Yona Ko—the 33-year-old protagonist of South Korean author Yun Ko-eun’s The Disaster Tourist—is content in her position as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a Seoul-based travel company that specializes in exotic vacations to disaster zones. When supervisor Jo-gwang Kim starts groping and harassing Yona at work, she stays quiet, determined to keep her job; it’s only when Kim demotes Yona that she contacts a woman named Choi in human resources. Choi expresses sympathy, but urges Yona to simply cope; many others have complained about Kim, but he’s never been disciplined. A fed-up Yona ultimately threatens to resign, at which point Kim extends an offer: she can have a month off if she’ll spend the first two weeks posing as a Jungle customer, evaluating one of their least popular destinations. Yona agrees, and soon finds herself en route to Mui, an island nation south of Vietnam. The trip proves underwhelming; Mui’s sinkhole is now a lake, and its volcano is inactive. Yona resolves to recommend the package’s cancellation, but on her way home, she gets separated from her tour group and loses her luggage, passport, and wallet. She returns to the resort, where she learns that the manager has hired a writer to help engineer a new catastrophe that will put Mui back on the map. Yona is horrified—until the man suggests she develop a vacation centering on the impending cataclysm and use it to rebuild her career. Although it’s billed as an eco-thriller, Yun’s chilling, evocatively written work of satire also tackles #MeToo issues while criticizing the commodification of tragedy and the parasitic nature of the tourism industry. Lean and propulsive, this is a crime novel that manages to encourage introspection (or, at the very least, more conscientious consumerism) without feeling overtly preachy.
Nelson George’s The Darkest Hearts—his fifth D. Hunter mystery, after 2017’s To Funk and Die in LA—takes the African-American bodyguard turned talent manager to Atlanta, center of 21st century hip-hop and home to rising trap star Lil Daye. D is negotiating with billionaire Samuel Kurtz to secure a liquor endorsement deal for Lil Daye when he receives a blackmail threat from the artist’s mistress, Dorita. If D doesn’t give her $150,000, Dorita will tell the world that Lil Daye is cheating on his Instagram-famous wife and made Dorita abort his child. When D broaches the topic with Lil Daye, the young MC orders D to let him handle the situation “in an ATL way”—an instruction that makes D profoundly uncomfortable, particularly when Dorita then disappears. To ease his conscience, D asks Serene Powers—a fierce female vigilante and aspiring MMA fighter—to find the missing girl. Further complicating matters is a phone call from former gangbanging hit man Ice, who tells D that a body found off a Brooklyn pier links the two of them to the death of ex-FBI agent Eric Mayer. George’s passion for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, hip-hop suffuses every word of this smart, stylish novel. Although the author deftly deals with issues of predatory capitalism, government corruption, and the senseless murder of black men by America’s cops, it’s his handling of the tale’s sex trafficking and #MeToo subplots that deserves special acclaim. Forcing D to reflect on what he’s willing to overlook in the name of friendship and fame enriches the plot and adds dimension to an already nuanced character. George incorporates a decent amount of backstory for readers unfamiliar with his series and its setting, but interested newbies may want to buy book one, The Accidental Hunter, and embark on a binge.
While Bailey Cates’s Witches and Wedding Cake is the ninth in her Magical Bakery series, it was the first for me, and I appreciated that I could slide into the narrative effortlessly. Cates has included an almost overwhelming array of cozy mystery elements—magic, baking, a cute animal (the main character carries her dog familiar in her purse), a book club, and the ultimate romantic ingredient—a wedding. The good news is that she manages to blend them all deliciously.
The book begins with the nuptial preparations for series heroine Katie Lightfoot. As she crosses the last item off her checklist for a perfect wedding, thinking herself in the clear, things inevitably start to go off the rails. The officiant cancels. When she goes to an Airbnb to meet her fiancé’s family, the ex of his youngest sister shows up, obviously unwelcome and desperate to win her back by any means necessary. He ends up dead, with Katie’s future sisters-in-law as the prime suspects. When they plead with her to clear them, Katie agrees to investigate against her better judgement.
Much seems to hinge on the hideous music box the dead man offered his ex to make up. Nobody can figure out how this unappealing object could possibly be of value, and Katie must penetrate a phalanx of estate sales and antique appraisers in her search for the truth.
This is a gently told story, interspersed with wedding planning and cooking, much of the latter infused with the magical nature of the various herbs Katie uses in her preparations. Author Cates describes herself as a “master herbalist,” and provides fascinating details about her area of expertise.
Katie is a “kitchen witch” and a member of a local coven composed of ladies with varying powers. With her supernatural know-how, Katie discovers that the dead man had been using a “glamour” to make himself more powerful and attractive, with possibly fatal results. Because the powers and spells described are fairly mild and just a step away from the ordinary, the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief is greatly enhanced, which adds to the pleasures of the book. And who doesn’t love the inclusion of some good recipes at the end of the tale?
Sometimes a cozy writer makes a book memorable through the use of character. Cheryl Hollon’s Still Knife Painting opens with the main character’s anxiety upon discovering a dead body. This angst is described so credibly and vividly that before you know it, you are transported completely inside her head. It’s not an easy thing for an author to create and summon such insight—it’s a bit of magic a little different from that described by Bates in her books, because in this case the magic is of the real.
This new series features Miranda Trent, who has returned to her roots (and her uncle’s old farmhouse) in Wolfe County, Kentucky, to start a business. Paint & Shine consists of Miranda leading tourists on a nature hike, where they settle en plein air to create a painting under her guidance, then return to her farmhouse for a down-home meal accompanied by moonshine pairings.
A lot is riding on her project’s success, but, unfortunately, just as the first meal is to be served, the cook is stabbed to death. While local law can’t quite figure out what happened, the big-city cops from nearby Lexington are convinced it was just an accident. A murder in the kitchen isn’t the kind of publicity a new business needs, and, with financial failure looming, Miranda decides to investigate on her own.
Many of the elements of Still Knife Painting are familiar cozy tropes—there’s an attractive park ranger, suspicious locals, and an entrepreneur’s money worries—but in Hollon’s capable hands they all seem fresh. Part of the reason is the originality of Miranda’s business, but it’s her artistic nature that really shines. As several characters note, a good artist must also be a good observer, and Miranda’s sleuthing puts all her skills to the test.
As she and her park ranger buddy close in on a solution, there’s a properly exciting conclusion to the proceedings. This book is well paced, anchored by an excellent central character, and infused with a keen sense of place. Veteran scribe Hollon makes it all look easy. Rocking in Miranda’s chair on the porch, sitting under a quilt, and taking in the view sounds like a plan to me. Pass that moonshine.
Juliet Blackwell’s The Last Curtain Call is a blast of a read, as ghostbusting home renovator Mel Turner takes on an old movie palace as well as her mother’s childhood home in San Francisco. It’s hard to inject humor into this kind of a mystery because in order to be effective, humor needs a bit of a satirical edge, but in a cozy that edge can’t be too sharp or biting. Blackwell gets it just right, and I selected this book for review on the basis of the humor on the very first page. The brisk, light tone continues throughout, grounded in a winning central character.
There’s a lot to love in The Last Curtain Call, which begins with Mel discovering a ghost in a walled-off area of the attic in her new house. The ghost informs her that she was an actress in the ’20s and offers her one of her dresses. Both nonplussed and intrigued by this new acquaintance, Mel must push on to the decaying movie palace her company has been hired to renovate. It’s a gorgeous space, but the company that owns the theater is concerned about the squatters who have occupied it, and they offer to obtain building permits if Mel will show the interlopers the door.
She and a corporate liaison meet the group, who are not your run-of-the-mill squatters, but an organized group of artists and performers, led by the flamboyant Isadora, a dancer who bears a startling resemblance to her legendary namesake. When the theater’s classic Wurlitzer rises from the floor with her corpse on top of it, the project becomes complicated, not just from the crime scene tape, but from all the spirits that arise when Isadora is discovered.
It also turns out that in the confusion, the corporate liaison was hit over the head by someone—or something. Things are getting a little crazy, and Mel is eager to figure out who killed Isadora and why so many ghosts are manifesting.
Mel’s starlet ghost in the attic naturally ties in with the presence of the haunts in the theater, and Blackwell manages a neat mixture of past and present mysteries, weaving them together seamlessly. While this book is the eighth in a series, I never felt as if I was entering things midstream. What I did feel was the desire to go back and inhale the rest of the series, in the hope that the other books are as well-crafted and entertaining as this one. I loved the beautifully portrayed San Francisco setting, the ghosts, as well as Mel’s ongoing quest to discover why she is so sensitive to them. It may make the reader a bit curious about what’s haunting their own attic.
Debra Webb’s The Undertaker’s Daughter saga began in a gripping 2018 e-novella called, naturally, The Undertaker’s Daughter, wherein series heroine, 39-year-old psychiatrist Dr. Rowan Dupont, learns that her already complicated family history (which included the death of her identical 12-year-old twin, the subsequent suicide of their grief-stricken mother, and two suicide attempts of her own) has many dark, unsuspected facets. Shocked into awareness by the disturbing revelations contained in that novella, she embarks on perilous personal journey to learn the secret history of her immediate family.
Her yearlong quest for truth begins in earnest in The Secrets We Bury, with Dr. Dupont returning to her hometown of Winchester, Tennessee, to take over the family undertaking business, believing it will represent a new beginning and a clean break with her past life as a police consultant. Events conspire against her, however, as revelations concerning the details of her sister’s passing both intrigue and torture her. Simultaneously, she is tormented by the machinations of a man she once trusted almost as much as her own father.
Webb’s gripping roman-fleuve continues in The Lies We Tell, as she delves further into her mother’s mysterious past, and concludes in The Darkness We Hide, where she continues her look into the abyss, only to find it staring back at her. The body count rises, and startling revelations continue unabated until the very last chapter.
This well-crafted saga eagerly embraces its myriad influences, drawing inspiration from gothic romances, the novels of Thomas Harris and Anne Rice, even television shows like Murder, She Wrote and Quincy, M.E. Webb’s writing is both effective and affective, ruthlessly pulling readers into her story. Her writing is at once subtle and operatic; she doesn’t shy away from the grand, but still manages to invest even the most mundane interactions with vibrant energy and intimacy.
Brooklyn Legacies, by Triss Stein, finds the author’s series character, urban historian Dr. Erica Donato, investigating two Brooklyn-based mysteries. The first, which she describes as “Very Nancy Drew,” involves a missing plaque honoring the building where Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass. The second, and considerably more dangerous, involves a land dispute in Brooklyn Heights, between a legendary community activist and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that threatens to explode into physical violence at any moment. This slim volume, packed with history and incident, peopled by living, breathing, vibrant characters, is always entertaining, always informative. I’ll risk being clichéd, and also point out that the borough of Brooklyn almost rises to the level of a main character, something true of all five novels in the series.
Readers enter a dystopian future in Tim Lebbon’s Eden, where mankind has created a number of expansive nature reserves, called Zones, in a last-ditch effort to reverse man’s degradation of the planet. After several years, each of these Zones have taken on identities and characteristics of their own, evidenced by throwbacks and strange evolutions. They’ve also become “must sees” for groups of explorers who invade their boundaries despite international prohibitions against doing so. Lebbon, the talented mastermind behind 2016’s The Silence, focuses on one of those groups, whose members have reasons both professional and personal for visiting the Zone known as Eden. It’s Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by way of James Cameron’s Avatar, an excellent read that thrills and enthralls, teeming with action, violence, and high adventure.
Anyone familiar with Brooks’ popular World War Z, in which heroic citizens (including Brad Pitt in the cinema version) battled an ever-increasing international zombie army, should not be surprised by the author’s new thriller premise involving a cluster of eco-woke back-to-nature colonists, isolated by an eruption of Mt. Rainier, forced to combat a cadre of shrewd, savage, splenetic, and starving sasquatch. For those who had no difficulty buying into Brooks’ vampires, his bloodthirsty Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) should pose no credibility concerns. The format of the story unfolds Citizen Kane-like, with Brooks gathering the “facts” surrounding the slaughter. For this audio version, he portrays himself, as do a couple of public radio favorites, Kai Ryssdal of NPR Marketplace fame, and, perhaps more surprising, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, supplying expository interviews along with at least a whiff of verisimilitude. The NPR personalities’ participation is brief, while several familiar actors—Nathan Fillion, Jeff Daniels, Kate Mulgrew, et al—get a bit more involved. Most of the narration falls to Judy Greer, portraying Kate Holland, a young woman whose detailed entries in a journal suggested by her psychoanalyst capture the subtle descent of the pioneering effort. The other performers, including the author, do not stint, but Greer, with 145 entries on IMDb nearly all in support roles, steps into the protagonist spotlight ready to show her stuff. And show she does—from Kate’s hopeful and only minimally snarky attitude upon arrival to her panicked, horrific reactions to the flesh-slashing, head-crushing attacks of the Sasquatch. It’s a reminder that things can always get worse, something that we, in the midst of a pandemic, may not need.
This is a departure from Cara Black’s popular novels about Parisian sleuth Aimee Leduc. Black’s current thriller, set in WWII, focuses on Kate Rees, an American markswoman who, grief-stricken after her beloved husband and toddler daughter fall victims to a Luftwaffe bomb, determines to avenge them by becoming a pre-007 assassin for British Intelligence. On her debut assignment, she’s sent to Nazi-occupied Paris to exterminate none other than Adolf Hitler, visiting during the time span mentioned in the title. A firearms expert but a novice at the spycraft game, Kate not only fails to send der Führer on to the big sleep, she draws the attention of a dogged, oddly charismatic German detective. Worse yet, as she is forced into the shadows of the City of Light, working her way to England with a war-changing secret, she becomes suspicious of her own handlers. Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male set the standard for hunter-heroes-missing-their-Hitler-shot, and other authors have played around with protagonists maybe or maybe not being taken for a ride by their supervisors. But Black’s well-researched tale is as gripping as any of its progenitors, maybe more so, with its breathless pace, sustained suspense, and convincing portrayal of female empowerment. Theater and audio actress Elizabeth Rodgers easily handles an assortment of accents—cockney, Etonian (the aloof head of “Section D”), and a gallery of guttural Germans from Kate’s determined follower to a furious Führer—while her imperiled heroine is an inspired interpretation, a strong woman on a nonstop emotional run from happiness, as wife and mother, through horror, heartbreak, cold anger, and confusion to, eventually, her relentless struggle to survive.
In John Sandford’s 30th novel in the Prey series, protagonist Lucas Davenport, a multimillionaire and therefore very independent US Marshal, is drawn into an investigation by, of all things, a teenage blogger and influencer, who discovers that one of her photos is decorating a neo-Nazi website that has not paid her for the privilege. The teeth-gratingly obnoxious little self-promoter is the daughter of a member of the US Senate Armed Services Committee and, since the FBI is helpless in a case where no crime has been committed, to whom can this country’s power brokers turn? None other than the freewheeling, boundary-pushing Davenport, a legend for always getting the job done. One of the things I like best about the series is the way the author (in reality Pulitzer Prize recipient John Camp) has allowed his hero to mature—from a skull-cracking, bed-hopping young Minneapolis PD detective in the 1990s to today’s more self-controlled, if still unorthodox, law enforcer and family man of 52. Ever more entertaining is Sandford’s ability to stay abreast of the zeitgeist, in this case noting the rise of teen influencers and, I suppose, neofascism. (The vilifying of the latter, not incidentally, seems to be costing him readers, if emails to Amazon.com are any indication. One of these unhappy former fans wonders why, in selecting the villains of the piece, Sandford couldn’t have substituted Muslims for members of the alt-right.)
This time Davenport’s investigation building blocks seem a little less sturdy than usual, but the conversations are typically smart and often funny, especially those involving Lucas’ assistants Bob and Rae. The action set pieces—shootouts in the main—are precise and swift. And the final twist is satisfyingly surprising. Richard Ferrone, with his throaty, hardboiled delivery, has been successful in capturing Davenport’s tough style and pragmatic sensibilities for a while now. He continues to tonally shift just enough to portray the sleuth’s desperate, addled prey; humorless and humorous politicians; the bemused, sarcastic Bob; and the novel’s females, from the plain-talking Rae to the chirpy Instagram-savvy mean girl who sets Davenport on this hazardous quest.
Blackstone deserves a shout-out for reminding us of, or introducing us to, Craig Rice’s wonderful, decidedly non-cozy comedic mysteries featuring Chicago defense attorney John J. Malone and his best pals, Jake and Helene Justus. The uninitiated should think of them as a merry mix-up of a rumpled, half-in-the-bag, cigar smoking, showgirl-wooing Perry Mason and an even less sober, more emotionally unpredictable Nick and Nora Charles. Their adventures, particularly the earlier ones written by Rice in her prime, are the real deal when it comes to screwball crime fiction. The Right Murder, book four in the series, shows the author at top form, fulfilling the promise made in book three, The Wrong Murder (also available in audio via Blackstone). By then, Malone and Jake, a press agent at the time, had met the beautiful and recklessly eccentric heiress Helene Brand (book one, Eight Faces at Three), with Jake and Helene intensifying their heady romance during their search for a disappearing body (book two, The Corpse Steps Out). Book three has the fabulously wealthy nightclub owner Mona McClane betting newlywed Jake that she can kill someone in front of a gathering of witnesses and get away with it. Malone and the Justuses do discover a corpse and uncover the culprit, but as the book’s title suggests, it’s the wrong murder. That mistake is righted in book four, decidedly and deliriously, with our heroes staggering through Windy City bar rooms, back alleys, and dinner parties at gated mansions, meeting an assortment of delightfully loony suspects and pausing to pick up what used to be called fair play clues, with Malone eventually tying up all the shaggy loose ends in time for cocktails. I can’t think of a more appropriate reader for these tales of mirth and mayhem than Johnny Heller, whose gruff, rapid delivery is reminiscent of the funny, fast-paced 1940s film vernacular so much a part of great Howard Hawks movies—and novels by Craig Rice.
Among the ten cases considered with the fictional works drawn from them are poisoner Dr. William Palmer (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), the Lindbergh kidnapping (Murder on the Orient Express), the Crippen uxoricide (Mrs. McGinty’s Dead), the Smith brides-in-the-bath murders (A Caribbean Mystery), and the drug-related death of music-hall star Billie Carlton (“The Affair at the Victory Ball”). In each chapter, a nonfictional account of the case at hand, often researched from contemporary newspaper accounts, is followed by an extremely (excessively?) detailed synopsis of the Christie novel or short story and finally a separate section on how the fiction adapted the facts. Though the material is efficiently written and well researched, the three-part structure exposes some problems, notably annoying repetitiousness that could have been lessened if fact and fiction were treated side by side from the outset. Of course, that method would have resulted in a much shorter book. Three topical postscripts trace the occurrence of cocaine, gossip, and photography in other Christie works.
Mark Twain had an affinity for crime and detective fiction—see, for example, certain deductive passages in Huckleberry Finn plus Pudd’nhead Wilson, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” and Tom Sawyer, Detective. Before any of these, his writings for the Virginia City Enterprise and the San Francisco Call touched on stagecoach robberies, sexual and other crimes by San Francisco hackmen (taxi drivers), law enforcement by official police and vigilantes, capital punishment, and gender relations in the Wild West. Clearly a natural fiction writer, Twain also was given to hoaxes, in which he intended to dazzle readers with violence and horror, sometimes including a hidden message about civic corruption. Drawing on primary sources (newspaper articles and personal letters to family), Roark does an excellent job of showing the development of Twain’s style and attitudes, as well as insights into frontier journalism.
Milton Shaw (1927-2010), a retired Marine Corps colonel and former community college president, was the son of the famed editor Joseph T. Shaw (1874-1952), and the early and finishing chapters read like a memoir written for family members. But the meat of the book, about Shaw’s years as author, editor (of Black Mask from 1926 to 1936), and literary agent, is of broader interest. The book gains strength the more the author quotes from letters to and from his father, showing his relationship to his writers and his views on popular fiction.
The early history of Black Mask is recounted with due credit to the editors who preceded Shaw, notably Phil Cody, and readers are cautioned not to overestimate an editor’s role in “discovering” particular writers or inventing new literary modes. Seven writers Shaw inherited were key to the development of the Black Mask style: Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, Erle Stanley Gardner, Nils Leroy Jorgensen, Tom Curry, Frederick Nebel, and Raoul Whitfield. Others who came along later include Horace McCoy, W.T. Ballard, Raymond Chandler, Dwight V. Babcock, and Lester Dent. All of the above are discussed at some length except for Jorgensen, whose name oddly never comes up again.
The introduction to Shaw’s landmark anthology The Hard-Boiled Omnibus is quoted in full, and author notes written for that anthology but not used are included here, on Chandler, Dent, Peter Ruric (aka Paul Cain), Norbert Davis, Hammett, Whitfield, and Roger Torrey.
A large section on Shaw’s work in the last years of his life as an agent discusses the difference between an editor’s job and that of an agent in developing and helping writers. Quoted are letters to and from clients William R. Cox, Norman A. Fox (including a letter written by Shaw on the day of his death, August 1, 1952), and Thomas Thompson.
(Reviewed from ebook edition.)
This is the first volume reprinting issues of a very handsome latter-day Sherlockian periodical, beginning with an introduction by editor Steven T. Doyle. Contents, as the editor enumerated in the first issue, would be the usual in such journals: “traditional scholarly essays on…the Sacred Writings,” pastiches (e.g. “Sherlock Holmes Intercepts the Frankenstein Monster” in the first issue), news notes and reviews of books and periodicals, writings on the life and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as more than Watson’s literary agent, and pieces on the Victorian era and Holmes’s contemporaries in detective fiction. Inclusions of widest interest may be the Strand reprints profiling Conan Doyle and playwright and early Holmes impersonator William Gillette from (respectively) 1892 and 1901, plus contemporary interviews with latter-day Sherlocks Jeremy Brett and Peter Cushing.
The four central figures in the making of Chinatown, arguably the greatest private-eye movie ever made, all began as actors: director Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, and star Jack Nicholson. Wasson’s book is a collective biography of the four, as well as a vivid look at Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a look at how a film is made, including the work of scenic and costume designers, editors, and composers.
The story begins with Polanski at the time leading up to the Manson family murders of the director’s wife Sharon Tate. Dealing with his grief, Polanski made obsessive efforts to solve the murders as an amateur detective, including suspicion of his closest friends, such as John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas. A memorable realization: “All of a sudden, you realize that the remote light at the end of the tunnel is the train going in the opposite direction.”
(Reviewed from ebook edition.)
The first attempt to corral the published output of one of the most prolific writers in the mystery field was Lawrence Block Bibliography 1958-1993 (A.S.A.P., 1993), just a bit over 100 pages and limited to 500 copies, but that didn’t begin to tell the whole story. For one thing, Block’s pseudonymous sex novels were excluded at the subject’s preference. Zobeck thoroughly covers the author’s whole output with first-edition publication information plus paperback publishers’ series numbers, pseudonyms, and house names if any, title changes, and reprints, often in Block’s own series of crime or erotic novels. Included are both fiction and ersatz nonfiction, the latter signed by various fictitious doctors, usually Benjamin Morse, M.D. The first section of separate publications is numbered to A209, including three 2020 titles. First periodical publications number 432, including writing and numismatic columns along with fiction and miscellaneous nonfiction. There is one 2019 entry. Most items available only electronically are not included. Other chapters include Ephemera, Music/Films/Television/ Radio/Stage, Unlocated, and Juvenilia. Block contributes a self-effacing afterword titled “The Man Who Wrote Too Much.” Appendices lists titles currently in print and/or ebook and in various series.
The Best of Manhunt 2, edited by Jeff Vorzimmer, as the title suggests, is the second volume of stories originally published in the digest magazine Manhunt. The magazine lasted only 14 years (1953–1967), but its contributors are a who’s who of the most popular mystery writers of the era. The first volume, which I highly recommend, features stories by the most popular writers to appear in Manhunt—David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, Mickey Spillane—and while the scribes included in this volume are less well-known, their stories are no less entertaining and impressive than those contributed by the big-name writers.
The best story in the anthology, and one of the best straight crime tales I have ever read, is Fletcher Flora’s seamless novelette “As I Lie Dead.” It opens as a straight murder-for-greed tale, but quickly spins itself into surprising places with Flora’s deft ability to hijack the reader’s expectations and calmly smash them. It would make a marvelous and dark film. “You Can’t Trust a Man” by Helen Nielsen is another surprising tale with a heroine that uses everything at her disposal to get what she wants. Roy Carroll’s “Shakedown” has a powerful narrative that is misleading and, in its final few sentences, perfectly ironic. “In Memoriam” by Charles Boeckman is a brief and excellent story about punctuality and marital expectations.
There are also stories from Ira Levin, Richard Deming, Wade Miller, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, H. A. DeRosso, Bruno Fischer, and…so many more that The Best of Manhunt 2 and its companion volume, The Best of Manhunt, are the most important books Stark House has published to date.
Love & Other Crimes is a nice collection of 14 stories by Sara Paretsky. The tales are linked by a theme of people killing for love, but each is told from a different angle. “Wildcat” shows Chicago’s 1966 race riots through the eyes of a child. “Safety First” is an uncomfortable, and believable, tale about a doctor’s arrest for treating undocumented immigrants. Sherlock Holmes makes an appearance in “The Curious Affair of the Italian Art Dealer.” Every story is wonderful, and amazingly for short stories, it is the characters who drive the tales. Love & Other Crimes is the most recent evidence that Sara Paretsky is a literary genius.
Tampa Bay Noir, edited by Colette Bancroft, has a contributor list that includes a handful of bestselling crime novelists, but more importantly, the stories are pretty excellent, too. Michael Connelly contributes a Hieronymus Bosch story, “The Guardian,” that brings Harry from the west coast to Tampa’s suburbs. Harry is lured east when a former lover asks him to find a stolen painting. The tale starts slowly, but it burns swift and true into the climax.
Tim Dorsey’s humor and storytelling savvy are on display in “Triggerfish Lane.” A story of immigration—from Indiana to Florida—that features oddball neighbors, crime, and a view of how wacky and appealing Florida is as a fictional setting. “Only You,” by Lisa Unger, is a bleak and atmospheric story about belonging, desire, and loss. There are also stories by Ace Atkins, Lori Roy, Sarah Gerard, and Gale Massey.
Tales From Colleton County collects 12 of Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott stories. The tales span three decades: “Deborah’s Judgment,” first published in 1991, to the most recent, “The Tuesday Book Clubs,” which was published earlier this year in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The crimes range from shoplifting to petty theft to murder, and each story has all of the elements—witty, deft plotting, eccentric small-town characters, and so easy to read—that make Deborah Knott’s Colleton County, North Carolina, a desirable and a friendly place to visit, no matter the length of the stay.
Deadly Anniversaries, edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, is a celebratory anthology of the Mystery Writers of America’s 75th year. The 19 original tales revolve around anniversaries of one kind or another—marriage, birthday, death date—and every single story is worthy of its inclusion. Lee Child’s “Normal in Every Way” is a clever and gritty tale about an awkward police clerk who reads every file that crosses his desk. The clerk’s ability to remember everything he reads, which is a blessing in the pre-computer age of 1954 San Francisco, is matched only by his capacity to make connections.
“Blue Moon” by William Kent Krueger is an atmospheric take on the “What would you do for love?” theme, with betrayal and angst thrown in for fun. Peter Lovesey’s “The Bitter Truth” is a beautifully ironic tale about poison and obituary writing. “Amazing Grace” by Max Allan Collins is a smooth and smile-inducing story about an 80th birthday party, a likable drunken husband, a woman scorned, a birthday cake, and delayed justice.
There are also good stories by Sue Grafton, Laura Lippman, Carolyn Hart, Margaret Maron, Peter Robinson, and a Mary Russell tale by Laurie R. King.
Four bullets in the back have left Quinn Colson bleeding out in a creek bed. A fake 911 call led him to Perfect Circle Road and an ambush, where only the intervention of Boom Kimbrough saved his life. But while he’s recuperating, his longtime enemies have been multiplying like rabbits—Fannie Hathcock, struggling to break with the Dixie Mafia; Mississippi’s new governor, the power-hungry Jimmy Vardaman; his pals, the militia group known as the Watchmen; and now, a corrupt interim sheriff.
In The Revelators, Colson has his back against the wall like an Old West hero. He isn’t content just to survive—he’s got to clean up his town.
Colson’s recovery, aided by his pregnant wife, Maggie, is interrupted when a sudden ICE raid leaves the families of Tibbehah County shattered. Struggling against constant pain and a county in shambles, Quinn gathers his allies Boom Kimbrough, Lillie Virgil, and federal agent Jon Holliday in a final scheme to put a stop to Hathcock and Vardaman’s bid for power.
Ace Atkins’ series has never failed to deliver Deep South violence, grit, and atmosphere, and The Revelators is no exception. The painfully timely plot matches the depth of characterization. Colson is joined by several significant viewpoint characters, each of whom carries their scene with three-dimensional goals, making the person as interesting as the plot. While some authors struggle to top their past works, Atkins’ series just builds up steam. A read-it-all-night entry in a fantastic series, The Revelators is an explosive culmination to an arc that still leaves readers yearning for the next volume.
Snarling like the finely tuned engine in Beauregard “Bug” Montage’s Plymouth Duster, S.A. Cosby’s tale of a man battling his own Jekyll-and-Hyde duality as a loving husband and father vs. a risk-taking, peerless getaway driver is excitement injected on multiple levels. Reading Blacktop Wasteland is a thrill not only for the page-whirring story, but the sense of discovering a brilliant, fresh voice in crime writing.
Years after using his “one final score” to get out of The Life, set up his auto garage in Red Hill County, and strive for a more stable life for his wife and two sons in small-town Virginia, Beauregard Montage is drowning in bills. His talents as a mechanic can’t overcome his cut-price competitors or scrape together the soaring costs of glasses and braces for his kids, medical bills for his acid-tongued mother, or the college dreams of his near-estranged daughter. Not to mention the extra hurdles he has to deal with as a working-class black man in the rural South. But when Bug gets under the hood, or behind the wheel, there’s no one better on either side of the Mississippi. When ex-con Ronnie Sessions, a shifty past associate who previously screwed him over, turns up dangling the lure of a big score, Beauregard wants no part of him or his diamond heist, except…could the reward be worth the risk? Maybe, for Bug.
Blending superb heist storytelling with Southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland is a knuckle-whitening tale that hurtles along while providing plenty of character depth and an immersive sense of place. It’s a thrilling concoction. There are shades of Elmore Leonard with its crisp and vivid voice and everyday folk in backcountry USA caught up in terrible deeds, dosed with literary flair and vital issues à la Attica Locke and Walter Mosley, while being its own original thing. Snarling and sumptuous, Blacktop Wasteland is a treat of a read: energetic with a distinct voice, depth, and heart.
This is a powerful piece of crime writing from a writer with something to say.
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