Another Winner from Martin Limon

Martin Limon has carved out a unique space for himself in the world of crime fiction. His series is set in the South Korea of the 1970s, and his two protagonists are U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division detectives, George Sueno and Ernie Bascomb. Sueno is the brains of the outfit; Bascomb supplies the brawn. Luckily they have the reputation of being the best team in the C.I.D., which allows them to get away with occasionally disobeying orders and ignoring the miles of military red tape as they pursue their investigations.

Like most young American soldiers, when off-duty Sueno and Bascomb party hard in Seoul's red light district. One night they are approached by a young woman in a bar who asks them to deliver a note to a British soldier who is part of a U.N. detachment. Sueno and Bascomb oblige and shortly thereafter, they are ordered to the scene of a murder. There they find knifed to death the British soldier to whom they had delivered the note.

The detectives realize immediately that they have been used to target the victim for his killer and thus they launch a very personal manhunt in an effort to track down the perpetrator. Sueno and Bascomb are essentially caught in a vise: If the Army discovers their role in the killing, they will be in deep trouble, no matter the fact that their intentions were innocent. If that weren't bad enough, the killer quickly targets the two detectives who are closing in on him.

As the case develops, more bodies are discovered, and Sueno and Bascomb find themselves entangled in the murky underground (literally) world of the Slicky Boys, a gang of thieves who have been ripping off the U.S. Army for more than twenty years.

As is always the case in these books, Limon presents a very intriguing view of South Korea in the 1970s and of the interaction between the Koreans and the Americans. Sueno and Bascom are well-drawn characters, and it's fun to tag along with them whether they are partying with bar girls, investigating a crime, or running for their lives.

If there's any problem with this series, it's that Limon sometimes gets carried away and supplies a conclusion that is simply over the top to what is otherwise a solid police procedural. He's guilty of that here and you wind up shaking your head at the last couple of chapters. But that's a relatively minor complaint, and Slicky Boys is an otherwise very entertaining ride.

A Very Cold Kiss...

Nate and his pregnant girlfriend Sara are driving from Minnesota to Reno, seeking a new life for themselves and their baby. On a snowy night in Nebraska, they see a man in a cafe who is obviously very sick. Sara takes pity on the man and when the stranger offers them $500 for a ride into Omaha, the kids accept.

The three drive off into a major winter storm and are forced to seek refuge in a run-down motel out in the middle of nowhere. On getting out of the car, Nate and Sara discover to their horror that their passenger has died. They are further stunned to discover that the passenger, Syl, has over $2 million in cash in his suitcase. Of course the kids should call the cops, report the tragic death of their passenger and hand over the money. But then, of course, the book would end at the conclusion of chapter two.

Tempted by the sight of all that money, Nate and Sara begin to imagine the life they might have if they were to simply dump Syl's body, wait for the plows to clear the roads and take off with the cash. Unfortunately for them, apparently neither Nate nor Sara has read Scott Smith's, A Simple Plan. Nor has either one of them ever seen the movie that was made from Smith's book, and thus they have no idea that keeping the money is a really, really, really bad idea.

Needless to say, complications ensue. As one might expect, the other stranded guests consist of the usual group of fine folks that one expects to encounter when stranded in a third-rate motel, miles from civilization trapped by the blizzard of the century.

The plot is hardly new, but Rector makes it seem fresh. This is a taut, lean book that grabs you early on and refuses to let go. Practically from page one, you're screaming at Nate and Sara, begging them not to make one bad decision after another. But even though they consistently reject your sound advice, you can't abandon them, and you can't rest until you see where the consequences of their actions finally take them.

Jane Whitefield Returns (Finally)

In a series of five books, published from the mid- to late-1990s, Thomas Perry detailed the adventures of Jane Whitefield, a tough, clever, contemporary Native American woman who lived in western New York. Jane came to the rescue of people who were in serious trouble, guiding them out of their old lives and into new ones. In the process, she almost always had to help her clients to escape from brutal thugs who were hot on the trail. This usually put both Jane and her client in mortal danger and demanded that Jane use all of her wits and considerable physical skills to disable or eliminate the bad guys. Along the way, Jane created a new identity for the client and taught him or her how to survive in a new life.

Jane finally retired, married a doctor, and created a happy, fulfilling new life for herself, flawed only by her inability to conceive a child. Now, five years after her last adventure (nine years in real time), a pregnant young girl turns up at the hospital where Jane's husband works in Buffalo. The girl is looking for Jane, but only knows her maiden name, which the hospital staff does not recognize.

Coincidentally, Jane is heading a fundraiser at the hospital that evening, and in the middle of the soiree, a bomb goes off, interrupting the festivities. Jane and the young girl are thrown together in the confusion and it turns out that the bomb has been set by a team of hunters who have been hired to capture the girl and return her and her baby to the girl's abusive boyfriend and his seriously weird parents.

Naturally, Jane will have to come out of retirement and help the poor woman escape. She quickly discovers that because of technological advances, it's a lot harder--and a lot more expensive--to create a new identity for someone in the post-9/11 era. If that's not bad enough, Jane also discovers that the crew in pursuit of her new client is easily the toughest group of adversaries that she has ever faced.

The result is a book that begins, literally, with a bang and continues to move at a breakneck pace from start to finish. As always, it’s fun to watch Jane work, and it’s particularly interesting to see the details of how she creates a new identity for Christine, the woman she’s assisting. Inevitably, perhaps, Christine will make the exercise a lot more difficult than it otherwise might have been, but this simply means more fun for the reader who gets to watch Jane react to the added threat.

This book does require the suspension of some disbelief. For example, even after being out of the business for several years, Jane seems to have a huge supply of fake identities squirreled away, along with an inexhaustible stash of hundred dollar bills hidden in her basement. Without them, the book would come to a pretty abrupt halt on about page three.

Readers who have waited not-so-patiently for Perry to resurrect Jane Whitefield will be very happy to have her back. But those who’ve never read this series and who have missed all of the backstory might be better off starting with the first book in the series, Vanishing Act, and working their way forward. They won’t be disappointed and, unlike the rest of us, they won’t have to wait nine years to get to Runner.

Travis McGee Spends a Winter in Illinois

The eighth installment of the Travis McGee series takes place in Chicago rather than in Florida, and thus most of the usual cast, save for McGee himself of course, is MIA. This is not a book that would have endeared MacDonald to the Chicago Chamber of Commerce. The author was obviously not very fond of the city, and through McGee makes some fairly cutting comments about the Windy City and its inhabitants.

For those unfamiliar with the series, McGee is a self-styled "salvage" expert. If someone is defrauded and has no legal recourse, McGee will use his considerable talents to recover what has been lost. His fee is fifty percent of the recovery; expenses come off the top.

In these books there is always a fragile woman who has been badly treated, sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally, and often both. In addition to recovering what has been stolen by the bad guys, it will be McGee's job to restore the poor woman to a state of health and physical well-being--unless, of course, she manages to get killed along the way.

In this case, one of these previously broken birds (the book's description, not mine), Glory Doyle, turns to McGee for help a second time. Her husband, a respected Chicago physician, has recently died and Glory discovers that during the last year of her husband's life, someone had managed to bleed him of his entire fortune. McGee comes to Chicago to chase down the money and punish the evil-doers. In the normal course of things, he will also have to rescue a beautiful but frigid blonde who has no idea why she hates sex. Can McGee cure the poor woman and turn her into a sexual dynamo while at the same time he deals out justice to the bad guys? Is the Pope Catholic?

As the book progresses, we also get a heavy dose of McGee's philosophy as he ponders the mysteries of the universe and the failings of his fellow man. He's particularly hard on Chicago legend Hugh Hefner and the Playboy lifestyle.

This was in its day, one of the most popular mystery/suspense series ever written. But sadly, it has not held up very well over time. One naturally expects that a book that was originally published in 1966 is going to show its age, but these books now sound positively archaic and re-reading them is almost always disappointing. When I first discovered the paperback reprints of these books back in my youth, I devoured them and couldn't wait to find another. Every couple of years or so, I pull one off the shelf, hoping to discover again some of the magic that first drew me to McGee and his adventures. Unhappily, I haven't found it again in a long time. But that won't stop me from trying again in another couple of years.

Angela McCready is Gone Again

At the beginning of his writing career, Dennis Lehane wrote an excellent series of gritty P.I. novels set in Boston and featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, detectives who operated out of an office in a church bell tower. The 1998 entry was Gone, Baby, Gone, in which the detectives mounted a long search for a missing four-year-old girl named Amanda McCready. The girl had been kidnapped from an abusive mother and a generally miserable home environment and left in the care of a stable, middle class couple who loved Amanda and provided her with an excellent home. Once having found Amanda, Patrick and Angie disagreed about whether they should return the girl to her awful mother or leave her in the home of the people who were obviously much better prepared to care for her. Ultimately, they returned Amanda to her biological mother, but the decision to do so drove a wedge into the relationship between the two detectives.

Lehane would write one more Kenzie/Gennaro book, Prayers for Rain, published in 1999, before leaving the series to write a number of stand-alones, including Mystic River and Shutter Island. He now returns to the series with Moonlight Mile, a book that Kenzie/Gennaro fans have long awaited.

Much has changed in the eleven years that have elapsed. Patrick and Angie are now married and the parents of their own four-year-old daughter. (This gives nothing away. It's in the promotional material and is revealed in the opening of the book.) Patrick is still working as a P.I., but the cases are few and far between. Angie has gone back to school and the family is struggling financially, victims of the recession. The office in the bell tower is gone--a casualty of the Catholic church's financial crisis--and now Amanda McCready has gone missing again.

The case has haunted Patrick and Angie for twelve years and Patrick agrees to try to find Amanda for a second time. The hunt takes Patrick and Angie into a tangled world of Russian mobsters, irresponsible parents, and a young woman who is wise way beyond her years. In addition to the intellectual and physical challenges that the case poses for Patrick, he faces a number of ethical and moral dilemmas that are not easily resolved.

This is a very good book--both highly entertaining and thought-provoking. But as a long-time fan who has read this series from the very beginning, I had a couple of quibbles. First, I regret, to some extent, the fact that Lehane simply picked up the series eleven years down the road. Major changes have occurred in the lives of characters that fans of the series have come to care about. And I feel somewhat cheated by the fact that I didn't get to watch those changes as they happened. It would be as if Lawrence Block had simply skipped over the book in which Matthew Scudder stopped drinking and became sober.

My other concern is that Patrick makes choices in this book that would have been perfectly logical for a single detective in his early thirties, possessed of a strong moral code. Patrick still has a strong moral code, but I'm not sure that some of his choices are appropriate for a man with a wife and child who may well be seriously affected by those choices. He has other people to think about now, and I found myself questioning the logic of his actions at a couple of points.

Those admittedly minor reservations aside, I enjoyed this book very much and it was very nice to see Patrick and Angie back again.

A Plague of Secrets

A Plague of Secrets reunites John Lescroart's main series characters, Dismas Hardy, Abe Glitsky and Wyatt Hunt, along with the cast of minor characters that populates this very engaging series. The book opens with a personal tragedy that afflicts Glitsky, Hardy's best friend and the head of the San Francisco Homicide unit. Not surprisingly, the tragedy will distract Glitsky's attention from his duties in the department, and it probably goes without saying that this will not be a good thing.

Immediately thereafter, Dylan Vogler, the manager of a very popular coffee shop, is found shot to death at the back door of the shop. Vogler is wearing a backpack filled with high quality weed that he's also selling out of the coffee shop. His client list, which includes some very prominent names quickly becomes public, causing no end of embarrassment for a number of people.

Suspicion falls almost immediately upon the coffee shop's absentee owner, wealthy socialite Maya Townshend, who knew Vogler in college. Townshend claims she felt sorry for her former classmate when he finished a stint in prison and needed a job. Thus she made him the manager of her coffee shop at the rather astonishing salary of $90,000 a year.

Townshend is well connected politically and the case provides the opportunity for a number of ambitious and very scary politicians and others to advance their own careers and agendas by prosecuting her. Maya retains Dismas Hardy to defend her, and the game is on.

Last week, I reviewed one of the very early Perry Mason mysteries, and I always think of Mason and his creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, when I read one of Lescroart's Dismas Hardy books. As fond as I am of the Mason books, it always strikes me that Dismas Hardy is a defense lawyer for grown-ups. Reading Lescroart, you get an excellent impression of what a defense lawyer's life is really like and how a murder trial really works, especially with a high profile client. Not surprisingly, I suppose, it doesn't look much like a Perry Mason novel.

Lescroart's court room scenes are always enormously compelling, and once one of his cases gets to trial you know you're in for a long night because from that point on, it's always impossible to put one of these books down. Certainly, that's the case here.

As the title suggests, this is a book in which an awful lot of people have buried secrets, and Dismas Hardy is forced to uncover and understand the meaning of any number of them if he's going to have any chance at all of saving his client. Watching him attempt to do so is a great treat.

Perry Mason in His Literary Youth

First published in 1934, The Case of the Howling Dog was the fourth entry in Erle Stanley Gardner's long-running series featuring Perry Mason.

At this point, Gardner was still in the process of establishing the formula that he would adhere to once the series hit its stride. Lieutenant Tragg, the intelligent and sympathetic homicide detective, and Hamilton Burger, the D.A. who would become Mason's principal adversary had not yet been introduced. The police department is still represented by the oafish Sergeant Holcomb, who wouldn't recognize a clue if it bit him in the backside. The D.A.'s office is represented by an assistant D.A., Claude Drumm who immediately falls into every trap that Mason so cleverly baits for him.

Della Street, the faithful and adoring secretary, Paul Drake, the reliable detective, and Perry Mason himself are still evolving into the characters they would ultimately become. Mason is a bit rougher around the edges than the suave attorney that most crime fiction readers would recognize, and at this stage of the game he's much more willing to severely bend, if not actually break the law in the interest of serving what he sees as the greater good.

As is often the case in this series, the plot becomes almost hopelessly convoluted: A man comes to see Mason about his neighbor's howling dog and about writing a will. Complications ensue.

Suffice it to say that there will be a murder. Inevitably, Mason's client will be the prime suspect, and inevitably the case against the client will appear to be open and shut. As always, the D. A.'s office will be salivating at the chance to finally beat Mason after suffering so many ignominious defeats at his hands. And of course, as always Mason will pull the rabbit out of the hat and save the day at the very end.

Obviously, this story is a bit dated and is clearly a product of its times, but it's still a fun read and an opportunity to see Perry Mason and these other characters in their formative stages.