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.

Alan Banks Is After a Bad Boy...

[Please note: This review contains some minor spoilers, but nothing beyond what is described in the tease on the back of the book.]

Bad Boy is a book that, had it been set in the U.S. instead of in the U.K. would have ended on page three.

A woman comes into the Eastvale police station, looking for DCI Alan Banks who was once her neighbor. The woman's daughter has come home for a visit and while cleaning the daughter's room, the woman discovers a hand gun hidden away. Being a good citizen, she races to the police station to report it, apparently hoping that Banks can safely get the gun out of the house and minimize the legal trouble her daughter will be in for having it in the first place.

In the U.S., of course, the desk sergeant would doubtless just tell the woman to go home and to stop trampling all over her daughter's Second Amendment rights. In the U.K., they take this sort of thing more seriously and, although the woman doesn't know it, her daughter could be facing five years in the slammer for possessing the gun.

Unfortunately for the woman, her old friend Banks is on holiday in America and so the woman is referred to Banks' colleague, Annie Cabbot. Following protocol, the police send a SWAT team to the house to remove the weapon, but things go badly wrong and a tragedy ensues.

Erin, the young woman who brought the gun to her mother's house, is the roomate of Banks' daughter, Tracy. Erin and Tracy are both attracted to a sexy Bad Boy named Jaff who owned the gun in the first place. As events unfold, Tracy realizes that Jaff could be in serious trouble and so goes to warn him. Knowing that her father is going to be out of town for the better part of a week yet, she then volunteers that the two of them could lay low in her father's vacant cottage for a while.

This is a seriously bad idea, but Tracy, who is obviously not the brightest woman on the planet, won't realize that until it's too late. By the time Banks returns, Jaff will be on the run, taking Tracy as his hostage. Lots of bad things are going to happen along the way and Banks will face one of the most difficult and most personal challenges of his long career.

This was a good read, and the story moves right along, but I did have a couple of problems with it. First of all, this is an Alan Banks story in which Alan Banks is basically AWOL for the first half of the book. By the time he arrives back in the UK, his daughter is on the run with a known criminal and yet his superiors still allow him to work the case. That stretches credulity a bit when he has such a personal stake in the situation.

Also, as a person of the male persuasion, I might find it harder than some other readers to really appreciate the attraction that some women have for dangerous "Bad Boys." I understand the concept, but Tracy's actions in the beginning of the story simply left me shaking my head. I had some difficulty feeling much sympathy for her later in the book when she had so stupidly gotten herself into this situation to begin with.

One minor note that jarred me and took me out of the story for a moment: While vacationing in San Francisco, Banks begins reading Dashiell Hammett's classic book, The Maltese Falcon, which takes place there. Later, he flies from San Francisco to the UK and on arriving notes that he continued to read the book on the flight," until his eyes got too tired" to continue.

Say, what? The Maltese Falcon is 229 pages long and a non-stop flight from San Francisco to Heathrow is ten and a half hours. Plus, he'd already started the book! Banks must be the slowest reader on the planet.

A final note: The moral of this story is, obviously, that once your kids are grown and have left home, change the locks and, NEVER, under any circumstances, give them a key to your house.

Dave Brandstetter Returns in Skinflick

This is the fifth of Joseph Hansen's series featuring insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, and it's among the best in the bunch. As the book opens, Dave is going through some significant changes in his life but, as with any good P.I., the job always comes first.

Dave's company has insured the life of Gerald Dawson, a man with deeply held religious convictions who was convinced that the world around him was going to hell in a hand basket. Dawson was determined to do what he could to at least slow the rate of decline, even if it meant breaking the law. He and associates from his fundamentalist church believed that they answered to a Higher Law and so felt no guilt about things like bashing gays and trashing bookstores that sold pornography.

When Dawson is found in front of his garage with a broken neck, the police arrest the owner of a porn shop that had been vandalized by Dawson and his fellow vigilantes. The evidence against the shop owner seems slight, but it's good enough for the cops.

Enter Dave whose company is about to be out a lot of money and who doesn't believe that the evidence against the store owner is all that compelling. Dave wants to know why the cops didn't find the victim's keys, especially since the guy was killed at his doorstep. Dave would also like to know why he found the victim's son burning kiddie porn in the back yard.

The deeper Dave gets into the case, the more questions he has, and before long, he's wading through a cesspool of soft-core porn films, drugs, missing persons and religious fanatics. It's a thankless job, but somebody's got to do it, and before Dave is finished, it's going to be a very dangerous one as well.

As I suggested above, this is one of the best books in the Brandstetter series. It's a tight plot; the characters are interesting and, as always, Dave's humanity shows through from beginning to end. The series was published between 1970 and 1991, and it established itself early on as one of the best of the P.I. series set in L.A. to follow Raymond Chandler.

What set the series apart more than anything else was the fact that Dave Brandstetter was openly gay. Hansen presents this simply as a fact of life and in many of the books, Brandstetter's love life constitutes a theme of the novel, just as any other P.I.'s love life might. But there's little time for that here; Dave is awfully busy with the case at hand. As always, it's fun watching him work.

John X. Shade Is Going Home

This is the third and final entry in Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy featuring St. Bruno, Louisiana police detective Rene Shade. In this book, though, Rene has been suspended from the department and appears only occasionally. The main protagonist is actually Rene's father, John X. Shade, a pool hustler who had abandoned the family years earlier.

John is now well into his sixties and living in Mobile, Alabama. His vision is getting blurry; he's got the shakes, and his days of making serious money as a pool sharp are well behind him. He's reduced to working at a rib joint to support himself, his new much younger wife, and their very precocious ten-year-old daughter, Etta.

John's wife, Randi, "The 'Bama Butterfly," is an aspiring singer, and as the book opens, she's decided to pursue her destiny in Europe where she feels that her talent will be more appreciated. She leaves Etta behind to deliver a note to John informing him of the situation.

To make matters worse, Randi finances her trip by stealing $47,000 from the safe of John's boss, a five-foot, six-inch psychopath named Lunch Pumphery. Lunch is totally nuts and Shade knows that Lunch will hold him responsible for the money. Shade figures that the only sensible thing to do, then, is to whack Lunch over the head a couple of times with a bottle of Maker's Mark, gather up Etta and hit the road.

Shade decides to return to his old home in St. Bruno where he was once the most handsome man in town, for a reunion with his three sons, Rene among them. Lunch Pumphrey is in hot pursuit, and things are bound to get dicey.

This is a hugely entertaining read with engaging characters, great dialogue and interesting observations about family ties and Cajun life. The daughter, Etta, is brilliantly conceived and steals virtually every scene in which she appears. Given the lifestyle of her parents she's obviously old beyond her years and is curious about a great many things. She wonders, for example, "what would've happened if they hadn't killed Christ for our sins? I mean, if instead they'd just dragged Him out back and slapped Him around some?"

Daniel Woodrell is obviously incapable of writing a bad book and it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't enjoy this one.

Jack Carter Returns Home

This book was originally published in 1970 as Jack's Return Home. Then in 1971, it was filmed as Get Carter starring Michael Cain, and the book was subsequently re-released with the new title. This is a very dark, hard-boiled novel and it is credited with helping start the noir school of British crime fiction.

The main protagonist, Jack Carter, works for a pair of dodgy blokes named Gerald and Les who skate along the edges of the law. Jack is skating right out there with them on ice that's even thinner, given that Jack is also conducting a clandestine affair with Gerald's wife, Audrey.

As the book opens, we find Jack on a train, returning to his home town of Doncaster. He's going back to attend the funeral of his only brother, Frank. The authorities report that Frank died, driving drunk and crashing his car after drinking most of a bottle of Scotch. The only problem with the official scenario is, as Jack well knows, that Frank didn't drink Scotch.

Jack and Frank have been estranged for years, but Frank was still his little brother and Jack still carries very fond memories of the time they spent growing up together. Jack is also concerned about the fate of Frank's fifteen-year old daughter, Doreen, who is now orphaned. Mostly Jack is enormously pissed at the people who killed his brother and who didn't even trouble themselves enough to make the "accident" look legitimate.

Once the funeral is over, Jack begins poking around the dark underbelly of Doncaster in an effort to determine what Frank might have been involved in and who might have been angry enough with him to kill him. In the process, he's going to have to deal with a lot of lowlifes and upset more than a few apple carts. Jack couldn't care less, and when the local crime bosses decide that it's time to get Carter, Jack will only be too happy to meet them halfway.

This is a lean, spare novel that's very well written and which should appeal to anyone who likes their crime fiction dark and unnerving, populated with few, if any, redeemable characters.