L. A. REQUIEM Is the Best Book Thus Far in the Elvis Cole Series

The eighth entry in the Elvis Cole series is easily the best to date. It begins when Elvis's partner in the detective agency, Joe Pike, calls and asks for his help. Frank Garcia, a very wealthy and well-connected businessman, is an old friend of Joe's. Garcia's daughter Karen, who is thirty-two, has been missing for a little over twenty-four hours. Garcia has called the police but, not surprisingly, they aren't going to go looking for an adult that has been gone for barely a day. Garcia is worried sick, though. He knows his daughter and he knows that something has happened to her.

It turns out that, back when he was still a cop, Joe dated Karen Garcia, in the process breaking her heart. But he's still tight with the family and so there's no doubt that Joe and, by extension, Elvis, will immediately begin searching for Karen. Sadly, of course, it will turn out that Karen has been shot to death while out hiking, and Cole and Pike will now be trying to find her killer. The homicide detectives investigating the case are not at all happy about this; most of them either dislike or actively hate Pike because of the events that caused him to leave the department. But Garcia has enough political juice that the cops are forced to let the two into the investigation. Naturally, they will attempt to frustrate Cole and Pike at every turn.

This is a very complex plot with a lot of devious twists and turns. The most interesting aspect of the book, however, is that it offers readers of the series a deep dive into the personal history of Joe Pike. Up to now, Pike has been the strong, silent, almost super-hero sidekick who materializes every time it's necessary to bail Cole out of a tight spot. We've known little or nothing about him, save for the fact that he was a Vietnam vet, a former cop, and Cole's largely silent partner. This book, though, is as much Pike's as it is Cole's and Robert Crais has imagined a very unusual and interesting back story for the character. It also turns out that, up to now, Cole hasn't known much more about his partner than the reader.

Also central to the book is Cole's evolving relationship with his new love, Lucy Chenier. Lucy has just given up her life in Louisiana to move to L.A. with her young son in order to be with Cole. Cole is helping Lucy move into her new home when he gets the call from Pike, and their relationship will be sorely tested as the story moves along. As a reader, I'm still not sold on the character or the relationship with Cole. To me it seems more like a plot device than a genuine romantic attraction, and I couldn't get invested enough to care whether the relationship will survive or not.

This is an excellent crime novel, although I'm docking it half a star because I found the great reveal about the killer to be a bit of a stretch. Overall, though, I enjoyed it a great deal. 4.5 stars.

 Over a career that spanned forty-four years, from 1962 to 2006, Dick Francis wrote forty novels as a solo author and four of them featured Sid Halley, a former jockey who had become a private investigator. This is the last of the forty novels and the last to feature Sid Halley, which is, I think, an appropriate way for both Sid Halley and his creator to bow out.

For those who haven't made his acquaintance, Halley was a champion jockey until he had a horrendous racing accident that cost him is left hand. He was fitted with a prosthetic, but obviously his racing career was over. Halley found a second career as a private investigator and established a reputation as a tough, honest, intelligent operator. The cases he takes often involve the world of horseracing.

Such is the case here. A British lord named Enstone is concerned that his horses seem to be underperforming, losing races that they should be winning. He asks Halley to investigate to see if, for some reason, someone is causing them to lose. At the same time, Halley accepts another case in which he is asked to investigate the relatively new business of on-line betting as it affects the horse racing industry.

Halley barely gets started with the investigation before a jockey who often rides for Lord Enstone is shot to death at a racecourse. The police fairly quickly settle on a suspect that Halley believes to be innocent and so he turns his attention to the murder as well. As things progress, they get increasingly complicated and increasingly dangerous, not just for Sid Halley but for those he cares most about.

This is an interesting novel for a couple of reasons. Halley, who has long been divorced, is in a new relationship with a woman named Marina, and she looks like she might finally be the one for Halley. Their relationship is a key part of the novel. Additionally, the book relies heavily on DNA evidence, which was still in its infancy when this book was written. Apparently the police in Britain are not using it in any significant way yet, but fortunately, Marina works in a lab where the new techniques are being used for other purposes and so Halley is able to rely on the lab for help in investigating the case. There's plenty of action in the novel and a lot of twists and turns. If I were to make any complaint about the book, it would be that the villain of the piece does not measure up to the standard that Francis set in so many of his earlier books, and doesn't really seem to be an opponent worthy of Sid Halley.

Under Orders is certainly not the best of the Francis novels, but it's still a pretty good book to go out on, and this, then, completes my assignment of reading and reviewing all of the Dick Francis novels. Francis would go on to write a couple of other books in concert with his son, Felix, and Felix Francis has now taken over the franchise. For a variety of reasons, I have no interest in reading books in a series that I have thoroughly enjoyed when the original author dies or passes the baton to someone else. The sole exception to this rule is that of Ace Atkins who has taken over Robert B. Parker's Spenser series and who is doing an excellent job with it.

Given that, I have not and will not be reading any "Dick Francis" novels written by anyone else, his son included. The forty novels written by Francis himself, with the assistance of his wife Mary who was his principal researcher, are more than sufficient as far as I'm concerned.

Owen Laukannen’s new book, The Wild is aimed at a young adult audience, but it’s certainly smart and sophisticated enough to appeal to a lot of adult readers as well.

The protagonist is a seventeen-year-old girl named Dawn who has suffered an emotional trauma and has made some very bad decisions in consequence. She can’t stand the man her mother recently married; she’s run away from home several times; she’s abusing drugs, and she’s moved in with a drug dealer who’s nearly old enough to be her father. And at that point, her mother and stepfather basically kidnap her and send her off to Out in the Wild, a “wilderness therapy program for troubled youth.”

Boot camp would be more like it. The “therapy” involved here centers on marching a group of troubled teenagers through the woods and up and down steep mountain trails, in cold, miserable weather, with no comforts at all—not even so much as a backpack and a tent—unless and until you can earn them.

Dawn is issued a tarp, some water, and a bare minimum of food and is sent off with several of her fellow campers on a forced march under the supervision of two “counselors,” whose sole approach to “therapy,” is to drive the kids to exhaustion and, apparently, to break down their resistance to authority.

Dawn’s fellow hikers turn out to be a mixed bag of kids, some of whom are emotionally disturbed while others who simply mean and violent and probably belong in prison rather than in a wilderness program. And it’s clear going in that trouble is going to follow.

Dawn is a very sympathetic protagonist, and Laukkanen moves the action along briskly with short, fast-paced chapters that keep the reader turning from one page to the next. By implication, Out in the Wild is a pretty suspect organization, and it’s hard to imagine how the program they offer would ever actually benefit anyone, save for the people who are making money by convincing parents to enroll their children in this program.

I’m a huge fan of Laukkanen’s earlier novels, which have been aimed at an adult audience, and while reading The Wild, I found myself thinking repeatedly about his book, The Stolen Ones, which is not only an excellent thriller but an eye-opening examination of the sex trade business. I wish he would have had the opportunity here to more thoroughly examine the entire “boot camps for kids” industry, but I imagine that probably wouldn’t have been appropriate in a book designed for younger readers.

Even as an adult, I was pulled along by the book’s propulsive pace; I can only imagine how quickly I would have been turning the pages had I read this at the age of fifteen or so. All in all, this is another excellent novel from Laukkanen who has conveniently solved the problem of what I will be getting my teenage nieces and nephews for their birthdays this year.

This is an excellent stand-alone novel from Adrian McKinty, who is also the author of the Sean Duffy crime novels, a series which is among my very favorites. The protagonist here is a woman named Rachel O'Neill who has been having a very bad run of luck. Her husband has left her for a younger woman and she's been ill with cancer. Then, on a morning when it appears that her cancer may be returning, Rachel gets the worst news a parent could possibly imagine: her thirteen-year-old daughter, Kylie, has been kidnapped.

Inevitably, of course, a voice on the phone tells Rachel not to contact the authorities. But in addition to demanding a monetary ransom, Rachel is told that in order to get her own daughter back, she must kidnap someone else's child and hold that child until the parents agree to pay a ransom and kidnap a victim of their own. Rachel, Kylie, and the other parents ensnared in this trap are now a part of The Chain, a devious criminal conspiracy that perpetuates itself and enriches its developers, by forcing ordinary citizens to do the unconscionable work of kidnapping children. Should Rachel or anyone else break the chain, they and their children will be killed.

Like the other victims of the chain, Rachel, a moral, upstanding, law-abiding citizen, is forced to confront the question of how far she is willing to go to protect her own child. And the answer, of course, is that she will do literally anything.

This is one of those stories that grabs the reader from the opening page and refuses to let go. It's also a variant on the theme of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations and forced to save themselves and their loved ones. Part of the book's power is that, in watching Rachel react, the reader is forced to imagine how he or she would behave under similar circumstances.

The Chain requires a fairly healthy suspension of disbelief, especially as the book reaches its explosive climax, but I was so caught up in the story that I didn't even stop to think about that until after I had finished reading it. I suspect that a lot of readers will have the same reaction, and that, also like me, they will be up late into the night, turning the pages of this one.

A Great Historical Thriller from Paddy Hirsch

Set in the New York City of 1799, this novel introduces Justice (Justy) Flanagan who has just returned to America after graduating from law school in Ireland. Several years earlier, in the wake of the new nation's first financial panic in 1792, Justy discovered his father's body. The father had apparently hanged himself after suffering serious losses in the panic. While in Europe, Justy also spent some time studying the developing science of criminology, and he returns to New York convinced that his father was actually murdered. Justy is determined to find the killer.

The search will take him across the city, both geographically and socially, bringing him into contact with the destitute who inhabit the worst neighborhoods in the developing city, the gangsters and other thugs who roam the waterfront and control the city's vice, and the elite movers and shakers who run the city. A number of historical figures, including Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and others appear, along with a wide variety of invented and very well-imagined fictional characters.

In searching for his father's killer, Justy will run afoul of some very dangerous characters from both ends of the economic and social spectrums, and it's a lot of fun watching the inventive ways in which he copes with them. But the real joy of this book lies in the author's portrayal of New York City in the later 1790s. Hirsch has clearly done a great deal of research on the topic and the reader feels as if he or she has actually been transported back to the time and place. This is a book that should appeal to large numbers of readers who enjoy historical fiction, thrillers, or both.

This is a collection of thirteen short stories that were originally published in a diverse number of newspapers and magazines, including Sports Illustrated and The Times of London. Most are set in the UK, but a couple are set here in the U.S. Virtually all of them have a connection of some sort to the world of horse racing.

The stories are very well-crafted and in most cases involve a twist of fate that leaves someone's carefully-laid plans in ruins. They are populated by a lot of grifters and innocent victims, and there's a fair amount of wry humor running through them as well. The stories have held up very well over the years, and this collection should appeal to a lot of readers as well as to fans of Dick Francis, who certainly should not miss this one.

After muddling around a bit in the first two books, Robert Crais begins to hit his stride with the third entry in the Elvis Cole series. He's dialed back the constant--and what I thought was often inappropriate--humor and produced a fairly gripping novel. The humor hasn't disappeared, to be sure, but in this book it's not nearly as jarring.

The case seems pretty straightforward, at least initially. Elvis is introduced to a big league movie director named Peter Alan Nelson. Nelson is awfully full of himself and comes off as a total jerk. Years ago, he was briefly married and fathered a son. But he decided that being a husband and father really didn't suit him and so he abandoned his wife and child. The wife divorced him and disappeared with the son. Nelson has heard nothing of either of them in years.

Now he decides that he really wants to meet his son and he hires Cole to find the boy and his mother. Nelson is such a jerkoff that Cole almost refuses to work for him. But Nelson does seem sincere in his desire to meet the boy and so Elvis reluctantly agrees.

Finding the woman and her son is really no problem at all. But once having found her, Cole discovers that she's mixed up in some very serious trouble. This is another case where I think that the tease on the back of the book gives away way too much, and I'm not going to go there. Suffice it to say that Cole decides that he needs to attempt to extricate the woman from her problems before notifying his client that he's completed his mission. This will get Cole himself into some serious danger, and before it's all over, a lot of blood is going to get spilled. A very good read with a great climax.

A Classic Pulp Novel from Lionel White

First published in 1953, this is a novel in the classic pulp school. A gang of kidnappers abduct the young daughter of a very wealthy Connecticut man and take along the girl's nanny as well. The gang asks $500,000 in ransom money, which would have been more than a small fortune in that day and age, and goes into hiding along with the hostages in a beach house on Long Island during the off-season when no one else is around.

The gang members have a very elaborate plan for collecting the ransom and returning the daughter, but they are divided about whether or not they can let the nanny go as well. There are other tensions on top of that: One of the gang members is a woman, who may or may not be in the process of switching her affections from one of the male gang members to another. Additionally, the nanny is a delectable young woman, and that won't help matters either.

These people are all cooped up together in a small house for several days as the plan unfolds and inevitably tempers will boil over, divisions will erupt, and the question will be whether the gang can stick together long enough to collect the spoils of their effort.

This is a pretty good example of the genre, and it will remind some readers of Richard Stark's Parker series, which came along a little over ten years later. The Parker novels are generally much better done, but for fans of old-school, hard-boiled crime fiction,The Snatchers is worth seeking out. A couple of years ago, Stark House re-released the book in a single volume along with White's Clean Break, from which the movie "The Killing" was made. That is also a good read and so both books are now readily available again.

A Diminished Inspector John Rebus Returns in this novel from Ian Rankin

This is the twenty-second novel featuring Scottish police detective Inspector John Rebus. It appears thirty-one years after the first book in the series, Knots and Crosses, and Rebus, who was no spring chicken when readers first met him, has been allowed to age in real time. He's now nearing seventy and is in poor health with COPD. He's had to give up liquor and cigarettes, and even worse, he's been forced to retire. He spends a lot of his time now walking his dog, Brillo.

This presents the author with a difficult problem that's been confronted by other authors who have allowed their series characters to age over time, and in particular one also thinks of Michael Connelly's Detective Harry Bosch who is basically the same age as Rebus. What do you do with a beloved character who has obviously lost much of his physical prowess and who has been pushed to the sidelines by his department's retirement regulations?

Both Rankin and Connelly have attempted to keep their protagonists engaged by finding roles that they could legitimately fill in retirement and by giving them younger sidekicks who can do much of the heavy lifting, especially in an official capacity. The problem with that approach, though, is that a book billed as "An Inspector Rebus novel" really becomes a novel featuring Siobhan Clarke, Malcolm Fox and others, with Rebus forcing himself into their investigation as much as he is able. In the end, he still plays a fairly consequential role in this book, but it's not nearly the same as the Good Old Days when he was basically carrying the story solo.

The book opens when a car is found concealed at the bottom of a gully in the woods. In the trunk is the body of a man whose ankles have been handcuffed together. The case is assigned to Rebus's former protege, Siobhan Clarke, and when the news of the discovery is reported, Rebus contacts Clarke, suggesting that he might know who the victim is.

Sure enough, the body turns out to be that of a private investigator who was reported missing years earlier while on a very sensitive case. The investigation into his disappearance was worked by Rebus and others but went nowhere. The victim's family has long maintained that the police botched the investigation and covered up critical details to avoid embarrassing themselves and others. Now that the body has finally surfaced, there will be a new investigation into the crime itself and into the circumstances surrounding the original investigation, which may not bode well for Rebus and for some of his former associates in the department.

Clarke is having problems of her own with the ACU--the branch of the department that investigates police corruption. She's also getting mysterious phone calls and asks Rebus for his assistance. Rebus also manages to insert himself into the new investigation and is soon working with Clarke and his old adversary Malcolm Fox in an effort to sort out some very complex developments both old and new. It's a good story with a heavily-layered plot and the principal characters are by now old friends. I enjoyed reading it but feel somewhat sad about the fact that Rebus has deteriorated to such an extent and is no longer front and center. Having finished In a House of Lies, I feel almost obligated to go back and reread one of the earlier novel is the series when he was younger and in full vigor.

Jack Reacher Faces Very Bad Luck and Serious Trouble in This Novel from Lee Child

The eleventh entry in the Jack Reacher series opens with a man being thrown out of a helicopter three thousand feet over the California desert. Shortly thereafter, Jack Reacher receives a rather innovative call for help from Frances Neagley, who was once a member of an elite Army team headed by Reacher. The eight-member team was very skilled and very close, but they gradually lost touch as they all left the military and transitioned into civilian life.

Post-Army, most of the team members have become private investigators or have joined security teams of one kind or another. But now one of them is dead and several others are missing. Reacher and Neagley team up in an attempt to locate the rest of the team and to discover what kind of trouble they might have gotten into. One thing is for sure, though, nobody messes with Reacher's team without paying a very high price.

The hunt will take the surviving members of the team from California to Las Vegas and back and will pull them deep into a terrorist conspiracy that has severely compromised national security. Reacher is in fine form and it's fun to see him working with the rest of this team. The conspiracy unfolds very slowly at first and then explodes into a major crisis in which Reacher will have to make some very tough choices. All in all, another very satisfying page-turner in a great series.

Introducing P. I. Elvis Cole

First published in 1987, this is the novel that introduced Los Angeles P.I. Elvis Cole and his taciturn sidekick, Joe Pike. As seems to be the case in eighty-five percent of P.I. novels, Cole is whiling away a quiet afternoon in his office when a woman appears who is in desperate need of his help. In this case, though, the woman, Ellen Lang, isn't exactly convinced that she needs Cole's help, but her friend, Janet Simon, is determined that Ellen does need help and that Cole may be the man to provide it.

Lang's husband, Mort, is a B-list Hollywood agent who's fallen on hard times. Mort and the Langs' young son, Perry, have disappeared. Simon believes that Ellen should hire Cole to find them, but Mort has always made all of the family's decisions. Ellen, who is thirty-nine years old, doesn't even know how to write a check and has no idea what to do about her husband's disappearance. Perhaps he had a good reason for leaving with the boy and she should just go home and wait for him to show up again. Absent Mort, her friend Janet is doing all the thinking for her though, and Lang ultimately agrees to hire Elvis to track down her husband and son.

Before long, Ellen's house is ransacked by people obviously looking for something they believe to have been in the house. Mort Lang will turn up murdered, and the son, Perry, will not turn up at all. Cole's job now is to find the missing boy and rescue Ellen Lang from the dangers and other trials and tribulations that have descended upon her. It will lead Elvis on a journey through the seamier side of Hollywood and ultimately to an explosive climax involving a gang of drug dealers and some very bad actors.

This is a book that owes a lot to the P.I. novels that went before it, particularly to Robert B. Parker's Spenser series. Like Spenser, Cole constantly cracks wise, even when it would be a lot smarter not to, and, like Parker, Crais has a tendency to overdue this at times, leading the reader to think that neither Crais nor his protagonist are nearly as funny as they think they are. Like Spenser, Cole has a strong and silent sidekick who seems to have abilities greater than those of most mortal men. There's also a touch of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee here in that over the course of the book Cole will have to restore a very damaged woman to psychological good health. Inevitably, of course, Cole will also be at odds with the cops through the entire story but will ultimately have to follow his own course, irrespective of the consequences.

For all of that, though, once the plot gets rolling, the book takes on a life of its own and becomes a pretty compulsive page-turner, leading to a violent and very well-choreographed climax. Elvis Cole has always been a little too cute and full of himself for my taste, and I found it hard to imagine that any adult woman could be so naive and incapable of thinking for herself as the Ellen Lang we meet as the book opens. Still, I found The Monkey's Raincoat to be a pretty good read and a nice introduction to a series I've long enjoyed.

Another Excellent Novel from J. Todd Scott

Lost River is an outstanding novel from J. Todd Scott who has been a federal DEA agent for more than twenty years and who thus has had a front row seat watching the ravages of drug addiction and the toll it has taken on millions of Americans and on the country as a whole. This book, his fourth, is set in the dying community of Angel in eastern Kentucky.

The fictional town of Angel once thrived on the business of coal mining, and the substance most often abused there was moonshine whiskey. But after raping the land and leaving it devastated, the mining companies have moved on, taking the jobs with them, and leaving the town and its remaining inhabitants as badly bruised and damaged as the land itself.

Few of the people left in Angel have any sort of jobs at all, let alone anything that might be construed as meaningful or rewarding, and way too many of them have turned for comfort, first to opioids and then to heroin. A criminal clan controlled by a large family known as the Glassers now controls the local drug supply and much of the town itself. The local police force has been hopelessly corrupted, and in consequence, no one is about to challenge the Glassers and no one is able to deal with the destruction they've left in their wake.

As the book opens, a particularly potent and deadly heroin mix is working its way through the community, courtesy of the Glassers, and people are dying left and right. As this happens, Scott introduces the reader to a few of the characters still hanging on in Angel, including Dobie and Trey, the two young men who constitute what passes for the local ambulance service, and through their eyes, we get a gut-wrenching view of the toll that the drug epidemic is taking on the small community.

Suddenly, though, on a day when Dobie and Trey are racing from one call to the next, the word goes out that there's been a massacre at the Glasser family compound. Virtually all of the Glassers appear to have been slaughtered and this brings the DEA to Angel, in the person of Agent Casey Alexander, a woman with a past and scars of her own.

The story plays out over the span of twenty-four hours as Alexander and her partner attempt to make sense out of the developments at the Glasser compound while trying to sort through the tangled relationships of the people in Angel. The story is brilliantly written and populated with a cast of well-drawn and believable characters. The setting is very well done and as the tension builds through the second half of the book, it's almost impossible to put down.

This is not a story that's going to leave any reader in excellent spirits. It's an impossibly depressing tale, all the more so for the truth it exposes about the opioid crisis that is currently taking such a heavy toll, particularly in some parts of rural America. Still, for all the tragedy that inhabits this story, it's impossible to look away, and this is a book that will haunt readers for a long time after they've read the final pages.

Virgil Flowers Searches for the Killer of a Bloody Genius

I've been a huge fan of the Virgil Flowers series from the very beginning, and I always eagerly await a new entry. Unfortunately, though, I don't think that Bloody Genius measures up to many of the other, better, books in the series. That's certainly not to say that I thought it was a bad book--I genuinely enjoyed reading it--but only that it didn't meet the high expectations that I have for this author and this series.

As the book opens, a wealthy and distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota is murdered late one night while sneaking into one of the university's libraries in the company of an unidentified woman. It appears that the professor may be using his private carrel in the library for a little late night clandestine "research" when he encounters an intruder. The intruder smacks the professor over the head with the professor's heavy laptop computer, leaving him dead on the floor. The professor's female friend hides in the stacks, hoping that the killer won't discover her and then, once the killer is gone, she hightails it out of the library without bothering to call the police.

As a practical matter, there are no clues and the police are completely baffled. The professor has been involved in a battle with the members of another department--one of those conflicts that could only seem important within the confines of academia--but there's little evidence to suggest that this brouhaha is the cause of his murder. The professor's family is well-connected politically and so, with the case stalled, the governor reaches out to the Minnesota BCA and has Virgil Flowers assigned to the case. Virgil joins the lead detective on the case, Margaret Trane, and spends a couple of weeks poking around, asking questions and trying to find a solution to the case.

As always, it's great fun to watch Virgil in action, and the interactions between Virgil and the other characters are often very witty and amusing. But that's par for the course in these books. The problem, at least for me, is that this case really doesn't seem worthy of Virgil's attention. Also, there's not nearly as much danger and tension in this book as there is in most of the others in the series. This case seems more like a parlor game of sorts, or maybe an old Agatha Christie whodunit, and there's not nearly as much at stake as there is in most Flowers novels.

As readers of the series know, a few books ago, Sandford decided to have Virgil settle down with a woman named Frankie who is now pregnant with twins. Up until then, one of the great pleasures of reading these books was watching Virgil flirt and otherwise interact with the attractive women who often populate these books. Sometimes these interactions led to something and sometimes they didn't, but they were always a lot of fun to read. Virgil is now effectively neutered, though, because he's not the sort of guy who would cheat on a woman to whom he has made a long-term commitment. There are at least a couple of women in this book who are attracted to Virgil and with whom, in earlier novels, he might have developed some chemistry. But we know from the jump that while Virgil might admire them, he's not going to pursue them and, for me at least, it feels like readers are being cheated out of one of the most enjoyable aspects of the earlier books.

Sandford has indicated that he's going to be taking a break from the Flowers novels if not abandoning the character altogether, save for an occasional appearance in a Lucas Davenport novel. If that's true, perhaps it's just as well to leave Virgil settled and about to become a father. I wish he had gone out at the end of a more interesting case, but I take comfort in the fact that I have a shelf full of great Virgil Flowers novels that I can always go back to and enjoy.

Tibbehah County Sheriff Quinn Colson Faces His Toughest Challenge Yet

Over the course of the last few years, this has become one of my favorite series, principally because through the nine books to date, author Ace Atkins has created such a beautifully imagined setting in Tibbehah County, Mississippi and populated it with a great cast of characters.

That is not to say that the county, in the northeastern part of the state, is beautiful in and of itself. The rolling hills of the county may be naturally beautiful, but sadly the county continues to be a cesspool of crime and corruption, ruled by greedy and corrupt politicians, and populated by a lot of people who appear to be on a downward slide. For years a criminal syndicate has been running drugs and women through the county, often with the complicity of at least some county officials. A truck stop madam named Fannie Hathcock, the owner of a strip club formerly known as the Booby Hatch, now represents the syndicate in Tibbehah, at least for the moment, while a sleazy state senator named Jimmy Vardaman is the syndicate's candidate for the state's governorship. Vardaman insists that he wants to restore traditional Mississippi values, but his candidacy could mean that the state, Tibbehah County in particular, would be wide open territory for the criminal elements.

Standing against them is a former army ranger, Quinn Colson, who is again serving as county sheriff and who is determined to clean up the county, no matter the odds against him. Over the course of the first eight books in the series, Colson has been fighting what could best be described as a holding action. While he's sent a few of the criminals off to prison and dispatched a few more of them permanently, there always seem to be new recruits, like Fannie Hathcock, waiting to step up and take over the action.

This entry revolves around the death of a young boy named Brandon Taylor who died in the woods twenty years earlier. His death was ruled a suicide, but there have always been questions about that, and now two young female journalists arrive in Tibbehah County determined to reopen the case. Unfortunately, Quinn Colson, who was only a boy himself at the time Taylor died, is in the journalists' crosshairs as a person of interest in the case. The situation becomes even more complicated when Colson's wife, Maggie, who was Taylor's girlfriend in high school, suddenly begins receiving mysterious messages about the boy's death.

While Colson tries to deal with all of that, various factions of the state's criminal elements are jockeying for position. The one thing that they all seem to share is their belief that Quinn Colson is a threat to their activities and that he needs to be neutralized. It all adds up to a potentially explosive situation for Quinn Colson, and for the family and the county that he loves. This is one of the best books in an excellent series. Five stars, principally for the complex and very believable world that Atkins has created here.

Used Car Salesman Russell Haxby Is the High Priest of California in This Early Novel from the Great Charles Willeford

Published in 1953, this curious little book is the first novel by Charles Willeford who would ultimately go on to write a number of excellent hard-boiled crime novels, including a great series featuring Florida homicide detective Hoke Moseley. This is not a crime novel in any traditional sense, although there are a number of crimes committed during course of the story, the bulk of them by the protagonist, a very sleazy San Francisco used car salesman named Russell Haxby.

By day, Haxby cheats both his customers and his boss at the used car lot where he works. By night, he pursues a mysterious and apparently frigid married woman named Alyce Vitale. He is determined to get her into bed by any means, fair or foul. The blurb on the cover of the book promises that "No woman could resist his strange cult of lechery!", but Alyce manages to do so for quite some time.

Haxby is a truly repulsive protagonist who exploits, cheats, and demeans practically everyone he meets. It's impossible to root for the man in any way, shape or form, but it's still a very interesting and entertaining read if just for the glimpse we get of Willeford in his early career. Even then the guy clearly had the chops, and the book is well worth reading simply for some of the great lines he offers, as in, "I took her elbow and guided her through the crowd to the floor. We began to dance. She was a terrible dancer, and as stiff and difficult to shove around as a St. Bernard."

Or, "She was a tall woman with shoulder-length brown hair parted in the center. She looked as out of place in that smokey atmosphere as I would have looked in a Salinas lettuce-pickers camp."

They just don't write 'em like that any more...

LONE JACK TRAIL Is Another Excellent Thriller from Owen Laukkanen

Lone Jack Trail is the second novel from Owen Laukkanen featuring Mason Burke, Jess Winslow, and Lucy, the pit bull mix that first brought Burke and Winslow together. It follows the excellent Deception Cove, which was published in 2019, and, as good as that book was, this one is even better.

Burke is an ex-con who did fifteen years in prison as an accessory to murder. Winslow, recently widowed, is a former Marine who returned home to Deception Cove with PTSD after serving in Afghanistan. A small town in Makah County on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Deception Cove is on a downhill slide and most of the people who live there are barely hanging on. Some are living on the margins of the law while others have already crossed over the line in an effort to keep body and soul together.

While in prison, Burke participated in a program where convicts trained service dogs which then went to people who needed them. As part of the program, he trained Lucy who was then given to Jess Winslow as a comfort animal. Once out of prison, Burke went to Deception Cove to ensure that Lucy was being treated well. He and Winslow became involved in a mess that involved Lucy, and once those matters were resolved, Burke remained in Deception Cove, tentatively beginning a relationship with Winslow that might or might not have a future.

As this book opens, Winslow has become a Makah County deputy sheriff and Burke is living in a cheap motel, working for a contractor who is rebuilding Winslow’s house. Their relationship is progressing slowly and it’s still not clear if the two have a real future together. They do share a love for Lucy, though, and both are very protective of the dog.

This creates a problem when a former professional hockey player named “Bad” Brock Boyd returns home after serving a prison sentence for dogfighting. Boyd is a local hero—the most famous person ever to come out of Deception Cove—and he remains very popular, his conviction notwithstanding. Given that Lucy had been rescued from a dogfighting ring before coming to Mason Burke, Burke is naturally suspicious and resentful of Boyd. The two circle each other for a couple of days and after Burke sees Boyd harassing Lucy, the two men have a huge fight.

A couple of days after that, Boyd’s body washes up on the beach with a bullet hole in his forehead. Burke, already having served time for murder and having fought with Boyd, is the natural prime suspect. He’s still an outsider in Deception Cove; many people are suspicious of him anyway, and most people have no problem assuming that he’s guilty of killing Boyd.

Even though she cares for him, even Jess Winslow can’t be totally certain that Burke is innocent, and with all of the cards seemingly stacked against him, Burke goes on the run in the hope of proving his innocence. Winslow, of course, is badly compromised, torn between her job and her affection for Burke.

As usually happens in a thriller like this, one thing leads to another and the tension and the action ramp up significantly. It’s a great plot, and as in his previous books, Laukkanen creates believable and very sympathetic characters, both human and canine. In particular, he excels at creating a great setting, and from the opening pages, Deception Cove and the surrounding county feel absolutely real.

As evidenced by my reviews of Laukkanen’s earlier books, I’ve been hugely impressed with his work from the very beginning, and Lone Jack Trail is another terrific novel that will keep readers turning the pages well into the night. I’m already looking forward to his next book.

Fiddle Player Alexander Roth Takes an Unfortunate Detour on the Way to California During the Great Depression

Towards the end of the Great Depression in the late 1930s, fiddle player Alexander Roth leaves New York City, hitchhiking to Los Angeles. Sue, a night club singer with whom he was living in New York has decided to follow her dreams and go out to Hollywood in the hope of becoming a star. Still in love with Sue, after a few weeks of living without her, Roth decides to follow her to the Coast. He hopes to reconnect with Sue and to find a job himself. He's been told that it's easy for musicians to find work in Hollywood.

In the meantime, he's almost flat broke and is having trouble getting rides. Finally somewhere out in New Mexico, he's offered a ride by a well-dressed man driving a powerful and expensive roadster. Even better, the guy says that he's going all the way to L.A. Roth figures that he's now got it made and will soon be reunited with Sue. Just out of Phoenix, though, the driver says he's not feeling well. They switch places and while Roth is driving, the guys dies. Roth has no intention of taking illegal advantage of the situation, but in attempting to help the man out of the car, the guy slips out of Roth's grip and his head cracks off the pavement in such a way that it now looks like Roth may have hit him over the head and killed him.

In short, this is a classic noir setup in which an innocent man suddenly finds himself in an impossible situation. Roth fears that if he tries to tell his story to the cops, they won't believe him and will arrest him. So he attempts to make the best of a bad situation by hiding the guy's body, appropriating his car, his money and his identity and heading off to California.

Things will naturally go from bad to worse.

The story is told mostly from Roth's point of view with some alternating chapters describing Sue's life in California. She still loves Roth and is having trouble being discovered. We learn about her problems attempting to make a success of her life, and Goldsmith describes very well the nasty underside of the Hollywood dream which consumes most of the innocents like Sue who come to the Coast seeking fame and fortune.

The Sue chapters are interesting, but they tend to break the tension of the chapters describing the trials and tribulations that Roth is enduring, and the book is a bit weaker for that. Still, it's a very entertaining read and fans of noir fiction are sure to enjoy it. It's nice to see the book back in print.

Child Psychiatrist Alex Delaware Returns to His Roots in BREAKDOWN

I've been critical of several of the recent books in this series because many of them have not involved Alex Delaware's role as a psychologist in any significant way. The stories have almost always featured a murder case which is assigned to Delaware's friend, Detective Milo Sturgis. Sturgis then calls Delaware and says, in effect, "I just got assigned a really cool murder case. Would you like to tag along and help me investigate it?"

That premise is, of course, not remotely believable. No police homicide detective would so casually invite a civilian to play a critical role in a murder investigation, and while the author has stretched to find some plausible reason for Delaware to be involved in these cases, I've never been able to buy into the idea and thus have been disappointed in many of the recent entries.

Happily, this book reverts to the origins of the series where the critical role is played by Delaware as a child psychologist and Sturgis is along to assist him. The book opens when a former television actress named Zelda Chase turns up crazed and living on the streets. Checking her history, a social worker (of sorts) discovers that five years earlier, Delaware had treated the actress's five-year-old son, Ovid. She thus calls Delaware and asks him to check out the woman.

Delaware is tempted to beg off. The woman was never his patient and he has no relationship to her. He is concerned, though, about the boy he treated and who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. Accordingly, he agrees to meet with Chase in the hope of finding out where her son might be and ensuring his safety.

Before long, though, Chase turns up dead, apparently of natural causes, but under mysterious circumstances. Delaware thus recruits Sturgis to help him investigate, in the hope of tracking down young Ovid. One thing leads to another; more people will die, and this will turn out to be a very complex case. It mostly involves Delaware, with Milo's assistance, tracking people down and interviewing them. There's not a great deal of tension in the book, but it is an interesting puzzle with a great conclusion. All in all, then, a significant improvement over some of the later books in this long-running series.

This is the fourth and final entry in William Bayer's series featuring NYPD homicide detective Frank Janek. As in the other three, this book features an antagonist with deep psychological issues and in order to solve the case, Janek will have to prove himself a brilliant analyst. Janek is a detective who relies on the excellent team of detectives he leads. He also utilizes science and the normal routine of a police homicide investigation, but principally he relies on his brain as he attempts to sort through the evidence of a case and get into the mind of the perpetrator.

This case may be his toughest challenge yet. A profoundly damaged young woman named Gelsey lives above a very elaborate mirror maze that her now-dead father constructed when she was a young girl. We learn early on that on occasion her father took Gelsey down into the maze and abused her. Now on rainy nights, she visits the maze and then drives from her home in New Jersey into Manhattan. There she goes into a bar and tricks a target who appears well-to-do into asking her up to his room or to his home. Once there, she drugs the man and then robs him. Before leaving, she always writes a mirror-imaged message on the guy's chest, insulting him in some way. This will be the first thing he sees when he wakes.

Now, though, one of her targets has been found shot to death and robbed of something extremely valuable. Janek and his team are assigned the case. Hotel employees describe Gelsey say that she left the bar with the victim. Thus she becomes the prime suspect. Janek realizes almost immediately, though, that there's a lot more to this case than meets the eye, and the whole situation will very rapidly become decidedly more complex and a lot more violent.

Meanwhile, Janek will also be assigned to reopen a murder case, known simply as "Mendoza," which has haunted the department and damaged careers for nine years. Mendoza, a very wealthy "player," was convicted of having his wife murdered in a spectacular fashion and is now in prison. The case also involved the assassination of a police detective in a car bombing and there have long been accusations that, in their determination to bring down a cop killer, the detective investigating the case manufactured evidence against Mendoza to ensure his conviction. A new lead in the case now appears, though, and as he attempts to unravel the case, Janek will find himself in mortal danger and aggravating a lot of his fellow cops along the way.

The two investigations are very compelling and thus the book moves along at a brisk pace. Janek continues to be a very appealing protagonist and it's too bad that Bayer decided to end the series this quickly. This book was published in 1994, and like the others, may be a bit hard to find. But for readers who enjoy complex psychological crime novels, the series is definitely worth seeking out.

Jockey-Turned-Detective Sid Halley Returns in COME TO GRIEF

In his long and very successful career as a writer of crime fiction, Dick Francis only used two protagonists in more than one book. One of them was Sid Halley who appears here for the third time, following Odds Against and Whip Hand. Halley was a former champion jockey who had a terrible accident that basically destroyed his left hand and ended his career. He then became a private investigator and, in the course of an earlier case, a psychopath further damaged the hand, rendering it completely useless. Halley now wears a prosthesis and has nightmares about possibly losing the use of his other hand.

In this case, Halley has been hired to track down a sadistic monster who has been lopping off the hooves of young horses, leaving them crippled and useless. The attacker usually chooses the left front hoof, and although there's no mention of it, one has to wonder if Halley, who has lost his own left hand, might feel an especial affinity for the poor horses who are thus damaged.

Sid's client is the mother of a young girl whose horse was thus attacked. To complicate matters, the little girl is suffering from a rare disease and needs a bone marrow transplant if she is to survive. She and Halley develop a special bond, and some of the best scenes in the book are of the two characters together.

As his investigation progresses, Halley is shocked to discover that the attacker is, almost certainly, one of his best friends, another former jockey who has become a very popular television interviewer. Indeed, the friend, Ellis Quint, did a very heart-warming program about Rachel, the sick little girl whose horse he had effectively destroyed himself. (This gives nothing away; the reader learns very early on who the villain is.)

Sid's discovery causes him an enormous amount of personal pain and anxiety. It also subjects him to savage personal attacks in the press and elsewhere. Quint is an enormously popular public figure, and even Sid's own client can't believe that he would be guilty of such horrendous crimes. People insist that Halley is jealous of Quint's success and is attempting to destroy his reputation.

In consequence, Halley will be up against the wall for most of the book, unable to effectively defend his actions and his reputation. As is often the case in a Dick Francis novel, there are other, larger forces lurking behind the scenes and before it's all over, poor Sid Halley will be subjected to some very extreme tests.

This is one of the better of the later books in the series. It moves along quickly and has all of the hallmarks that readers of the series expect. Fans of the series should be sure to look for it.