CALLUM McSORLEY'S PAGE: DCI Alison McCoist, honest to a fault, leads two exciting stories

SQUEAKY CLEAN (DCI Alison McCoist #1)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Half the Glasgow polis think DI Alison McCoist is bent. The other half just think she's a fuck-up.

No one thinks very much at all about car wash employee Davey Burnet, until one day he takes the wrong customer's motor for a ride. One kidnapping later, he and the carwash are officially part of Glasgow's criminal underworld, working for a psychopath who enjoys playing games like 'Keep Yer Kneecaps' with any poor bastard who crosses him.

Can Davey escape from the gang's clutches with his kneecaps and life intact? Perhaps this polis Ally McCoist who keeps nosing around the car wash could help. That's if she doesn't get herself killed first.

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My Review: Did Trainspotting or Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, those dialect stories, defeat you? Are you a bit on the squeamish side? Did The Wolf and the Watchman series' borderline body horror keep you grossed out and/or sleepless? Horseman, pass by.

Ready for inappropriate Scottish-inflected law-enforcement humor that you can't quote publicly to lodge in the folds of your brain, then, so let's us go.

DI Ally McCoist is in limbo, or maybe better to say purgatory. She really, really screwed up. She waited to unleash this screw-up until the stakes could not have been higher. Her colleagues are...not inclined to forgive, and unable to forget...so she's not allowed to forget and thoroughly ostracized. It's not like they can fire her (in the UK people have actual rights to employment security, amazing thought) so she's still a Detective Inspector, she's still a pair of hands, there are thinngs her bosses can assign her to do that no one else wants to do.

Or everyone else is scared to do.

Paulo McGuigan is the diametric opposite of DI McCoist. A criminal overlord with stunning amounts of influence over Glasgow's workings, he's been reputationally wronged by Davey, a nobody, a hapless loser; so he must save face by revenging himself on the perpetrator of the lèse majesté. a bloody beating; followed by indentured servitude in McGuigan's bloody underworld follows for dumb, hapless Davey. Who, logically enough, gets sick of it because he's sickened by it. How this loser intersects with McCoist, his equal in loserhood, is the point of the read.

What debut Author McSorley achieves in this pretty bog-standard mystery plot's confines is to bring cringe comedy into violent police procedural by way of social commentary. It's couched in thick dialect (why it gets less than four full stars) as its dialogue so it feels hyperlocal. That's most likely why it won the McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Book of the Year in 2023. It's not like these voices would be heard outside Glasgow. Structurally everyone in the story wants something, always a very simple device but one that when missing is really missed. Readers may not *like* Ally, or Davey, or of course the Big Bad Paulo McGuigan (it'd be a little weird if you liked Paulo!) but they all want something and the others in the story either want it too or want to keep it themselves. It's easy to invest in characters whose wants one can readily grasp.

What happens when these separate wants collide is the reason to read the story. Author McSorley makes sure these collisions are quite...decorative, as in they're easy (if squirmy) to envision. I repeat: gore is your kryptonite, then go elsewhere. Adrian McGinty writes Enid Blyton pastiches compared to Author McSorley.

Ally and Davey and Paulo arrive at the plot's culmination with great finality. What is the set-up for another story, as this is a series? The concept of "failing upward" and of the adhesiveness of failure are great drivers of human activity. Ally is a character who's failed in multiple ways. She needs to figure out how to shed her failures, which we-the-reader all know is impossible but is lots of fun to watch.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PAPERBOY (DCI Alison McCoist #2)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, raw, and comic Glaswegian detective thriller: the follow-up to Squeaky Clean, winner of the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime book of the year.

DCI Alison McCoist is back in action, and her promotion hasn’t earned her any friends. In fact, it’s made her even more unpopular. Struggling to balance her new responsibilities with the growing pressure to prove herself, McCoist finds herself tangled in a web of crime and corruption.

Chuck Gardner owns a confidential paper-shredding business, but his addiction to gambling has left him deeply in debt. When he stumbles across some incriminating documents, Chuck becomes unwittingly caught in a deadly game of power and deceit.

Meanwhile, McCoist is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery—a rat-nibbled corpse under a flyover. As she investigates, both Chuck and McCoist are sucked into a deadly stramash of gangland wars and police corruption.

Can Chuck solve his gambling and gangster problems before some heed-banger feeds him into his own shredder? And can McCoist claw herself out of this latest shitemire without her own shady dealings coming to light? It might depend on how far she’s prepared to go…

Paperboy is the darkly comic follow-up to the McIlvanney Prize winner, Squeaky Clean. The author, Callum McSorley, has been hailed as one of the most exciting new voices in crime writing, and has been praised by authors like Chris Brookmyre and Kevin Bridges.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Praise from Chris Brookmyre is a gift to be treasured in a writer's career. Callum McSorley earned it with DCI McCoist's (mis)adventures. Author McSorley's creation is a person who screws up without bumbling. She fails upwards by seeing the problem that needs solving and unerringly choosing the less effective means of dealing with it; yet it's always, in the story-logic Author McSorley's set up, not instantly obviously a bad choice. Doing this multiple times in a series of stories is impressive. Doing it better the second time, well...that's mastery.

The cringe-comedy body-horror ("rat-nibbled corpse" anyone?) procedural mystery told in Glaswegian niche is now established and further developed by Author McSorley. In this follow-up story, the lineaments of the first story (Squeaky Clean, above) are reused. It's more like the stagecraft tradition of reuse of scenery and props than it is making a control-C copy and using control-F to find and replace the names, though.

I'm sure many will still find the Glaswegian voices impenetrable, adding to the increased use of very local humor in making the read a hillclimbing experience. It's going to keep these dark and funny stories abou the screw-ups of relatably clueless, naïve people out of many readers' hands. I'm sad about that because learning, by way of reading, just what it is that makes other people laugh, what worries them enough to need to tell stories that work it through, and what words can do in their clutches is a fast track to cultural amity. Or its opposite of course, some people don't get on with each other. But at least you know from experience, not simply rumor and report.

Newly-minted DCI McCoist got her promotion...was kicked upstairs...but she's no more respected in this story than she was when we met her. Still, she achieved something, she fixed a problem for her higher-ups that needed fixing and that means a promotion within that work culture. And it means another opportunity to fail as nearly everyone around her is just *waiting* to occur.

Most especially the corrupt cops Ally now has reason to know the identities of.

Fuck-up that she is, her luck *has* to run out sooner or later, and these dirty cops/bastards are fully prepared to give her the rope she meeds to hang herself and hope she trips over it before she ties the noose. Either way, they win, she fails, and status quo ante.

Not today, Satan(s).

With the necessary narrative pressure to act on the results that define the end of book one applied by Paulo McGuigan's widow, the PTB can't really say no to Ally poking the embers of that fire despite their...and her own...reluctance to expose the embers to more oxygen. Because middle-school science class taught you what happens next: it's hot, destructive, and really dangerous for everybody around.

And that's the fun of reading about it. I was really invested in Ally before I started this read. I met Lottie, the widow, and formed a fondness for her scary-tough self. Chuck, well, really can anyone care about Chuck the cuck? Like Davey from . he's an extra in the movie of his own life, lacking rizz or main-character energy or whatever you want to call it. See? I can't even muster the investment to choose a single word for the smear that is Chuck.

I get that most of my readers, based in the US, won't want to do the work of reading in a dialect of English they don't hear on the regular. I wish y'all would try harder. Honestly though I kiinda like being a lone weirdo in my immediate peer group because I liked feeling I inhabited a place I don't think I'll ever see IRL. It's the power of intentional storytelling informed by a real passion for the way he's telling it in Author McSorley's capable hands.

Start with Squeaky Clean for sure, nothing will make sense if you don't, but please start.

LIAR'S CREEK, Matt Goldman's Clay Hawkins mystery series book one

LIAR'S CREEK (Clay Hawkins #1)
MATT GOLDMAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winner Matt Goldman comes Liar's Creek, which asks how far we'll go to protect the people we love.

The small town of Riverwood, Minnesota is true to its name, brimming with beautiful scenes of nature. Its rural landscape is threaded with scenic trout streams, which carve their way through limestone bluffs. But beneath its picturesque facade, danger runs rampant.

Clay Hawkins isn’t a stranger to the secrets of his hometown. After twenty years away, Clay has recently returned home from abroad with his twelve-year-old son Braedon, and his relationship with his father Judd, the recently replaced sheriff, is as strained as ever.

Trouble immediately brews for Clay when his beloved uncle, Teddy, disappears. Together, the three generations of Hawkinses must overturn every stone in Riverwood and confront deep familial wounds to find the one person who brings them together. As danger looms, Clay worries that it might be too late to save Teddy—and that the rest of the family might be next.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Goldman clearly invested a lot of mental energy in Clay Hawkins' life trajectory. It's all here: dead mother, grouchy prickly father, adolescent son with all that implies and entails, escapr from then return to Home after a fun, fascinating adulthood elsewhere...it's all here. Coming home has its rewards, these aren't skimped, and its risks. Uncle Teddy, who vanishes without explanation, is going to be found, by Clay, and damned if his family's ugly secrets they do NOT want splashed around will stop Clay from doing it.

Perch that determination on top of his...estranged, unliked...father making a friend of Clay's son, and the differing ways to be a father between the generations add a load of tension between them, among all three of them. The women in the story are all strong, competent people, with their own careers and concerns. They're not little ladies, nor are they ball-busting viragos, they're presented as flawed and imperfect like the stiff-necked men they choose to hang around with.

The mystery's resolved. Copious trout-fishing is done. Football/soccer is discussed. The manly men (and one about to start being a man) all do man-stuff like pointedly not talk, like ignore feelings (their own of course, but each others' too), not talk, lust after women, and not talk. It takes extreme measures to goad them into speech not about sports. When they do talk, shit gets done and in a hurry.

I'm afraid I was not surprised by the big reveal. I really seldom am, and this was not one of those times. I don't fault Author Goldman for that. I fault him a little for apparently losing track of some red-herrings that will stink up the furniture in future installments of the series. There will be future installments because no publisher works this hard to drop a promising premise. I hope the team will make some serious effort to answer young Braedon's quite reasonable questions about his past that he's too young to remember on his own.

A promising debut series that needs a bit of finesse applied as it matures.

THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY, looking back nigh-on seventy years at a crime that rings familiar bells today

THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY (Inspector Onitsura #1)
TETSUYA AYUKAWA (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5 of five

The Publisher Says: THE JAPANESE CRIME FICTION CLASSIC: A prize-winning railway murder mystery set in 1960s Japan—for fans of Agatha Christie and Seicho Matsumoto! Full of devious twists and turns, this brilliant puzzle mystery is considered to be one of the greatest alibi deconstruction mysteries ever written

Early one morning, the owner of a local mill is found lying next to the railway tracks just outside of Kuki Station. Suspicion initially falls on the workers' union, with whom the man had been embroiled in a labour dispute, then on a new religious sect that has been gaining followers recently.

Chief Inspector Onitsura and his assistant Tanna are called in to investigate, and soon set off in a journey across Japan, from Tokyo to Kyoto and Osaka, and finally to the island of Kyūshu, in a hunt for the killer.

But as they investigate, the killer strikes again, and again. Will they be able to catch the murderer before even more people are slain?

Fans of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington and Seicho Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express will delight in the devious twists and turns of The Black Swan Mystery, as well as in the characterisation and portrait of 1960s Japan.

The author, Tetsuya Ayukawa, is considered to be the master of alibi deconstruction mysteries–a talent that is on full display in this brilliant classic railway murder mystery, which won the prestigious Japanese Detective Writers Club Prize.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really struggled to apply the tag "historical mystery" to the 1960s setting of this story. It was written in the time period, and wasn't ever revised by the author to reflect later knowledge; but people born in the 1960s are (great-)grandparents as I have cause to know. Historical mystery it is.

Japan's train-riding culture is alive and well today unlike the US version. That alone makes this short novel feel very much like historical fiction in 2025. That and the clues being heavily involved in facts of train-riding culture, so harking back to another of Dame Agatha's classic mysteries, The ABC Murders. An interesting side note on the choice of trains as the setting for this story is that the author was an employee of Japan's imperial colonial railway system in Manchuria until that regime ended in 1944.

The death of a wealthy industrialist embroiled in an ugly labor dispute is seldom cause for me to weep. As ma'at must be preserved, and as those who transgress must be made to feel the weight of their arrogation of the power of life and death, I was reluctantly drawn into the procedural search for a murderer whose crime seemed reasonable to my id.

There is a lot of to-and-fro travel as Onitsura-san does his evidence-gathering...it felt a lot like a train-travel brochure at times...but the result is one of those logic puzzles that, when it comes together, one can't unsee the pattern. I'm not a sympathetic audience to those who holler about spoilers. In the case of intricate designs like this, however, any tiny hint of the real way the thing happened can feel just too revealing too soon. The pleasure of this Japanese crime classic is matching wits with the criminal beside the sleuth. I'll assert my inalienable human privilege to be inconsistent and decline to say more about the mystery bit.

I'll tell you instead about the reading experience. Translator Karetnyk did a very good job of enabling me to feel I was reading a fresh, new work. I was not given the occasionally inevitable experience of dislocation, of distance from the story being told about a culture not my own in a time gone by.

That's quality work, that is. I really hope it sparks a demand to translate the entire series of Onitsura stories...I'm here for 'em. See if you are too.

BONES UNDER THE ICE, Sheriff Jhonni Laurent series #1

BONES UNDER THE ICE (Jhonni Laurent #1)
MARY ANN MILLER
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Jhonni Laurent is the first female sheriff of Field’s Crossing, Indiana—and now she has her first murder case

Two days after a blizzard hits Field’s Crossing, Indiana, Sheriff Jhonni Laurent discovers the frozen body of a high school senior under a fifteen-foot pile of snow and ice. Murder is rare in farm country, and this death marks the beginning of Jhonni’s first homicide case.

Just as the investigation gets underway, Jhonni’s opponent for sheriff from four years ago wages a bitter reelection battle to oust her. Then, Jhonni finds another body, and further complications arise when a century-old feud between two families reaches its breaking point.

Soon, a slew of newspaper articles causes the Indiana State Election Board to doubt her credibility. Jhonni must fight to maintain her reputation, keep the small farming community together, and find the murderer at large—all while demons from her own past threaten to crush her. Can she find the killer and mend her battered spirit before it’s too late?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's a lot of nastiness in any murder. No one should take to themselves the responsibility for ending another person's life without facing consequences. In the meantime there's a lot of truly tedious legwork to do to make those consequences come about. Jhonni Laurent does that slogging work.

Of course it starts with the victim: who the heck would hate a high-school senior enough to kill her? Is she a victim of her own behavior...a popular way to discredit women of all ages...or is she simply a victim? It's a puzzle Jhonni is not getting any help making headway on. Her (male) deputy is harboring a grudge at the election defeat she handed him when they both ran for sheriff. He's well-connected in town and willing to call in his favors to get Jhonni either recalled or simply scupper her re-election bid.

Fate steps in, so to speak, when a local pooh-bah is found dead in his ice-fishing hut. So is this a murder as well? Is this the same killer if it is a murder? These are all vexing questions for any law enforcement agency, let alone one run by a complete tyro to anything like this level of crime. Jhonni's asking questions, getting lied to, figuring out how to go about this, while she's under constant pressure from the local reporter (a good buddy of her resentful deputy's) and coping with her past coming back to meet her...literally.

Small-town wintertime setting, woman fighting for her literal life and livelihood, and passels of nasty secrets suppurating for generations, all get their moment in the story spotlight. It does rather feel like a spotlight, though; I'm clear who's doing what, but without a lot of why until we reach the resolution. It is all drawn together, and there's a resolution had; there's clearly got to be another book because there are *major* threads left unresolved.

I'll be here next time, though. Jhonni won me over with her ability to learn on the job, deal with more ugliness than any one person should have directed against them, while reckoning with her past better than most ever could. A terrific way to get away for a few hours without feeling you've wasted your time.

FACE OF GREED is Detective Emily Hunter's first outing

FACE OF GREED (Detective Emily Hunter #1)
JAMES L'ETOILE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Greed, corruption, and betrayal—no murder is as simple as it seems

When a prominent Sacramento businessman is killed and his wife injured in a brutal home invasion, Detective Emily Hunter and her partner, Javier Medina, are called to investigate. At first glance, it seems like a crime of opportunity gone horribly wrong, but Emily soon finds there might be more to both the crime and the dead man.

The high-stakes investigation also comes at a time when Emily is caring for her mother, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Emily struggles to balance her job with her personal life. The city’s political elite seem to want the case solved quickly, but darker forces want it buried.

Could there have been a motive behind the attack, making it more than a random home invasion? Emily uncovers clues that cause her to reconsider her understanding of the crime. A deadly game of greed and deception pulls Emily deeper into the shadowy world of gang violence and retribution. She has to walk the razor’s edge to identify the killer—without becoming the next victim.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was inspired to pick this book for a review by Luigi Mangione's case developments...most state charges dismissed, the fate of the evidence prosecutors wish to present uncertain. This novel predates that alleged crime by several years but still has resonances with it...powerful people want a conviction, other forces don't want any such thing for intense, irreconcilable forces each competing for their purpose to prevail.

As a procedural, Emily and Javier lead us through the maze of conflicting evidence. Their detecting seems to be run on vibes, the leads they follow up assessed and occasionally dismissed based on things I found unconvincing. In the end, Author L'Etoile crochets it all into one big design that was, once you've seen it, inevitable; it just takes a shift of your idea of the violent thing that happened to see.

Emily, as our lead detective and primary PoV, gets the majority of the development in the story. Her personal life is complicated by a mother with early-onset dementia and the urgently needed carer for mom living in her house. It adds stress to her already stressful life. In a lot of ways I felt Emily was responding to some...irregularities...in a key witness's account of what seems on the surface to be a terrible but random act with her own pent-up frustrations. Equally it can be argued that her pushback against what's clearly an attempt to shut her and Javier's fact-finding down before embarrassing truths are revealed is sharpened by that frustration.

Author L'Etoile moves the story along at a solidly even clip. I was no more done with emotionally processing a domestic event of Emily's than a key piece of evidence is suddenly...shifted...like playing Uno when the reverse card smacks you. It's deft, it's handled well, and it exemplifies his chops as a writer and plotter of mysteries. I was always ready to dismiss the case because it's clearly not one the PTB think needs a real resolution just a speedy end. It turns out Emily has a lot of stiffness of spine. She needs it as a woman in a misogynistic world and as a support for an increasingly dependent mother.

Quite a lot of cussin' and discussin' of women in sexualized terms happens. It's not presented in a way meant to titillate but in a matter-of-fact evocation of the milieu the characters inhabit. It will bother some, so be prepared for it or make your decision to read accordingly. I think the grittier edge it gives is both appropriate and within ordinary peoples' boundaries.

As is often the case with procedural stories, the whodunit bit of the story is almost less important than the whydunit bit. The motives for this crime are in the title; the blowback from Emily and Javier following leads is in the title; it was very clear, when I got to the proper perspective point in the story, why this particular man was killed.

Can't say I'm sorry to know he's dead. I suspect you won't be either.

THE MEIJI GUILLOTINE MURDERS, seeing the birth of Japan's modern police

THE MEIJI GUILLOTINE MURDERS
FUTARO YAMADA (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic Japanese mystery—a pair of sleuths investigate a series of bloody murders in 19th century Tokyo

A captivating locked room murder mystery perfect for fans of Stuart Turton and Janice Hallett!

Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion.

Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them?

Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan's greatest crime writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One of those wonderfully Japanese locked-room puzzles that regularlt defeat me, forcing me to rethink my self-image as an experienced mystery solver, all while the author's playing fair with the reader. It's exhilarating.

You read that right. I find being bested in these contests fun because I need to feel challenged in order to feel awake not simply trudging ox-like in the ruts already worn in. Chief Inspector Kawaji Toshiyoshi (a real historical man who established Japan’s modern police force) and his colleague, the fictional Chief Inspector Keishiro Kazuki, of the new Imperial Prosecuting Office, each feel that way as well. They decide to keep themselves sharp by engaging in a rivalry over the case resolutions each attains...to demonstrate they're both the cream of the crop, to share triumphs and get input on tougher cases.

Meiji Japan must've been as exciting a place to live as 1960s London as the stifling fog of overweening tradition was beginning to lift. It extended into such modern ideas as policing, crminal prosecution, and execution of the condemned. Kazuki, whose naming convention was altered to Western style while he was living in France (!!!–a Japanese person voluntarily living abroad!) returns to his new appointment to the Imperial Prosecuting Office to fight the scourge of corruption that lingers from the Shogunate's old-style power dynamics. Kazuki believes passionately in merit and fairness, being the beneficiary of them. He also returned with two guillotines: one device, one woman. The Frenchwoman Esmeralda Guillotine is Kazuki's mistress and a trained...medium/mystic/seer.

Kawaji is more of the old school, more deferential, more traditional..but steely in his determination to see crime and corruption extirpated. He is less the big-picture man in the dynamic duo of this novel (while it is seventh in the Japanese series order, it works fine as an introduction to it). A number of details he spots are crucial to resolving the seven cases in this novel. I feel it's more a braided-stories novel, but with far more robust linking material than that description usually implies.

Esmeralda was the real surprise to me. Kazuki bringing an intimate partner back from France where she faces truly appalling racism and equal fascination from the Japanese was the touch that set the stories apart. Her central contribution to crime resolutions isn't from detection but from more...esoteric...sources. I enjoyed this flip from the usual stereotype of Eastern mysticism I see in Western fiction: the exotic Westerner has access to the Beyond! she can help us!. And she does.

I hope Pushkin Vertigo commissions more translations of this series. It's very high-quality reading for the ma'at addicts. A wonderful, pausable way to distract yourself briefly from Yule duties, or an immersive read depending on your need of the moment.

CITY OF SECRETS, oops...started at #4, don't do that!

CITY OF SECRETS
P.J. TRACY
Minotaur Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan returns in P. J. Tracy’s City of Secrets, the next book in the series praised by the New York Times Book Review: “Tracy seems to have found her literary sweet spot.”

Los Angeles Police Detective Margaret Nolan and her partner have worked a lot of different cases, ones where things aren’t always as they appear. And it’s Nolan’s job to find the truth in the darkness around her. When they’re called to the scene of what looks like a fatal car-jacking, Nolan soon realizes her victim was a founder of a company about to sell for millions, and within a day of his death, his partner’s wife is abducted. As Nolan learns more about the victim and his life, she gets pulled into a disturbing world of sex, violence, and big business; and an even darker world, where whispers of an "Angel of Death" are beginning to surface.

One of today's finest crime writers, P. J. Tracy has created a series that is a rich and authentic portrait of LA, filled with the tragedy and optimism of her multi-layered characters and a story guaranteed to keep readers enthralled.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Starting a series with book four is never ideal. I felt no investment in the Maggie/Remy subplot, but really didn't expect to once I twigged that the series was multiple books along.

That said, the dynamic between Maggie Nolan and Al Crawford, her policework partner, was an effortless joining of process. In large part that's because the pseudonymous Tracy partners really involve us in the way the investigation goes. This book, and I presume the entire series (as series authors seldom change tones radically this early in one), exemplifies the charms of the police procedural...that sense of being in on the action, a fly on the wall.

That's a wonderful way to build a series IMO because it gives the plotting a major through line without the need, at times, to contrive things just to keep up the pace. Of course the police work is a reductive fantasy version of the real thing, granted – stipulated – understood but it's the mystery reader's vision of it from countless other iterations, so it works. It also means one knows, if the series mystery world is not a new and fresh experience, that ornamental plot devices stand out. There are "dark sexual secrets' in the murder victim's life. Cheap, brummagem time-waster from the get-go, and, with Margaret's dull "romance" as the other lusterless sex distraction, means I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes.

The existence of a well-stocked larder of interesting side-characters, however, both redeemed and further irked me. I'm quite sure they've been here before, but I haven't. I'm on the fence about picking the series up but if I do, the first trip will be back to #1 before anything. I really want the answer to one burning question: Why does Ike like licorice?

Note for animal lovers: despite some suspense on the matter, no abuse or harm occurs and past wrongs are righted.

NORTHWOODS, deeper than I expected by the end of the read

NORTHWOODS
AMY PEASE
Atria/Emily Bestler Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The dark underbelly of an idyllic Midwestern resort town is revealed in the aftermath of a murder with ties to America’s opioid epidemic in this unputdownable and thrilling debut that is perfect for fans of James Lee Burke, William Kent Krueger, and Mindy Mejia.

Eli North is not okay.

His drinking is getting worse by the day, his emotional wounds after a deployment to Afghanistan are as raw as ever, his marriage and career are over, and the only job he can hold down is with the local sheriff’s department. And that’s only because the sheriff is his mother—and she’s overwhelmed with small town Shaky Lake’s dwindling budget and the fallout from the opioid epidemic. The Northwoods of Wisconsin may be a vacationer’s paradise, but amidst the fishing trips and campfires and Paul Bunyan festivals, something sinister is taking shape.

When the body of a teenage boy is found in the lake, it sets in motion an investigation that leads Eli to a wealthy enclave with a violent past, a pharmaceutical salesman, and a missing teenage girl. Soon, Eli and his mother, along with a young FBI agent, are on the hunt for more than just a killer.

If Eli solves the case, could he finally get the shot at redemption he so desperately needs? Or will answers to this dark case elude him and continue to bring destruction to the Northwoods?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The steady erosion of the workforce in rural areas is pushing a major crisis in substance abuse to epidemic proportions. This is what underpins the story that debut mystery writer Amy Pease chooses to tell us.

Eli, our main character, is self-medicating with alcohol (the legal drug) his PTSD, his marriage ending, and the loss of his career in the US Fish and Wildlife job he's done since leaving Afghanistan. His mother Marge does what any good parent would do, scrapes him up and gives him a purpose: As sheriff in a drastically underfunded department, she hires him to be a deputy. No one can say it's only nepotism, since he was a soldier, then a game warden, and so what if he's her son? Should she overlook his attendance problems and his increasingly frequent panic attacks from his entirely self-"managed" PTSD? In reality, no. In the book, she does, and it goes pretty much unexamined. As does a lot of the painfully obvious skulduggery rampant in the town...in the name of "going along to get along."

No good deed goes unpunished.

Eli comes across a murder that will make the entire town take stock of what they all know but won't discuss. In this way it resembles "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" in its exposé of complicity by silence. The silences run deep. The town's got many dirty little secrets, and Eli has the end of the thread that unravels the curtain hiding them in the murder of a teenaged boy. That it involves a local drug rehab center...for rich people...is the meat of the sandwich. There is a LOT of drug use in Shaky Lake, Wisconsin, and no one from the town gets help at that rehab...nicely done, Author Pease. There's a lot to unpick in the way this story attacks many facets of the status quo. This is, in fact, the reason I gave it four stars. If I was going solely on its literary merits, maybe three would be more like it. The pacing is slow, the way the author uses descriptions is odd...though it was the way I stumbled upon my fourth star...and the completely unprofessional behavior of Sheriff Marge towards her deputy Eli wouldn't pass the most casual law-enforcement scrutiny.

The action in the book, as in direct conflict, takes place in the last quarter or so; until then, one's got to be kept reading by the investment made in the characters. The frequency of Eli's panic attacks as he responds to the initial call for a disturbance of peace and thus discovers the dead boy became a cause of problems for me. I got jittery every time I was forewarned of another social situation that would trigger Eli. It's a state of negative arousal, so I wasn't at all sure I wanted to keep reading. His lack of proper help, at apparently any turn in his post-service life, turned out to be my dark little clue of what the author was doing. The lights came on for me when I realized the only places she was using descriptive words that were more than merely functional was when Eli was in the woods, or among the wealthy people in his resort-ridden town. The safest and most unsafe places in Eli's world were heightened, thus counterpointed.

Clever. Subtle. Make the contrast unmissable, once you've seen it. The plot's main driver becomes less the murder of that poor kid, and more the hideous disfiguring sense of entitlement that Eli smacks into as he shakily grasps the threads of motive behind the murder. After the dead kid's girlfriend disappears and the FBI gets involved...why that would occur remains hazy in my mind...even then, Eli and Marge are just kept in their place. That the resolution of the case comes at the cost of Eli's illusions about his world, and his mother, is down to the outsiders. Yet nothing is going to change, it feels like to me; the perpetrators are not let off scot-free but there's no sign of some wider awakening....

Honestly, I was in two minds about how to rate and focus on the review until I thought back on the larger exposé aspects of the story as told. Eli is a suffering everyman, a person used and discarded by the very world he's served and is still serving as being broken therefore useless. What I felt the author was doing in making Eli's panic attacks so frequent yet so pointedly timed, was a kind of human kintsugi. Much like the narrative device in A Man and a Woman, it's something that must be allowed to pervade one's sense of the story. To bring it into sharp relief would've made the author's deeper purpose, the one I perceived anyway, too on-the-nose. No exaggeration intended, it truly changed my perfectly okay read of a first mystery, possibly a series-starter, into a very pleasant read of a solidly crafted, well-aimed novel.

Good one, Author Pease.

INCENTIVE FOR DEATH: A Novel, new procedural novel from debut author Spoohour

INCENTIVE FOR DEATH: A Novel
JAMES SPOONHOUR
Oceanview Publishing
$28.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: They all sold their life insurance policies to the same company—and now they’ re all dead. Mac and Oliver are on the case.

On a beautiful spring morning in Washington, D.C., a high-profile attorney is found dead in his office. McDermott “Mac” Burke and Oliver Shaw, homicide investigators for the Metropolitan Police Department, are called to investigate. There appear to be no signs of foul play, but there is also no obvious sign of a natural cause of death.

The detectives are perplexed until the medical examiner notices a tiny pin prick on the lawyer’s neck and theorizes that the man was injected with succinylcholine—aka “sux”—which is a common horse tranquilizer that dissipates quickly in the body.

As Mac and Oliver begin to look further, they discover that the lawyer had sold his life insurance policy to a large viatical company. Then, they realize that more deaths under mysterious circumstances have occurred among those who’ve sold their policies to the same company.

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My Review: Lots of coincidences, lots of conveniently available people able and willing on no notice at all to answer the detectives' questions, and the men investigating the crimes (that might not be crimes) never follow a blind alley or take a wrong turn for long. No one in their chain of command ever questions how they got the information they have, taking their word for whatever they're saying without pushback or demands for sources.

Mac is divorced from Maggie. She lives with him still. She also breaks rules (sort of, that is if as she's hinted at being employed by A Gummint Intelligence Agency she sure as heck does) to help him out. Everyone loves these guys! They're so lovable, hell, I'd marry 'em both!

That's really the sum total of my grumbling. Oh, and the fact that they rehash basically the entire case to date whenever they talk to someone new. What works for me is their inability to set aside the essential unfairness of the viatical "services" industry, which I learned about in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. Lots of gay men had the kind of jobs that come with life insurance, and were definitely not going to live very long; a large number of them sold their life insurance collection rights to investors for 50% of face value so as to be able to live with some shreds of dignity until they died.

Capitalism rots.

So anyway, the detectives don't think hurrying the inevitable in order to maximize your profits is acceptable investment management, and set about proving that's what some unkind souls have done. That they succeed is inherent in the genre. The way they go about achieving that success is the fun part. I enjoyed their antics, for the most part, and will definitely read the next one in the series. Oceanview, a relatively new player on the series-mystery publishing scene, is doing a lot of books like this one...not Big Names, unconventional plots and detectives, settings one doesn't necessarily expect for the kind of mystery being told. This one, set in Washington, DC, for example...it's not race-based "urban" or rankly political, it's an interesting business crime. I am all for this publishing house keeping up the good work they're doing with worthwhile new authors like (retired? lawyer) James Spoonhour.

THE GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO PAGE: THE COLD SUMMER, new mystery series from the author & THE MEASURE OF TIME, sixth Guido Guerrieri procedural

THE MEASURE OF TIME
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (tr. Howard Curtis)
Bitter Lemon Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The latest in the Guido Guerrieri series.

The setting is Bari in Southern Italy. Against his own instincts, defence attorney Guerrieri takes on an appeal against what looks like an unassailable murder conviction. The alleged perpetrator is the son of a former lover. A taught legal thriller and a meditation about the ravages of time.

One spring afternoon, defence attorney Guerrieri is confronted with an unexpected spectre from his past. In her youth, Lorenza had been a beautiful and unpredictable girl with dazzling charm. A changed woman faces him in his office that day. The ensuing years have ravaged her appearance and embittered her mind. As if that weren’t enough, her son Jacopo, a small-time delinquent, stands convicted of the first-degree murder of a local drug dealer. Her trial lawyer has died, so, for the appeal, she turns to Guerrieri as her last hope.

Guido is not convinced of the innocence of Lorenza’s son, nor does he have fond memories of the way their relationship ended two decades earlier. Nevertheless, he accepts the case; perhaps to pay a melancholy homage to the ghosts of his youth. His old friend Carmelo Tancredi, a retired police inspector, and his girlfriend, the charming investigator Annapaola Doria are once again by his side.

A masterful, compassionate novel, striking a balance between a straightforward trial story—some say the purest distillation of human experience—and the sad notes of time as it passes and exhausts itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

Book One review — Book Two review — Book Three review — Book Four review — Book Five review

My Review: Last time we met Avv. Guerrieri, he was feeling his age and feeling Time's Arrow poking him between the shoulders. I think he, and Author Carofiglio, are winding down their association. That feeling is stronger having read this latest entry in the series.

As Guido reacquaints himself with the lyrics of "What a Fool Believes," he works his dogged best to ignore the ancient and life-changing on his side relationship he had with Lorenza while her son languishes in prison for a crime he swears he's innocent of. The trouble is he simply can't. I don't guess we ever can. Meeting someone special from long ago is inevitable, I suppose, but more often than not unsatisfying. It's Lorenza's son's bad luck to have a mother his new lawyer can't get over.

Yet get over her Guido does...it takes a lot out of an old-flamehood to go painstakingly over the present's ugly realities with her. And, lest you forget, Guido's feeling his age in many ways these days. When one does something, even does it well, for a long time there creeps in a staleness and a tedium to make the world just a bit darker all around. That's where Avv. Guerrieri is in his life, doing his dead-level best for Lorenza's sake and to satisfy his bone-deep conviction that everyone deserves the best representation possible. He knows young Iacopo did not get that. But...is he, after all, guilty? Could this just be time-serving, motion-going-through? It's an unnerving truth that Guido doesn't know. He just does not know.

Scary place for a defense lawyer to be.

At any rate, the story is told in vintage Carofiglio style...we are there, we are never kept in the dark about the developments that Guido himself isn't kept in the dark about. I am on record as liking this style of telling a procedural story, especially one that's set in a legal system very unlike the one I'm accustomed to by six decades' reading of mysteries. It's also interesting to me that Author Carofiglio (a lawyer by trade before becoming a writer and a Senator) goes through Avv. Guerrieri's speeches to the judges and, in real-time, gives us his second-guessing internal monologue. That is very much to my taste, and it's still in evidence (!) in this entry in the series.

Where I wasn't quite so enthused, though, was in the number of Lorenza flashbacks Guido indulges in. This woman was extremely formative for his life and his outlook on gender relations! I get it, the need to process that old baggage is deep. I felt, though, that it got in the way of my seeing Lorenza the mother of the accused, as well as Iacopo the accused himself. It was, I suppose the best way to say it is, both overdone and underpresented.

It wasn't a fatal blow to my pleasure in the read since I gave the book four and a quarter stars. I think it was effective at one of its jobs, to wit: Demonstrating Avv. Guido Guerrieri's increasing longing to retire, to find a life outside his living. He's worn a groove in his spirit doing this important, and satisfying, job. This case...its links to a past he doesn't want to dredge up but won't fail to look in the eyes...its unsurprising results...its ending that we saw coming because of course...it's all just another turn of the wheel.

Stopping and alighting are, I suspect, the next things Avv. Guido Guerrieri will do. If so, I'll miss him. But I completely understand.

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THE COLD SUMMER
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (tr. Howard Curtis)
Bitter Lemon Press
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The summer of 1992 had been exceptionally cold in southern Italy. But that’s not the reason why it is still remembered.

On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri. Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari.

The police are stymied until a gang member, accused of killing a child, decides to collaborate, revealing the inner workings and the rules governing organised crime in the area. The story is narrated through the actual testimony of the informant, a trope reminiscent of verbatim theatre which Carofiglio, an ex-anti-mafia judge himself, uses to great effect.

The gangs are stopped but the mystery of the boy’s murder must still be solved, leading Fenoglio into a world of deep moral ambiguity, where the prosecutors are hard to distinguish from the prosecuted.

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My Review: The cold summer indeed...very cold for those whose Earthly remains could, thanks to massive bombs killing them, be measured in teaspoons. Author Carofiglio was, during that memorable summer that turned the tide against the Sicilian Mafia and its other regional affiliates, a working prosecutor fairly early in his career. His story, as told here, is one that truly feels like it happened exactly this way despite its being fiction. When one knows the author's history, it does inform the experience of reading the author's words. In this case, I've been on Team Carofiglio since I first discovered the Guerrieri series a decade-plus ago.

In this book's case, it's the second Fenoglio novel written but the first translated into English. In Italian, the first one's called Una mutevole verità or literally "A Changing Truth" but I'd probably call it "Slippery Facts" or something similarly indicative of dishonesty. It's a much shorter work and isn't about Fenoglio so much as about how a man in his position...a "foreigner" to the Barese he works with since he's from Piedmont-Savoy (basically France to the Southern Italians)...can see but not get what he's seeing. This outing, being about a gigantic trauma that shook Italy to its core, makes more sense to have come out first in the series.

The set-up for the story is Author Carofiglio's usual quiet, meandering walk through the detective's days as the crime is committed and he begins to look into the causes and results of it. About midway through, a huge shift happens. In this story, the shift is a break in the wall of silence around organized crime's activities. All it takes is one lousy creep afraid of getting punished for a particularly unpopular crime (child harm is a death sentence in most prisons around the world) to blow open the stalled cases he knows about.

Structurally, the way Author Carofiglio manages the case-breaking event in this book is to spend several chapters on the scumbag's interrogation. This isn't flash-fast, as I imagine you're thinking it might be. Italian crime fighting moves at a different pace and to a different rhythm than the US version. The cast of characters is different because the legal system is organized very differenly, with responsibilities split in different directions. That, for my dollar, is one of the selling points of these books. I am absolutely enrapt in the cast of legal characters and eager to hear more about what they do and why they do it...I suspect Translator Curtis, having worked on a half-dozen or more Carofiglio novels in several series (as well as no series at all), is responsible for the ways some characters discourse explanatorily...as it sharpens the pleasure of being swept up in a very different world. That being something I look for, and forward to, in my reads, I'm happy as Larry while it's going on. YMMV, of course, so don't forget to account for your own tolerance for exposition when choosing these reads.

The reason I'm fond of Fenoglio, and I suspect I'd be fond of Author Carofiglio, is the way his policemen philosophize:

“I like finding out what happened. In so far as it’s possible. I like that people trust me and decide to tell me what they know, even in the most unexpected situations. I like it when what I do – and it does happen – gives a little dignity back to those who’ve lost it. It gives meaning to chaos.”

–and–

The problem is that we like to control everything: a stupid, pointless, unhealthy idea. We need to have the opposite attitude, accept the fact that nobody really has any control over his or her own life: that was what the barman Nicola, from the Caffè Bohème, had said to him once.

One day at a time. He had also added that it’s a good rule not to take anything personally. We think that everything revolves around us: both what other people do and what they don’t do. It’s almost never true. Things happen and that’s it; most other people are uninterested in us, for good or ill.

The quiet musings of Pietro Fenoglio, an intelligent man, as he works his way through the complexities of human venality and evil, demanding a reckoning for those not able to demand one for themselves. I like this pace, this path, and this person's journey. I will say that I found the bad actors all a bit interchangeable. I can't for the life of me remember one's name without looking it up to be sure I'm not misassigning another one's name to him. Nothing made by human hands can ever be perfect, can it. But very damned good, this one's got locked down.

THE DARKEST GAME, cerebral LA Noir, third in a series

THE DARKEST GAME
JOSEPH SCHNEIDER
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Bad things happen every day. No one knows this better than LAPD Detective Tully Jarsdel. He also knows that bad things often go unpunished—all it takes is a glance at his dusty stack of cold cases to see that time is kind to sinners.

A museum curator is found shot point-blank, his home torn apart. It's the sort of random crime destined to fester in an evidence locker. But it's a case tailor-made for the academic turned detective—he can't leave any question unanswered. In pursuit of an untouchable killer, Jarsdel soon uncovers a web of fraud and corruption that leads him to sunny Catalina Island, Hollywood's bygone playground. There, nothing is as it should be: the past is ever-present, and Jarsdel unwittingly finds himself embroiled in a widespread conspiracy. While reckoning with a dark legacy, he'll exhume long-buried secrets of LA's troubled past and with it, deadly consequences.

A searing mystery from critically acclaimed author Joseph Schneider, The Darkest Game is a story about dread, greed, and anguish; how it spreads like rot, and how one detective struggles to keep it at bay.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are a lot of things wrong with starting a series with Book Three. I am usually very twitchy about this topic. I would, after having read this book, have felt much better had I had the history between the two leads. As it was, in medias res with them as a bickering old couple (not in the sexual sense), I was able to enjoy the story for itself. I still wish I'd had their history to hand in my brain's filing system, though.

The mystery itself got announced in a fairly usual way: Someone not obviously murder-worthy is found in a trashed home...there's just enough off about the situation to make the Odd Badge-wearing Couple poke more into the dead guy...and thus a very thorough policing job, one that proceeds without undue haste, uncovers some very rotten doins in both past and present that merit a lot of trouble being heaped on people more accustomed to doing the heaping. And, to be sure, they try their goddamnedest to do that heaping again. Tully, having "disappointed" his professor parents by *shudder* becoming a cop in LAPD, isn't likely to let a little thing like Official Disapproval stand in his way of a successful solution. Morales? He's along for the ride, an always-complaining partner-in-crime (solving) with more to gain by staying with the insufferable Tully than moving on. Plus he's not exactly easygoing hisownself.

Tully's abandoned life of being another Professor Doctor Jarsdel has, it is to be noted, equipped him with far more information than the typical cop. It didn't give him his powers of observation, however, and those are the key characteristics that get Tully into enough hot water that he gets quite viciously attacked...twice...and, the second time, he's almost killed from it.

Not only do both he and Morales survive, the second attack...and the murder of their chief suspect...coalesce into a picture of the actual murderer and the real motive for the entire sad affair. It was very, very well-handled, I thoroughly enjoyed Tully's snobby references to things others do not catch or care about, and still thought, "why hasn't friendly fire taken this oh-so-superior guy out?" Because he may grate on the ordinary people around him, but he gets the job done where most of them are honest enough to admit that they might very well not have done.

If you liked watching Endeavour on the TV, or liked the Gervase Fen series or the Nero Wolfe series, these stories will likely scratch the itch well. He's not as arch as Fen or as august as Morse, but Jarsdel will definitely be well-placed on your radar.

I spent most of my life in Texas, but was born in California to a native Californian, a man from Venice Beach. We visited Catalina Island many times, and I've seen the Huntington Museum that forms part of this mystery...but the main thing to know about the settings is that they are there to evoke moods and emotions in the reader. Yes, you'll recognize the places if you've been there or live there, but essentially these aren't used to make it impossible to "get" the full extent of the mystery the way some London- or Paris-set stories are. Like having read the first two entries in the series, it would add something to know what's what, but it isn't in any way *crucial* for you to have done so.

UNDER COLOR OF LAW, first-in-series LA-set The One Good(-Enough) Cop story

UNDER COLOR OF LAW
AARON PHILIP CLARK (Trevor Finnegan #1)
Thomas & Mercer (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The murder of a police recruit pins a Black LAPD detective in a deadly web where race, corruption, violence, and cover-ups intersect in this relevant, razor-sharp novel of suspense.

Black rookie cop Trevor “Finn” Finnegan aspires to become a top-ranking officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and fix a broken department. A fast-track promotion to detective in the coveted Robbery-Homicide Division puts him closer to achieving his goal.

Four years later, calls for police accountability rule the headlines. The city is teeming with protests for racial justice. When the body of a murdered Black academy recruit is found in the Angeles National Forest, Finn is tasked to investigate.

As pressure mounts to solve the crime and avoid a PR nightmare, Finn scours the underbelly of a volatile city where power, violence, and race intersect. But it’s Finn’s past experience as a beat cop that may hold the key to solving the recruit’s murder. The price? The end of Finn’s career…or his life.

I RECEIVED THIS AS PART OF THE FIRST READS SELECTIONS THROUGH AMAZON PRIME.

My Review: I was in a weird position in September 2021. I got my monthly free-because-you-have-Prime offerings from Amazon and, where I usually have no problem picking between two or three of the stories, I was *stuck* between two I really, really wanted to read...the situation was so bad and the deadline to make my choice was looming so I asked my bookish friends to choose between them for me.

A dark and twisty psychological thriller set in Nebraska lost out to this law'n'order-floutin' procedural thriller, though not by much. Either of them would've been fine by me. This story's victory was perfect, I figured, since its publication was set for 1 October and I was #Spooktobering with mysteries and thrillers instead of ghosts and werewolves and the like. And now, mirabile dictu, it's #Noirvember when the review comes out!

It really shows that this author is also a screenwriter. His first pages are a lights-and-sirens, pursuit-copter assisted chase that whipped past as fast as it would've on screen. The major notes in the symphony the author's prepared for us are clear; the problem he's decided to write about couldn't be more timely. What isn't ordinary is the PoV of a cop, a Black cop, on police brutality. On the department's culture, on what it means to try to be a Good Cop, a good Black man, and a decent human being in a system that has little room for any of those identities.

Trevor "Finn" Finnegan stepped off the straight and narrow early in his career at LAPD. What he did is not a mystery; but you should find out from his story. The results of his ethical compromise are simple: He climbed the ladder faster than a Black man should've and is roundly resented by all for it. He has a toxic relationship to his "high yellow" father (and hasn't it been an age since I've heard that term!), an ex-LAPD officer, that was always going to be fraught but never got better. Neither knew how to make it so...his mother's early death didn't help. The men aren't going to be besties, but they have a basic world-view compatibility: No one gives you nothing, just decide how much you'll pay for it.

But what Finn decides to pay is a price that doesn't make for good reading...or living. What happens as a result of this price, this devil's bargain, is devastating. It changes everything. I think it's a change for the better, but that's by no means sure....

Why this is only getting a 3.5-star rating from me comes down to the ghastly sexual politics. There's a pair of women with whom horndog Trevor is involved, in a weird off-kilter way, and his actions do not speak well of him. In relation to one of the women, he all but throws her privileged whiteness in her face while enacting, apparently unironically, male privilege in its most extreme form. He then imagines the other woman in his life will condone, forgive, and accept his bad behavior...and Author Clark's construct of her makes that not improbable. Ugh.

My revolted reservations aside, the writing is deft, it fails to fall into speechification as it sometimes hints at doing, and the plot is one I feel strongly needs to be told. Good people doing bad things for what they tell themselves are noble aims is an evergreen because it's not just relatable it's instructive. I'll read the next book in what promises to be a very interesting series.

THE 7TH WOMAN, CROSSING THE LINE and THE CITY OF BLOOD, Paris-set procedurals from "France's Michael Connelly" deliver the goods

THE 7TH WOMAN
FRÉDÉRIQUE MOLAY (tr. Anne Trager) (Paris Homicide #1)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of France's prestigious Prix du Quai des Orfèvres prize for best crime fiction, named Best Crime Fiction Novel of the Year, and already an international bestseller with over 150,000 copies sold. There's no rest for Paris's top criminal investigation division, La Crim'. Who is preying on women in the French capital? How can he kill again and again without leaving any clues? A serial killer is taking pleasure in a macabre ritual that leaves the police on tenterhooks. Chief of Police Nico Sirsky—a super cop with a modern-day real life, including an ex-wife, a teenage son and a budding love story—races against the clock to solve the murders as they get closer and closer to his inner circle. Will he resist the pressure? The story grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the last page, leading you behind the scenes with the French police and into the coroner’s office. It has the suspense of Seven, with CSI-like details. You will never experience Paris the same way again!

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What makes me feel like a putz is that I haven't read this since 2014. I needed to revisit it, clearly. In the meantime, I'll offer some comments about the clear memories the story has left me with, then come back if I have more to say.

I'll tell you what I *do* remember, the way Author Molay renders the crime scenes. It's very very grim, and don't think for a second you're ready for it! I remember the way they were slaughtered vividly. The sensitive are forewarned.

Nico Sirsky, our PoV cop, is a surprisingly vivid character. I was, given the women's-body-parts nature of the killings, expecting him to be less than fully realized in the 250-ish pages we're granted. I was wrong. His ex-wife, Sylvie, has just dumped their teen son Dimitri onto his doorstep at precisely the moment Nico is falling in love with the (annoyingly perfect, if I'm honest) Caroline. The cases are all demanding his attention...the evident serial killings are urgently necessary to solve, to stop, to explain somehow...and the threats aren't just to random women.

Thanks, Sylvie, for the well-timed breakdown. Not surprisingly, this adds a lot of stress to Nico's madly stressed life. I'm pretty sure a lot of the bad stuff in the dénouement is exacerbated by Sirsky's stunningly high stress levels.

The crimes are very close to home indeed, and Nico's entire world is badly damaged by the perpetrator and reason for the killing spree.

I enjoyed very much the details of the French legal system. Author Molay has made a career of creating the procedural tales beloved of American audiences and has gifted us with a lot of our own violent tropes, "perfected" and returned. The differences are plentiful...what's an investigative magistrate when it's at home?...and there are many little moments where it's clear the translator slipped in a tidbit of Paris geography for her US audience. But there are also the deep dives into Nico's thoughts and methods. There are less successful dives into the killer's methods. (Ugh.) All the way around, the story felt to me like a French person's idea of an American procedural, explained for a French audience and then translated for an American one. The details and grace notes that would entertain a French reader do the same job on me, at least.

This is, in fact, the thing I liked best about the read. It worked on a procedural level. It worked on a novelistic level. And it gave the reader the chance to get fully involved in less book-bulk than the typical bloated four-hundred-page overstuffed story-sandwich you can't fit in your mental mouth. And still made me care about Nico, Dimitri, Caroline, and even that wretch Sylvie. One important note, besides the violence perpetrated on women by the plot's demands, is that French gender relations of a decade-plus ago were not anywhere near the levels of pre-#MeToo US gender relations. It's simply not that way, and if that isn't okay with you, don't bother to try.

It's $5 on your Kindle. Risk it! I bet most of y'all won't be a bit sorry.

***NOTE THAT ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE COULD BE A SPOILER FOR THIS BOOK.***

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CROSSING THE LINE
FRÉDÉRIQUE MOLAY (tr. Anne Trager) (Paris Homicide #2)
Le French Book (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It's Christmas in Paris. Chief of Police Nico Sirsky returns to work after recovering from a gunshot wound. He's in love and raring to go. His first day back has him overseeing a jewel heist sting and taking on an odd investigation. Dental students discovered a message in the tooth of a severed head. Is it a sick joke? Sirsky and his team of crack homicide detectives follow the clues from an apparent suicide to an apparent accident to an all-out murder as an intricate machination starts breaking down. Just how far can despair push a man? How clear is the line between good and evil? More suspense and mystery with the Paris Homicide team from the prizewinning author Frédérique Molay, the "French Michael Connelly". This is the second in the prize-winning Paris Homicide series.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "I was murdered" isn't something a cop expects to hear from a dismembered dead person. That's exactly what starts the machinery of a French homicide investigation moving in this exciting book. Second of Molay's "Paris Homicide" thrillers, we're more or less starting with Nico Sirsky, chief investigator from the last book, as he starts his normal day. I realize a lot of readers don't like the catch-you-up parts of procedurals, but I appreciate them...it's been most of a decade since I read The 7th Woman; no way in hell could I have recalled who these names were attached to without a refresher. I get it...I really do...lots of names, lots of titles, none of then familiar. Take your time, really best to start with The 7th Woman, but no matter what I recommend that you read slowly until they all fit into place.

They will! Paris, her police, the men and women who serve the unexpectedly dead as their interlocutors, all have a slot in Molay's stories. Something that Bruno Guedj, he of the "I was murdered" message hidden in his obviously, clumsily worked-on tooth, clearly expected to work as it always had. Donating his body to science...out of nowhere, blindsiding his wife and sons...was clearly calculated to get his message NOTICED and it worked.

The best thing about reading these books is the same thing people who enjoy Stuart Woods's Stone Barrington books, or James Patterson's Women's Murder Club books, are getting: Minimum of fussy stuff and maximum of forward momentum. Just what you want in a thriller. A bit less like those books is the way so much of the action, like press conferences and suchlike, take place off-screen. It's clear that Auteure Molay hasn't got her eye firmly set on a movie deal. One fillip in this book that I didn't care much for was the single-page chapters from the perpetrator's point of view...I didn't feel they served The Greater Good, somehow.

A great deal of the story has to do with how much Love rules our lives...Guedj, the victim, making sure his dearly and deeply loved family is cared for, and still making sure they won't be taken into dark places wondering why he died; then Nico, recovering from his nasty wounds inflicted by the killer in The 7th Woman, finally able to deal with his delight and love Caroline...his son Dimitri...all his team...Molay never forgets that the reason we read is that the characters mean something to us. I'd say that the series is a throwback to the days when 200-page thrillers were the norm. That makes the author's stakes high: must get action and character development from the off. The w-bomb dropped at 64% was an unpleasant surprise, out of keeping with the overall brisk and business-like tone. But to repeat the offense at 69%...! And then the coup de grâce at 88%, where it took me right out of a very high-stakes scene, well I ask you. Can that explain a whole star missing from the rating? You bet it can, sugarplum.

The details of Russian-descended Sirsky taking an interest in his heritage, the way this reconnects him to his teen son and his parents...all in this short word count, well, it's admirable. A note here to chuckle, albeit a bit wanly, about the pop-culture easter eggs in so many names..."Marc Walberg," "Dr. Queneau," et alii. Most amusant, Mme l'Auteure. I'm also a fan of the glimpses into the operational realities of the French justice system, the roles different people play in it, and how, like the US, so much happens due to needing to respond to the media's reporting on what has occurred.

Ending the story how, and where, she did made the underlying theme of Love, love, and luuuv as they intersect and intertwine so poignantly complete. I think the ultimate reveal is a good, solid ending. Had it not been for those blasted w-bombs there'd be four-plus stars on this outing in the "Paris Homicide" series. Molay has made a career in writing; she decided that her storytelling chops would sustain her, and I see that they truly have.

A special note of thanks to Translator Anne Trager. The careful, not-obtrusive explanations of things that wouldn't need explaining in the home audience's edition truly does help. I'd recommend that, at some point, a map of the parts of Paris we're going to be cruising through would be very helpful.

You need an exciting series, played for high stakes, and set in a lush landscape? Here it is, ready for you....

***NOTE THAT ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE COULD BE A SPOILER FOR THIS BOOK.***

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THE CITY OF BLOOD
FRÉDÉRIQUE MOLAY (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman) (Paris Homicide #3)
Le French Book(non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: When a major Parisian modern art event gets unexpected attention on live TV, Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and his team of elite crime fighters rush to La Villette park and museum complex. On the site of the French capital's former slaughterhouses, the blood is just starting to flow, and Sirsky finds himself chasing the butcher of Paris, while his own mother faces an uncertain future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know what you're in for with the Molay procedurals: Action. You're going to get action from the start and Sirsky, in charge of his usual posse of law-enforcers, is about to enter a world that scares many more than it beguiles: Fine Art. Avant gard fine art. Of the twentieth century...art that makes anti-capitalist and anti-waste statements.

See why I wanted to review this now, at this juncture?

Much more stress for poor Nico comes from his mother, a woman...barely more than a girl!...of sixty-five. There is nothing easy about parents grpwing older, and Nico Sirsky the cop knows it well. He is on the receiving end of news he usually needs to break..."we have unfortunate news about your mother"...at the same time that he and his team solve a decades-old disappearance that brought life to a halt for another mother.

It seems that the supply of sexual violence in Paris was reasonably well-capped until the Cassian exhumation. Suddenly there's so much more happening, and in the cruisy Parc de La Villette, with unknown perp(s) making their awful desires manifest in reducing young gay men to bloodless meat.

What winds through this entire book, and through all three Molay stories that I have read, is a sense of the inviolability of two things: Love and Hate. Every crime is deeply seeded with both of these things, and every time Nico and his team work on a case, it is clear that each of them has been imbued with Nico's so-Slavic sense of the duality of the world as represented by this pairing. The future is not guaranteed, not to anyone, and those who seek a guarantee before committing themselves to Life are always, always left with regrets and unhappiness.

This according exactly with my own life's course, I've got no kick with it. And the ways in which Auteure Molay makes these bones dance is always a pleasure. One of the additional joys of this story is the simple, direct path that Nico unhesitatingly follows to solve a thirty-year-old crime, one that ended more than one life. And will now end others, as there is fallout from any act of Hate committed in this world. A large thread of Nico's life is his love of his family, and his resultant willingness to put himself in the shoes of anyone who needs his professional services. It is a pleasure to read about such a fine character...as one of the bereaved says to Nico, towards the end of the story, "Maigret can sleep well, you are a worthy successor to him."

We do spend some time in the peculiarly placed gay hookup world, a thing I wouldn't've expected La Molay to give so much space to. It's not played for comedy, it's not presented as Abnormal; it's a reality, it's where the crimes committed have led; therefore, thence goes (tall, blond, blue-eyed hunk) Nico. It fails to shock me that he ends up on a gay club's dance floor....

I was a bit more shocked that Nico sought out a Russian Orthodox priest to, I suppose confide in...? He's pretty resolutely a materialist. Still and all, it was worked into the story as well as such a thing could possibly be. The artists of the 1980s and the hothouse world of Fine Art is a significant character in the tales. It isn't *explored* per se, but its limits and its passions are very much part of the reason for the crimes that are experienced in this compact, intense read.

I encourage thriller readers to check out all three of these Paris Homicide series reads. Rev up the translation-reading you do painlessly, pleasurably, and with added thrills.

Second Entry in Series, THE LEWIS MAN, scores!

THE LEWIS MAN
PETER MAY
Quercus (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times raved: "Peter May is a writer I'd follow to the ends of the earth." Among the many honors received, The Blackhouse, the first novel in May's acclaimed Lewis trilogy, won the Barry and Crime Thriller Hound awards.

In The Lewis Man, the second book of the trilogy, Fin Macleod has returned to the Isle of Lewis, the storm-tossed, wind-scoured outer Hebridean island where he was born and raised. Having left behind his adult life in Edinburgh—including his wife and his career in the police force—the former Detective Inspector is intent on repairing past relationships and restoring his parents' derelict cottage. His plans are interrupted when an unidentified corpse is recovered from a Lewis peat bog. The only clue to its identity is a DNA match to a local farmer, the now-senile Tormod Macdonald--the father of Fin's childhood sweetheart, Marsaili--a man who has claimed throughout his life to be an only child, practically an orphan. Reluctantly drawn into the investigation, Fin uncovers deep family secrets even as he draws closer to the killer who wishes to keep them hidden.

Already an international bestseller and winner of numerous awards, including France's Prix des Lecteurs du Telegramme, The Lewis Man has the lyrical verve of Ian Rankin and the gutsy risk-taking of Benjamin Black. As fascinating and forbidding as the Hebridean landscape, the book (according to The Times) "throbs with past and present passions, jealousies, suspicions and regrets; the emotional secrets of the bleak island are even deeper than its peat bog."

My Review: I gave this second book in the Lewis Trilogy a higher rating The Blackhouse because the amount of backstory was equal, but put in the mind, and the heart, of Alzheimer's afflicted "Tormod Macdonald." This made all the difference to my reading experience. His awful past was a gut-punch to me, and all I'll say about the matter is that the Irish branch of the Catholic Church has a boatload of apologizing and begging for forgiveness to do.

As the complexities of Fin's, Marsaili's, and Donald Murray's deeply intertwined pasts and presents unfold in front of us, accented by the heartbreaking agony for all who love a dementia suffer, the bittersweet nature of aging and its compensatory widening of the inner emotional landscape come into sharp relief:

Getting old doesn’t make them any less valid, or any less real. And it’ll be us one day.

Simple, short, and very true.

The landscape of these Outer Hebridean islands is well suited to the story May is telling. The islands are scoured by Arctic winds, rains frequently unexpected and blown horizontally by F4 and greater gales, peppered with decaying ruins of human attempts to wrest a living from this dark and angry landscape. Watching the lives of others spin out of control is a deep and shameful pleasure. This is a story full of that pleasure.

Nor is it devoid of the basic satisfaction of the whole genre: Bad people don't escape their misdeeds. In fact, retribution for past wrongs is the foundation of this story. That healing, forgiveness, and new opportunities for better days are here as well is what keeps this book from being unbearably grim. May's books show that mastery of structure that comes from screenwriting is able to translate satisfyingly to the novel's page and pace.