Another Fast-Paced Novel from Twist Master Harlan Coben

NYPD detective Kat Donovan hasn't had a meaningful relationship since the love of her life walked out on her eighteen years ago. She seems to spend a lot of time brooding, not only about her long-lost love, but also about the death of her father, a cop who was shot to death at virtually the same time. The man who confessed to killing her father is now dying in prison and Kat is hoping against hope that the man will finally explain why he pulled the trigger and who ordered the hit.

To cheer her up and to get some romance back in her life, Kat's best friend secretly enrolls her on an online dating site. (This hardly seems like something any sort of friend would do to a person, but the plot depends on it.) Rather than being angered by her "friend's" temerity, Kat logs onto the site and --lo and behold!!, miracle of miracles!!--practically the first face she sees is that of Jeff, the lover who abandoned her all those years ago. Jeff is now, conveniently, a widower who is thus available again.

Kat sends him a message, referencing their favorite song, which just happens to be "Missing You," by John Waite, and then sits on pins and needles, waiting for a response. When it comes, Jeff appears not to remember her, which crushes Kat. She sends him another message, identifying herself, and Jeff replies telling her that the past is past, and she should just leave him alone.

Something doesn't seem quite right, and so Kat begins to investigate and stumbles onto an Internet dating scam where innocent victims are going of on dates with people they met online and are never heard from again. And--horror of horrors!--Kat's old boyfriend seems to be right in the middle of the scam.

Meanwhile, Kat bursts into the prison hospital and confronts the man who confessed to killing her father, but the visit leaves her more confused than ever. Her superiors tell her to let it rest and stop torturing herself, but of course, she's not going to do that.

As the book progresses, Kat divides her attention between the two great mysteries of her life, trying to resolve at least one, if not both of them. It's going to be a very dangerous ride, and, as is usually the case in a Harlan Coben novel, the reader will be virtually whipsawed by all of the violent twists and turns that the novel takes. 

It's not a bad way to spend a few hours, but there's really no reason to combine these two very disparate plot ideas into one book. As Kat veers back and forth between the two investigations, the book tends to lose momentum every time we switch from one to the other. My other concern, which is not unique to this novel, is that Coben ultimately tosses in one last plot twist that simply takes the whole thing over the top. It's clear that he enjoys doing this sort of thing, and apparently a lot of his readers enjoy it too, but for me it's a twist too far and inevitably leaves me a bit disgruntled every time I finish one these novels. 

It's an okay read, but to my mind it would have been a lot better if Coben had focused on one or the other of the two main plot lines and if he had resisted the urge to throw in the final twist.

Perry Mason May Have to Cross-Examine a Parrot in this Complex Case

The fourteenth Perry Mason novel (published in 1939) opens when a new client comes to Perry's office. The client's father has been murdered, and the client fears that his father's new wife may attempt to cheat him out of his inheritance. (For some reason, there seem to be a number of Perry Mason books in which an older man has remarried to a woman who seemed very loving and terrific before the marriage but who then turns out to be a greedy, unpleasant shrew, usually with greedy, grasping, unpleasant children, immediately after the vows. Then, when the man attempts to get out of the marriage, bad things always happen.)

In this case, the father has arranged to get a divorce. He's written a new will, disinheriting the shrewish wife, but the son fears that the wife will destroy the will, attempting to leave in force an earlier will that gave most everything to her. (A curious reader wonders why, having decided to divorce and disinherit the wife, the guy would leave the new will with her rather than, say, leaving it safely with his son or his lawyer. But in that event, of course, there would be no case, and Perry would be left to sit in his office playing Tetris or whatever.)

Perry agrees to get on the job but, of course, within a few pages it turns out that this will be much more than a simple contest over a will. Before you know it, Perry has a client charged with murder and the most critical witness turns out to be a Parrot. As always in these books, there are a lot of surprising twists and turns and Perry has to skate along the thin edge of the law. (One of the things that's most fun about these earlier books is that legal ethics were much less strict.)

All in all, it's a fun read that will appeal to fans of the series and to other readers who occasionally enjoy a trip down memory lane to the earlier days of crime fiction.

Boston Attorney Brady Coyne Is Challenged by a Void in Hearts

This is another solid entry in the Brady Coyne series. A private eye that Brady sometimes uses comes to him for advice. The P.I., Les Katz, has been hired by a woman to see if the woman's husband is having an affair. Katz gets some pictures of the husband in the company of another woman, but the pictures do not conclusively prove that the two are romantically or sexually involved. 

Katz assumes that the wife is looking for proof of her husband's infidelity so that she can take him to the cleaners in a divorce, but these pictures aren't going to do the trick and so Katz tells her that he's found no evidence that her husband is cheating on her. He then meets with the husband and suggests that the husband might want to buy the pictures that Katz has taken, just to ensure that they don't fall into the wrong hands, innocent though they may be. Now Katz's conscience is bothering him and he asks Brady for his advice. Brady, of course, tells Katz to see his client and admit what he has done, but almost immediately thereafter, Katz is killed by a hit-and-run driver.

At this point, the reader must wonder why, six books into this series, have we never met Les Katz before if he's a P.I. that Coyne uses regularly and, even more more important, why would Brady be using a P.I. whose ethics are as bad as this?

Those issues notwithstanding, Brady feels obligated to dig into the mess that Katz has left behind and soon finds himself confronted by a mysterious and dangerous set of circumstances. It's an interesting plot that moves right along and winds up in a satisfying climax. Seven books into the series, Brady still has issues with his ex-wife,Gloria, that prove critical to the case, and, naturally, a new woman will appear in his life. It all adds up to an entertaining read that will appeal to fans of the series and to those who enjoy fairly traditional mystery novels.

Detroit P.I. Amos Walker Is on the Job Again

Amos Walker is one of the last old-school private eyes--a tough guy with a cruddy office in a dilapidated old building, and the ever-reliable bottle in the desk drawer. In the tradition of the genre, Walker take a licking and keep on ticking, which is increasingly remarkable, given his advancing age and the fact that this is his twenty-second misadventure.

Walker's beat is Detroit, a city about as run down and beaten up as Walker himself, and one of the pleasures of reading this series through the years has been Estleman's brilliant portrayal of the city and all of its problems.

As this book opens, a friend tells Walker that the friend's son's teenage brother-in-law is being recruited by a local gang and is in danger of getting caught up in the warfare between this gang and another. The friend would like Walker to extricate the kid from the situation.

This will be easier said than done. The kid will prove hard to find and the journey takes Walker deep into Detroit's Mexicantown, where most of the major players have agendas of their own, some of them hidden and some not. Inevitably, of course, the first dead body will fall, followed by the next. In addition to several killings, Walker has to negotiate his way through arson, the drug business, cockfighting and a host of other problems, and before it's all over he may well be in serious trouble himself.

I enjoyed this book, but it's not among my favorite of the series. After twenty-one previous books, the reader certainly understands that Walker knows his city like the back of his hand. But the way in which a middle-aged white guy is suddenly able to move so easily through the Mexican community here stretched credulity a bit, at least for me, especially because I don't remember Walker demonstrating even the hint of such a facility in any of the earlier novels. Of course, that may simply be a failure of memory on my part, but I did keep wondering how Walker knew so many of the key players and why so many of them seemed indebted to him. Still, it's nice to see Walker back in action, and I'll certainly look forward to the twenty-third Amos Walker novel.

A Very Good Long-Lost Novel from the Master, Lawrence Block

This is the first crime novel ever written by Lawrence Block, the creator of Matthew Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Keller, and others, and one of the most prolific writers of his generation. Block wrote the book sometime around 1960, sold it to a publisher, and then never saw or heard of it again. It was ultimately published years later with a different title and under a different name, and the publisher didn't even send the author a copy. Block only vaguely remembered the book among all the others he was churning out at that point, but fifty years later the book surfaced again and Block recognized it as his long-lost creation. The folks at Hard Case Crime have now published the book with the original title and with Block restored as the real author.

It's a very good example of the sort of pulp novel that was popular back in the 1950s and '60s. A Connecticut executive named Don Barshter accidentally kills his wife in an argument. Rather than turning himself in, he goes on the run to Buffalo, New York, and reinvents himself as a mobster named Nate Crowley. 

This sort of thing was much easier to do in 1960 than it would be today, and Nate Crowley is a very different kind of man than Don Barshter. He works his way into the local crime scene and finds himself a woman. Naturally, there will be complications and before long, Nate Crowley could find himself in nearly as much trouble as the late Mr. Barshter.

This book is not the equal of most of Block's later work, but only because much of that later work is so exceptional. When he wrote Sinner Man, Block was a very young author, still honing his chops. Clearly, though, he was already as good as many of his much older contemporaries, and he would only get better as the years wore on. This book will appeal to anyone who enjoys early pulp fiction and is a must read for Mr. Block's legion of fans.

Daniel Roke Takes a Very Dangerous Job For Kicks

Daniel Roke owns a stud farm in Australia. He and his siblings were orphaned at an early age and Daniel, the eldest, has assumed the responsibility for raising his brother and two sisters, even though it means sacrificing his own dreams in the process. The farm is thriving, but it and the beautiful country in which it sits constitute a veritable prison for Daniel who yearns for other things.

Along comes a prosperous British Earl who is one of a handful of men who oversee the world of British horse racing. Someone is fixing races, but the Powers That Be are unable to figure out how the manipulation is being done, and the future of British racing may be on the line. The Earl hopes to hire one of Daniel's stable boys to go to England and provide intelligence by working undercover.

Sadly, the man that the Earl hoped to hire is clearly not up to the task, and the Earl shocks Daniel by asking if he would be willing to undertake the mission. Daniel's immediate reaction is to refuse, but as the Earl points out, Daniel's siblings are off at school and he can hire someone to run the farm while he is away. The Earl makes a financial offer that he believes Daniel could not refuse, but the Earl fails to realize that when Daniel accepts the job, he does so for reasons that have nothing to do with the money.

This is very much a typical Dick Francis novel, and Daniel Roke is very much a typical Francis protagonist--a stubborn, clever and intelligent man who will subject himself to any number of indignities and who will put himself in very grave danger if that's what's necessary to complete the assignment. It's a clever plot and the pages turn rapidly; any fan of the series will not want to miss this one.

Introducing Dr. Knox

Dr. Adam Knox has spent his entire professional life tending to the needs of patients on the margins of society. After a stint in Africa with Doctors Without Borders, he now runs a clinic in the slums of L.A., seeing patients that few other doctors would. It's a shoe-string operation clinging to life in a run-down building that may be sold out from under him at any given moment, and Dr. Knox pays the bills by working for cash under the table at night, meeting the needs of patients who don't dare go near a hospital.

When a panicked woman brings a desperately sick child to the clinic, Dr. Knox realizes that the boy is suffering an allergic reaction to peanuts. He treats the child and the crisis passes, but in the midst of it all, the young woman who brought the child to the clinic, and whom Dr. Knox believes to be the child's mother, disappears.

Dr. Knox's nurse, who may be the only adult in the room, tells him to do the right--and legal--thing, and turn the child over to the Department of Children and Family Services. But Dr. Knox doesn't trust the bureaucrats and convinces the nurse that they--meaning she--should hold onto the child at least for a couple of days, so that his mother has a chance to reclaim him.

Like the nurse, any astute reader realizes immediately that this is a BIG MISTAKE. Before long, some very nasty people are visiting the clinic. Some of them are looking for the boy; some of them are looking for his mother, and they all pose a very serious danger to Dr. Knox, to his clinic, to his staff, and to practically anyone and anything else that the doctor might care about.

Well, in for a penny...

Dr. Knox is not about to cave into the threats, even though he puts a lot of people he cares about at risk. He attempts to track down the mother on his own and reunite her with her son, and the chips will fall where they may.

The result is a high-octane thriller that will keep most any reader riveted to the page. Adam Knox is a great protagonist, and the bad guys are truly scary. Spiegelman writes beautiful prose, and his descriptions of L.A. and its residents put the reader right in the middle of every scene. There's some suggestion that Dr. Knox might appear in a subsequent novel, and I really hope he does. If so, I'll be standing in line to buy the book hot off the press.