too quickly to Kip Weiler who became a star of the 1980s New York literary scene while still in his early twenties. He quickly became "the Kipster," running through money, dope and women as if there were no tomorrow.

Unhappily for Kip, there was. And having squandered his talent and his young life, he's spiraled down to rock bottom, teaching English at a tiny rural community college to dead-end students whose futures are even darker than his. But then one afternoon, as Kip is returning the first assignments of the semester, a disgruntled student takes him and the class hostage. Acting purely on instinct, Kip saves the day and earns another fifteen minutes of fame. He also earns the attention of Renee Svoboda, a stunningly beautiful coed, and of another student, Jim Trimble, who has long been an unabashed fan of Weiler's work.

Before long, Kip is sexually involved with the lovely Renee and she and Trimble together introduce him into a group of gun aficionados that had turned into a semi-religious cult. For the people caught in the dead-end existence of this small rural community, the Gun Church provides the only excitement and escape that they are likely to find.

Kip is quickly caught up and finds that these new relationships have reinvigorated his literary imagination. He starts writing again and is suddenly producing the best work of his life. But then things take a very unexpected turn and suddenly that life is in serious jeopardy.

This is a gripping, well-written novel with a lot of discussion about the writing life and the business of writing, and it should appeal to a wide audience. Readers who like crime fiction and those looking for insights into the writing life should certainly enjoy it.

This is the twenty-sixth and last of the books in William G. Tapply's long-running series featuring Boston attorney Brady Coyne, published in 2010, a year after Tapply's death. The series began in 1984 with Death at Charity's Point, and Coyne also appeared in two other novels that Tapply wrote with Philip R. Craig. These two books featured Brady Coyne and Craig's series protagonist, J. W. Jackson, working in tandem.

Coyne did not appear to age much over the twenty-six years, although his ex-wife two sons did grow a bit older. He remained attractive to women and was usually involved in a relationship. While certainly no super-hero, he also remained perfectly capable of holding his own when things got rough.

That did not happen all that often. Brady ran a fairly genteel one-man practice with his long-suffering secretary, Julie, who tried, without much success, to introduce some discipline into Brady's regimen. His clients were mostly older, well-heeled types who came to him seeking advice about their financial matters. Truth to tell, Brady appeared to be much more interested in fishing than in the law and virtually every book found him sneaking away, or at least planning to sneak away from his office for some isolated but inviting fishing stream.

Inevitably, of course, some unusual problem occasionally appeared that required Brady to extricate a client from matters more serious than the usual drafting of a will. In this case, Brady gets a surprise call from Ken Nichols, an old friend and neighbor that he hasn't seen in years. Back in the old days, Brady and his wife Gloria had been close to Ken and his wife, Sharon. But then both couples divorced. Nichols moved away and the four lost contact with each other.

Now Nichols is in town for a convention and asks Brady to meet him for a drink. When they do, Brady senses that Nichols is in some sort of trouble, although Nichols insists that everything is fine. The next evening, Brady gets a call from Nichols' ex-wife, Sharon, who is in Ken's hotel room. Ken has been murdered; Sharon is the logical prime suspect, and she wants Brady to come to the rescue.

He does, in his usual low-key but competent fashion. He guides Sharon through the initial interviews with the police and then sets about trying to determine what actually happened before his client winds up taking the fall for a crime she insists that she did not commit. In and around his efforts to solve the crime, Brady must deal with some family issues of his own and with and old flame who has come back into his life but who seems reluctant to commit fully.

Opening the pages of a Brady Coyne novel was always like meeting an old friend. He was bright and interesting but he was also a regular guy and you could easily imagine sitting down and having a beer with him, talking about fishing or the Red Sox, another of his passions. The settings in these books were very well drawn; the plots were engaging and the action did not require a significant suspension of disbelief. A fan who has followed Brady Coyne through all of these adventures reads the last paragraphs of Outwitting Trolls with a profound sense of regret. Brady Coyne and William G. Tapply will both be missed.

On a rainy day, Rebecca Harris is shot to death at long range in the parking lot of the southern California newspaper where she works as the assistant to a liberal columnist. It quickly becomes apparent that Harris was almost certainly not the intended target. Rather, it was the columnist herself who had antagonized large numbers of conservative readers with her outspoken opinions.

Rebecca leaves in her wake a tangled emotional mess, including her fiance, Josh Weinstein, an FBI agent, and her lover John Menden, a fellow newspaperman. At the time of her death, Rebecca was in the process of leaving Josh for Menden. Both men are devastated by her loss, and Weinstein is naturally further hurt and angered by her betrayal. Menden responds to the tragedy by quitting his job, withdrawing from society, and taking another job at a tiny newspaper out in the boondocks. Josh's response is to throw himself into the task of finding Rebecca's killer.

Weinstein ultimately concludes that the killer is the powerful head of a private security company--a former FBI agent himself who went off the rails when his son was killed and his wife critically injured in a shooting incident. The ex-agent was infuriated by a series of columns written by Rachel's boss suggesting that his son was a rapist, hence the botched attempt to kill her.

The problem is that Josh does not have enough evidence to charge the killer and so, in a bizarre twist, he recruits Menden, Rebecca's lover, to go under cover and get it. The two men will put aside their feelings about each other in the larger interest of catching the man who killed the woman they both loved.

This is a very good book that keeps the reader on edge, particularly after John infiltrates the killer's inner circle. The tension rises not only over the issue of whether John will survive long enough succeed but also over the lingering question about whether Josh might still want to ultimately punish Menden for stealing Rebecca's heart. Another winner from T. Jefferson Parker.

First published in 1974, this is the sixteenth book in Richard Stark's acclaimed series featuring Parker, the amoral antihero criminal mastermind. While the book can be read as a stand-alone, it is really the capstone of the series to that point and the last Parker novel that would appear until Comeback, a full twenty-three years later.

The original plan seems simple enough: Two years earlier (in Slayground), Parker and several confederates hit an armored car in the Midwestern town of Tyler for $73,000. But before they could get away, the cops closed in and Parker was forced to hide out in an amusement park that was closed for the winter. A group of mobsters and a few corrupt cops laid siege to the park in the hope of separating Parker from the money. Ultimately, Parker hid the money in the park and managed to escape.

Now, after another job has come up empty, Parker decides to go back to Tyler and retrieve the $73,000. He recruits Alan Grofield, one of his long-time associates, and the two of them quietly go to Tyler, wait for the amusement park to close for the night, and head for the spot where Parker hid the loot.

It isn't there.

This will come as no great surprise to the reader because this is the longest of the Parker novels and Parker and Grofield discover that the money is gone on page 21, which means that they will have to spend the rest of the book attempting to get the money back.

Parker is not really surprised to find the money missing either. He reaches the logical conclusion that, in the wake of his escape, the mobsters searched the park until they found the money and appropriated it for their own purposes.

Parker explains to Grofield that he knows who the boss of the local mob is. Parker calls the guy and politely asks that he return Parker's money. Not surprisingly, the mobster claims that he doesn't have it. He insists that his men did search the park but couldn't find it. Parker naturally refuses to believe him and takes several steps to demonstrate that the mobster should not take his threats lightly.

As it happens, Parker and Grofield have arrived in town at a critical time for the local mob. A gang war is brewing and Parker decides that he'll show the locals what a real gang war looks like. He recruits his own gang, composed of a number of characters from the earlier Parker novels, and goes after the mobsters, leading to a sensational climax befitting what Stark originally intended to be the last book in the series.

This is a gripping and very entertaining book that will appeal especially to those who have read the earlier Parker books and who will recognize so many of the characters that Stark resurrects. But it's hard to imagine that anyone who loves crime fiction will not thoroughly enjoy Butcher's Moon.

This is a beautifully-written, captivating book about a number of mostly poverty-stricken rural characters, some of whom are down on their luck and others of whom are simply bad to the bone.

Set in rural Ohio and West Virginia, the story takes place over a period from the end of World War II until the middle of the 1960s. It weaves together the strands of several different stories, and the characters include a husband and wife team of serial killers who hunt their male "models" along the nation's highways. There are a couple of seriously screwed-up preachers, a totally bent sheriff, a war veteran who spends hours at his "prayer log" sacrificing and pleading with God to save his wife who is dying of cancer, and their son, Arvin, who pulls the various parts of the story together. The supporting cast includes a number of minor, but equally well-drawn characters, all of whom are unforgettable.

Also unforgettable is the setting. Pollock paints a vivid portrait of these small towns and isolated farms where hope and opportunity are totally foreign concepts. To say that these people lead often desperate, hard scrabble lives would be an understatement. Although the book is set in the middle of the Twentieth Century, in some respects many of these people are still living as though it were the beginning of the century.

There is a lot of brutal action in this book, but the story is so well-told that Pollock draws you in from virtually the first line. And even though it's very hard to sympathize with a lot of the characters, you turn the last page with a deep sense of regret that the book has ended. Donald Ray Pollock is also the author of the acclaimed Knockemstiff and he is definitely a writer to look for.