The President's Lawyer by Lawrence Robbins

 Any courtroom thriller that addresses friendship, loyalty, ambition, and just how hard it is to separate home life from work will usually find an audience. John Grisham’s been making a career of it. This 2024 novel is the author’s first. And ‘they’ say, write about what you know. Dr. Google tells us that Robbins is an accomplished trial and appellate lawyer who has argued a couple dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Safe bet that he will give this story considerable authenticity. 

We follow Rob Jacobson, a noted Washington, D.C., litigator who gets quite the case dropped in his lap. He’s been asked to defend his childhood friend who just happens to be one Jack Cutler. That’s as in former President Jack Cutler who stands accused of murdering Amanda Harper - a former White House lawyer and Cutler’s mistress. Yeah, this case will garner its share of public attention. But Rob has known Cutler since childhood. And Rob has a complicated history with Jack and Amanda. How so? Rob had once been romantically involved with Amanda. Makes this case painfully close to home.

Of course, Rob believes Jack to be innocent; hell, Jack passed his a lie-detector test. Rob knows this will be a career-defining case. Like many (most?) politicians, Cutler is equal parts a powerful ego, a volatile temper, a history of serial infidelity, not to mention, some disturbing sexual predilections. As Rob investigates Cutler’s past, he discovers behaviors that will make Cutler a less than sympathetic defendant. Rob is stuck between his oath to the bar or loyalty to a man he has known for most of his life. 

Rob's jumps into the trial as any attorney would: examine the evidence, question witnesses, investigate potential other suspects al while preparing for the impending media circus. Flashbacks reveal the depth of their friendship as well as differences in the big four traits of elected officials: personality, privilege, ambition, power. In the courtroom, damaging evidence snowballs against the former President. So much so that Rob has to wonder if his lifelong friend could really be a murderer.

If you like the back and forth of the courtroom, this book is right up your alley. Robbins clearly understands the courtroom. Exchanges involving jury selection, evidence, cross-examination, and trial strategy seem entirely convincing.  The pace is fast and (for one who has never seen the inside of a courtroom) utterly convincing and authentic. 

A book like this is told basically in two parts: the investigation and the trial. The trial crackles with realism. The investigation, less so as Robbins takes great pains to tell the reader (as well and Rob and Jack) what all is, and will be, happening from the legal side. We are left with competing loyalties driving the story and from over to cover, it’s quite a compelling read in addition to being a well-presented anatomy of a murder trial. 

If you think that Grisham is the best at legal thrillers (and he may well be), he’s got some competition from Lawrence Robbins who has the legal chops and expertise to be a worthy competitor.

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All Secrets Die by Andrew Watts & Dale M. Nelson

Get settled down for a fast-paced technothriller focusing on cybersecurity, espionage, and the consequences when technology falls into the wrong hands. Published in 2024, we follow CIA officer Colt McShane as he confronts a threat capable of exposing virtually every secret in the world.

Catastrophic security breaches release highly sensitive information is released. CIA operations are compromised and data from governments and organizations around the world suddenly becomes available and vulnerable. The attacks are the result of Archon, a techno-terrorist organization that has developed technology that can beat any level of encryption (sounding very James Bond-ish?). The successful instruction of financial institutions, intelligence agencies, governments, and private citizens could throw all international system into chaos.

It’s up to Colt McShane to stop the threat. He plans to infiltrate Archon, capture one of its leaders to force Archon to pony up a way to disable the technology. When Colt reaches his target, the man is suddenly assassinated. Looks like someone else is hunting Archon's leaders. Someone else is interested in controlling or destroying the same technology.

The further Colt digs, he comes across one Ava Klein, a mysterious operative of a covert organization called Trinity. Together, they must unravel the various competing intelligence agencies, terrorists, law enforcement, and enemies all of whom with unclear motives including people within his own government.

A story like this is tough. How to make juggling all those ones and zeros a compelling serious physical threat. Hacking as a tool is less background detail, but now becomes a serious weapon, an unsettling threat to global digital security.

Colt and Ava rush through international locations to combine traditional espionage with artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cyberwarfare, and political manipulation. Plenty of tension, action, and technology.

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Winter Counts by David Heska Wambli Weiden

Y’all know I like crime thrillers. Also like stories set in the American west, especially those that feature Native Americans. Winter Counts is centered on the Rosebud Indian Reservation (in South Dakota). The primary character is Virgil Wounded Horse mixed-race Lakota) who works as a vigilante or “enforcer.” Familiar with the Longmire story lines? Virgil is akin to Hector. 

Crimes on the reservation typically are neglected or subject to a complicated web of tribal and federal jurisdiction limits. When local or federal law enforcement fails, the locals call on Virgil to deliver justice denied.

Reservation issues tend to revolve around property crime, minor assaults, weed, and alcohol. Until heroin starts to find its way in. His fourteen-year-old nephew, Nathan, gets involved with the heroin and is hospitalized after an overdose. Being Nathan’s guardian, (after the death of his sister) Virgil sets out to find the source and how the drug is entering their world. A former girlfriend, Marie Short Bear, re-enters Virgil’s life and gets pulled into the search for the bad guys.

The investigation leads Virgil well beyond the reservation into Denver where he uncovers connections between different criminal organizations. Tracking the trafficking routes, Virgil uncovers connections to reservation politics, tribal power, and the chance that people he knows the reservation contact where he has to confront these outside threats but also his own history of anger, grief, and alcoholism (his own ‘winter counts’) that cloud his own feelings and judgements about his Lakota identity.

The Lakota tradition of winter counts involves pictorial records of significant events remembered from year to year which for Virgil are a metaphor for personal and collective memory that have shaped his life. It all descends on Virgil as he tries to stop the drug trade while dealing with his relationship with Lakota traditions and his own community.

I liked the way Weiden weaved a fast-paced thriller with a thoughtful presentation of Native American life. The reservation is more than a backdrop for the mystery; it is a central character to the story, like the way Pelecanos makes Washington, DC a critical character. On the reservation, systemic injustice, poverty, addiction, racism, cultural identity must be balanced with Lakota resilience, humor, and tradition.

An interesting book. Not perfect. A few secondary characters could’ve been fleshed out more and some of the plot could be paced better. But don’t let that detract anyone from picking this up. Pretty sure I’ll be checking back in with Virgil. All in all, an impressive 2020 debut effort.  

And it checks all my boxes: crime thriller, western, Native American. 

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The Collaborators by Michael Idov

Michael Idov is an established espionage author with special interest in stories based in and around Latvia that involve the CIA, Russian politics, international finance, and cybercrimes. Quite a collection of topics, right? 

The Collaborators (2024) is a contemporary espionage thriller novel that follows two unlikely souls whose tasks eventually converge. Ari Falk is a disillusioned young CIA officer and Maya Chou is a wealthy, troubled twenty-three-year-old born of a Russian-American billionaire father who apparently committed suicide.

The CIA has tasked Ari to Riga, Latvia. His cover is that of a media investor. His job is to support Russian opposition journalists trying to uncover and publicize the activities of bad actors in the Kremlin. His most important asset is Anton Basmanny, a Russian blogger with viral videos that expose corruption among the power elite of Latvia. Anton is abducted following a suspicious diversion of his flight. Ari sets out to determine who ordered the flight to divert and whether Anton is alive. Anton’s abduction gets connected to the suicide of billionaire financier Paul Obrandt. 

Maya refuses to believe that her father killed himself. While investigating his business affairs, she finds evidence that his death is connected to something much larger. Eventually, these two investigations, despite differences in motivations and backgrounds, each quest is destined to intersect. 

Ari and Maya sift through wealthy Russian businessmen, intelligence agencies, political influence operations, and historical events. The investigation skips through Riga, Istanbul, Berlin, Marrakesh, and Moscow; flashbacks gradually reveal the connections between historical relationships and the current conspiracy. In the end, the reader sees this as more that an espionage tale, but a look at how the post-Soviet Russia developed its own political and financial system and the role played by Western governments. 

This seems authentic primarily due to Idov’s personal history with this part of the word. His experience as an editor and screenwriter creates a believable world of intelligence operations, media manipulation, oligarchic wealth, and contemporary Russian politics. Ari is no Bond or Borne. He’s intelligent but also tired and uncertain of the masters on both side of the game. 

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Maya plays well off Ari due to her lack of espionage experience. She goes off half-cocked adding both humor and emotional tension. I will say that this is complicated and layered with all its speaking parts, timelines, and conspiracies. 

Betting many will find this intelligent and entertaining with believable characters, sharp political commentary is a modern view of espionage where social media and finances can be every bit as powerful as humint and weapons. Just keep a notepad nearby to keep track of details.

The Patriarch

 

The Patriarch is the 8^th book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker, narrated by Robert Ian MacKenzie. I’ve reviewed the first seven books in the blog and I expect that I’ll get to the 9^th book whenever my reading queue gets short enough to go there. In this story, there is a further evolution in the ways that Brun is an unusual police officer, the chief of a one-man force in a small fictional village in rural France. Although he has gotten offers to move to Paris where he would be likely to get promotions, he has grown to love the quiet life in this small town, the populace of which Bruno intends to protect. This single man continues to be involved with available women, and in this case, it leads to a complication in the investigation of a crime. Like in past stories, his work leads to him having significant injuries.

An old man from North Africa, who fought on behalf of France in the war with Algeria, was murdered, and the investigation led to new information of one of Bruno’s lifelong heroes, a WWII flying ace, Marco Desaix, the patriarch who becomes accused of hidden and highly suspicious activities against France. Meanwhile, Bruno continues to demonstrate his incredible gifts as a chef and a wine connoisseur. It’s another successful story from the author.

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Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 voices

 I’ve never read a book quite like Hotel Angeline before, and I bet you haven’t either. The subtitle is “A Novel in 36 voices.” Robert Dugoni, one of my favorite authors, lives in Seattle which he described as a particular rich community for both writers and readers. In the foreword by Nancy Pearl, it is asserted, “No two people read the same book, even when it appears to be identical, with the same author, same cover, same publication date, and same pagination." She quoted Paul Auster, “The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer.” Dugoni and Jennie Shortridge were planning to attend a month-long arts festival in Seattle, and they looked for a way to make it more fun for the writers by writing a book together, six authors per day, six days in all. So, 36 authors agreed to participate. There was very limited instruction and structure for the authors, but the intent was for each author to build on what had been written before. Included in the effort was a nonprofit group founded by Dugani called Seattle7Writers.

You might imagine that there were unexpected changes and twists in this story, but the authors had a beginning, a middle and a satisfactory ending. The content was more for young adult reading that being an adult thriller. At any rate, if you’re intrigued by this effort to write a book in such a format, then have at it. It is kind of fun, but if it was not for the structure of the writing, I probably would have panned the content.

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Beyond Reasonable Doubt

 Robert Dugani is as good a courtroom drama writer as Grisham, and he demonstrates that talent in Beyond Reasonable Doubt, published in 2024. This story might remind you of the Elizabeth Holmes conviction for fraud which occurred in 2022. She had been found guilty of massively overstating what her new medical technology could do, and she misled her investors to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. However, I found Dugani’s story as being even more compelling than the real life drama of Ms. Holmes. The fictional CEO Jenna Bernstein also claimed that her new medical technology would be a great boon to medical science and to humanity. She claimed “the Link” would allow the development of cures for a wide range of human diseases. The technology might have eventually achieved the status of which Jenna dreamed, but it needed years more testing and research before it could be used safely, and she could not wait for that to happen.

Jenna was the CEO of Link, but her function was to be the primary fund raiser, and she was adept at getting very wealthy people to believe her pitch in the amount of hundreds of millions. Although not in love with Sirus Kohl, but she did love his money. They began a romantic relationship which they tried to keep a secret. Normally, a principal investor and a CEO would refrain from having such a relationship because it would not go well with other investors and the Board of Directors because of the increased chance of fiduciary irregularities.

Five years earlier, Jenna was involved with a similar scheme. When Eric Wei, her chief science officer was about to inform the investors that their technology was not as advanced as Jenna was claiming, he was murdered. Jenna was the number one suspect, but her trial for the murder was handled by the masterful Patsy Dugan, “The Irish Brawler.” He convinced her jury that they could not convict her because there was reasonable doubt. The Prosecutors were flabbergasted that Patsy had been able to get such a verdict, and the prosecutors never believed in her innocence.

Thus, Jenna was never convicted and she went free. In the next five years, Patsy’s alcoholism advanced to the point he could no longer do courtroom work, so when Sirus was found shot in the back of the head as he was about to release the information about her fraudulent sales pitch. Jenna asked for Patsy to defend her again, but given his still active alcoholism, she ended up with Keera Dugan, Patsy’s daughter, a young attorney. Keera had worked with the prosecution previously, but she left that work to cover for her deteriorating father and his criminal defense firm. Jenna and Keera had a long history since they had gone to the same schools while growing up. Keera knew Jenna was a liar, a woman who could not be trusted. She decided to take Keera’s case for a number of reasons as explained by Dugani.

It was the courtroom issues that were the meat of this book about a most complex matter. The arguments between Jenna and Keera were exceptionally well written. Meanwhile, Patsy entered an alcoholic rehabilitation program. The trouble that Patsy’s disease had on his family, on his relationship with his daughter, and the impact of that on his courtroom abilities were beautifully written.

I’ve given you enough information, and I’ll conclude that by writing that the story was excellent, and the book gets my strongest recommendation.

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The Patriot’s Daughter by Brittany Butler

 This was unusual for me as you’ll see below.

Ava Anderson is a young and ambitious CIA case officer chasing two threads. First is her specific assignment (which she thinks is a bit beneath her) while also exploring just what happened to her CIA career officer mother who disappeared off the grid when Ava was a teenager. As mom was  a Russia specialist, Ava is convinced that her mom in alive and living the life of a turncoat from the CIA to the GRU. No matter what her bosses assign, Ava always has her senses attuned to clues about her mom.  

The story open with a barrage of of Russian cyberattacks creating widespread confusion and division within the cyber security ranks of the US. Part of Ava’s assignment is to find out who is behind the operation. Ava is sent to infiltrate Russia’s foreign intelligence service, where she focuses on Konstantine, an SVR officer whose past is somehow connected to her own.

The book’s success hinges on believing Ava is the agent she thinks she is. We are supposed to believe that this (for all intents and purposes) rookie case officer has the smarts, skills, and wisdom to sideline her personal family grief to focus on the task at hand. Personally, I thought her actions far exceed her limited intelligence experience. Each scenario seemed more outlandish than the previous. I didn’t buy most of her personal/professional relationships hard to fathom. Some might find this premise a plus, others (Iike me) weren’t all that convinced. The storyline just seemed so ambitious that I abandoned the story. I usually enjoy CIA thrillers, political conspiracies, and family mysteries. This just wasn’t my cup of tea.

ECD

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Silent City by Alex Segura

Prepare for a gritty crime thriller in the vein of the mid-20^th century pulp; the first novel in the Pete Fernandez mystery series.

Pete Fernandez is a struggling newspaper drone whose life has fallen apart. His fiancée has bolted, his career is heading south fast, and the recent death of his father has pushed him deep into the bottle of the demon drink. For some reason, a coworker thinks Pete is the perfect person to find his missing daughter. A simple missing person case leads Pete into murder, drugs, a mysterious hitman, and secrets connected to his father’s past.

Pete is no conventional confident detective. He is troubled, usually reckless, and quite unsure of himself. On some levels, his flaws make him believable and adds emotional depth to his investigation. The case becomes an unexpected opportunity for Pete to regain a sense of purpose in his personal and journalistic life.

This Miami is quite different from what greets visiting tourists. Its neighborhoods, bars, crime, drugs, and the darker parts of the city are on full display making the city a critical hot, tense, and unpredictable character. This Miami feels authentic and lived-in. Kind of how George Pelacanos makes Washington, DC central to his street stories.

Segura does manage to keep things a little light with frequent references to songs and musical references that colors Pete’s mood and personality in various shades of noir. Yeah, the various subplots may be a bit derivative, but I didn’t care.  

Looking for something noir-ish, colorful, and entertaining? Give Silent City a go. Pete’s a fun and sympathetic protagonist running around amongst the less than touristy depths of Miami. A good read for lovers of detective stories, journalist/ bumbling investigator turning over an urban underbelly to find that missing young femme fatale.

ECD

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Nothing Left To Lose by Danny Singer

 

Remember when Malaysian Air flight 066, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur enroute to China, just up and disappeared from air traffic control? The resulting long, massive, and expensive search found nothing.  Prepare for a retelling of that episode. In this reimagining of that flight’s outcome, the passengers have not vanished. It was all planned. The passengers signed up for the flight as a part of Project Lazarus, a secretive scheme intended to give people desperately in need of a ‘reboot’ the opportunity to leave their old lives behind and start all over again. Think of this as a variation of Fantasy Island. ‘De plane. De plane.’

An unusual premise, right?  Singer takes the true story a vanished aircraft and develops it into a complex story about people desperate enough to want to abandon their identities, fortunes, and previous lives and begin again. James is a former MI6 officer, Truman, a conspiracy theorist who believes the plane didn’t crash. It was intentionally diverted and all the passengers survived. Then there are all the passengers each with own stories and reasons behind wanting to effectively commit suicide only to reborn on their own terms entirely devoid of personal history.

The real question is can one truly escape the past. Project Lazarus offers its recruits just that: escape . . . but the passengers must keep up the charade. Changing your identity doesn’t necessarily mean changing who you are. An interesting take on the thriller genre.

The story seamlessly jumps between locations, characters, and timelines to learn the motivations of everyone from the captain, flight attendants, to some of the passengers (author can’t detail all the passengers; too many). The large cast and frequent flashbacks can be difficult to follow. Just know that going in and you’ll be fine.

I’m betting that most will find Nothing Left to Lose to be a thought-provoking thriller with a uniquely original premise that combines mystery, international intrigue, and emotional character. Deal with the overlapping and intersecting passenger plots and you’ll be rewarded with lots of questions without having political enemies setting the agendas.

ECD 

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The Same River Twice by Wiley Cash

Full disclosure: this book is based in the rural surroundings of Wilmington, NC, about a 2-hr drive SE of the Raleigh area where I live. That means I’m partial (biased?) that it’ll be an interesting story. And having reviewed here an earlier Wiley Cash book (A Land More Kind Than Home), I think this’ll be a must-read book.

Same River Twice is a contemporary Southern novel about race, class, family history, and just who should tell stories about the past. Our story begins when human remains are discovered on the grounds of Bennett Place, a former rice plantation built primarily on the backs of enslaved people. The property’s new owner hopes to transform it into a historic landmark celebrating his own family’s heritage.

Aaron is a successful Black writer/university writer in residence who returns to the property because his family history is connected to the land. His grandfather once worked there, and Aaron is also searching for answers about his father’s disappearance.

Three complicated characters become intertwined by the discovery. 1. Jessica is a newly minted PhD in archeology struggling with enormous student-loan debt. She accepts a job managing the historic site and is now somewhat dependent on the wealthy benefactor. The discovery forces her to confront an ethical dilemma: protect her employer’s interests or pursue the truth about the remains? She must balance her historical scholarship vs. powerful people who want to control the plantation’s narrative.

2. The new owner pulls Kevin, the local DA, into the situation. He too is balancing two roles: public official and his own complicated family history. What he learns forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about race, power, and the legacy of the past. The novel also draws Kevin’s family and teenage daughter Amelia whose limited life experiences offer a more contemporary outlook on Southern life and the pressures faced by young people.

3. Aaron is the third character.  

All drawn together because a skeleton dug up by the renovation crew has conspired to  force these southern characters to face universal unresolved relationships in the South.  Cash encourages us to see the remains not as museum trinkets. Rather the remains teach us about how the past can impact modern truths.

‘They’ say history is written by the winners of conflicts. In this case, who owns this narrative? No one really owns history or is allowed to interpret it with all its flaws and imperfections. Don’t expect any real black and white (figuratively speaking) resolution to Wilmington's secrets.

The primary three perspectives allow Cash to show us how race and class shape these three divergent characters. Or maybe not. Regardless of what a reader takes from the book, expect to benefit from this thoughtful Southern novel and whether the past should just stay buried.

ECD

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Head Cases by John McMahon

If you love Apple TV’s espionage series Slow Horses (early in it’s 5^th season), this just might be your next read. Slow Horses is about British MI agents who’ve screwed up on the job, but not so grievous to get fired. Mostly considered incompetent. They get kicked downstairs to Slough House, hopefully to get so bored that they’ll quit or get killed on the job. If you have access to Apple TV and haven’t seen it, turn on Season 1 Episode 1 for no other reason than to see how the Slough House supervisor (played by Gary Oldman) is introduced and report back.

Head Cases might be considered the FBI’s version. The main agent is Gardner Camden, an exceptionally intelligent but socially awkward FBI agent who is particularly adept at recognizing patterns, solving puzzles, and connecting pieces of information that other investigators overlook. Gardner in the motor behind the FBI’s Patterns and Recognition (PAR) unit, a small group of unusual and similarly talented agents who are brought in to investigate cases that have resisted conventional police work. They work out of Jacksonville, FL field office because no one quite knows where to put them

Our story begins when the DNA of a murder victim connects the crime to Ross Tignon, a suspected serial killer who was assumed to have died in a deadly fire seven years earlier. Gardner had previously investigated Tignon and suspected him of several murders. To discover that Tignon had survived the fire and was (recently) alive immediately raises troubling questions about the thoroughness of Gardner’s investigation. Then, another suspected serial killer is found dead. The evidence suggests that the two murders are connected. Gardner and the PAR team realize they may be dealing with someone who is deliberately hunting other killers (What? Another book that can trace its basic plot back to Dexter?).

The investigation becomes an increasingly complex personal and dangerous when the murderer begins leaving clues and riddles specifically designed for Gardner to challenge him intellectually. At the same time, the PAR team faces the possibility that someone inside the FBI is providing the murderer with confidential information about unsolved serial-killer cases (shades of Serves Your Right recently reviewed here on MRB). Who can be trusted?  How to protect families and themselves? The FBI is a big organization.

Gardner may be brilliant, but he struggles with ordinary social interactions, making him different from the stereotypical action-oriented FBI hero. His only real human connection is with his young daughter, Camila. The other members of the PAR team are an entertaining ensemble of unique skills.

As police procedurals go, the author combines police investigation, serial-killer suspense, multi-layered puzzles, and some creatively interesting twists to keep the reader guessing. A little more back story might help readers connect with the PAR team.

Head Cases is both entertaining and intelligent that introduces us to an unusual FBI team, puzzling puzzles, unpredictable twists, and memorable protagonist. Give McMahon's Gardner a shot.  

ECD 

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Serves You Right by Orion Gregory

 

Serves You Right is a crime thriller starring Sydney Livingstone, a former professional tennis player who has left the competitive world of sports behind to become a rookie detective in small town-ish Walsh County, Ohio. Sydney is hoping this career change will provide a quieter and more meaningful life while she waits for fiancé/tennis pro to retire. Instead, she finds herself caught in a dangerous investigation involving murder, vigilantism, corruption, and betrayal.

A number of criminals have escaped punishment for serious crimes now becoming targets of a mysterious vigilante known as The Enforcer (shades of Dexter?). Operating partly through the dark web, The Enforcer believes that people who have escaped justice through the legal system deserve to be punished. The vigilante's actions quickly become more violent, creating considerable pressure on the local police department.

Sydney gets assigned to the task force investigating the identify of The Enforcer. One of the central complications is that it appears The Enforcer is getting information from inside Walsh County law enforcement. The only person Sydney is sure isnt’ the inside source is herself. Everyone else on the force is a potential ‘traitor’. This creates a moral dilemma: The Enforcer is committing crimes, but the victims are some bad people in NE Ohio. Sydney must therefore investigate someone who believes they are correcting failures in the justice system.

The situation is complicated when a veteran police officer is stalked and evidence begins to suggest that corruption maybe a core of possibilities within the detective branch. As the investigation develops growing media attention, hidden secrets, suspicious behavior, and increasing body count make the case increasingly dangerous. Sydney must rely on her instincts and evolving investigative abilities while trying to determine whether The Enforcer is an outsider—or someone much closer to the investigation than she realizes

The author ramps up the suspense with each new victim, the attempt to narrow down the insider, and the ‘who’s next?’ question. Gregory continually introduces new clues and suspects, making it difficult to predict who is responsible. Sydney is an able and thoughtfully creative combining the unusual combination of her former athletic career and new life in law enforcement

The novel is not without weaknesses. The dialogue can be slow and formulaic; less convincing than the overall plot. The other thing is her professional tennis background. This is the 2^nd Sydney Livingstone novel, so I don’t know the back story from the first book. I’m under the naïve assumption that a police officer usually spends several years ‘on the street’ before taking the detective’s exam and other qualifications needed to become a detective. It looked to me like she sort of joined the force and rapidly moved up the ladder to become a detective or tested out for detective right out of the academy. She seemed too inexperienced and young to be a detective.  But what do I know.

Overall, Serves You Right is an entertaining mystery thriller that combines police investigation with questions about justice and revenge. Sydney Livingstone is an engaging central character, and the twists help maintain tension throughout the novel. Get past my curiosity about her lack of experience, take her background at face value, and you’ll have an entertaining read.

A number of criminals have escaped punishment for serious crimes now becoming targets of a mysterious vigilante known as The Enforcer (Shades of Dexter?). Operating partly through the dark web, The Enforcer believes that people who have escaped justice through the legal system deserve to be punished. The vigilante's actions quickly become more violent, creating considerable pressure on the local police department.

Sydney gets assigned to the task force investigating the identify of The Enforcer. One of the central complications is that it appears The Enforcer is getting information from inside Walsh County law enforcement. The only person Sydney is sure isnt’ the inside source is herself. Everyone else on the force is a potential ‘traitor’. This creates a moral dilemma: The Enforcer is committing crimes, but the victims are some bad people in NE Ohio. Sydney must therefore investigate someone who believes they are correcting failures in the justice system.

The situation is complicated when a veteran police officer is stalked and evidence begins to suggest that corruption maybe a core of possibilities within the detective branch. As the investigation develops growing media attention, hidden secrets, suspicious behavior, and increasing body count make the case increasingly dangerous. Sydney must rely on her instincts and evolving investigative abilities while trying to determine whether The Enforcer is an outsider—or someone much closer to the investigation than she realizes

The author ramps up the suspense with each new victim, the attempt to narrow down the insider, and the ‘who’s next?’ question. Gregory continually introduces new clues and suspects, making it difficult to predict who is responsible. Sydney is an able and thoughtfully creative combining the unusual combination of her former athletic career and new life in law enforcement

The novel is not without weaknesses. The dialogue can be slow and formulaic; less convincing than the overall plot. The other thing is her professional tennis background. This is the 2^nd Sydney Livingstone novel, so I don’t know the back story from the first book. I’m under the naïve assumption that a police officer usually spends several years ‘on the street’ before taking the detective’s exam and other qualifications needed to become a detective. It looked to me like she sort of joined the force and rapidly moved up the ladder to become a detective or tested out for detective right out of the academy. She seemed too inexperienced and young to be a detective.  But what do I know.

Overall, Serves You Right is an entertaining mystery thriller that combines police investigation with questions about justice and revenge. Sydney Livingstone is an engaging central character, and the twists help maintain tension throughout the novel. Get past my curiosity about her lack of experience, take her background at face value, and you’ll have an entertaining read.

ECD 

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The Children Return

 The Children Return is the 7^th book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. Once again, I chose the audiobook format with Robert Ian McKenzie as the most capable narrator. This book deals with the rapid infusion of Muslims into France which reached about 10% of the whole population. There were perceived problems from widely different angles depending on ones prejudices. An undercover Muslin agent was found murdered, and a young man, Sami, who had grown up in St. Denis. He was probably autistic, but he had always been mechanically gifted. As he grew up, he disappeared from the school system and some years later, was found in Afghanistan. He was thought to have been radicalized and put to the task of bombmaking against the allied forces that had come to Afghanistan. Sami came to the surface when he was trying to escape the Afghan war and return to St. Denis. It was Bruno who helped him get to France. As a young man, Sami was suspected of having been put to work by the Taliban as a highly skilled bombmaker. The allied forces called him “the engineer.” Bruno had to figure out who Sami really was so that he could protect the people of his home town.

I thought this book was a fair and unbiased look into the issues of a largely different but large  minority moving into a country. How much does each side of the immigration question have to adapt. It’s a very good book and I highly recommend it.

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Sunrise

 Sunrise by Tea Obreht was recommended in the 9/13/26 NY Times Book Review. It was described as a clash of the old west and a young woman, Nina Terzic who literally dropped into the story when a small plane she was riding in crashed into a lake in a remote Wyoming forest. I got as far as Day 5, Part 1of this adventure before I chose not to read any more. Nina had apparently been pushed from the plane and there may not have been any other survivors. Mostly this part of the book was a monologue by Nina as she often denies the reality of her circumstances, but then has some moments of lucidity. We hear Nina’s thoughts about her life, her boyfriend Ben, her fears, etc. When she stumbled onto an old ghost town, she found a novel that was being written or had been completed by the author about 100 years earlier. The body of the apparent author lied near the manuscript where she had been trapped in a cellar. Other subplots are initiated, but I got bored with the script, did not find Nina’s musings about herself and her life to be very interesting.

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Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl

 

I was privileged to receive a preview of Will Ferguson's latest novel Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl. Published by Goose Land Editions, the novel is a delightful twist on the buddy cop story. Superintendent Mamoru Kaito comes from Okinawa to Hateruma Island in extreme southern Japan to inspect the police operation of Officer Shimada. Mr. Ferguson describes the relationship between the younger Kaito and the nearing retirement Shimada layered with the cultural work life balance specific to Japan. The plot is driven by the search for the disappearing girl of the title who is the sister of Superintendent Kaito. 

Kaito's search for his sister Chloe is the motivation to meet Shimada and they soon set off on a "vacation" together first to Nagasaki City where she first disappeared. There are echos of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to be heard, but my mind was drawn to Janwillem van de Wetering and his Amsterdam cops Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant de Gier. 

The tone of the book is wonderfully balanced, which can be a difficult task given a missing person story. I always like learning something while being entertained by a story and the descriptions of Japanese culture, police, and family dynamics really added to my knowledge of Japan. Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl gets my highest recommendation. 

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The Resistance Man

 The Resistance Man is the sixth book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. I think the review I read in Audible probably best describes the intrigue that the author provided. I’m cheating by using a quote from another source, but if you’ve been following my reviews of this series, you’ll surely forgive me for taking this shortcut. I may have done this once before in the 1934 reviews that we’ve posted. I continue to be well entertained by this series. 

“It's summer in St. Denis for chief of police Bruno Courrèges, and that means a new season of cases. This time there are three weighing on his mind. First, there’s the evidence that a veteran of the French Resistance is connected to a notorious train robbery; then, the burglary of a former British spymaster's estate; and, finally, the murder of an antiques dealer whose lover is conveniently on the lam.

“As Bruno investigates, it becomes clear that they are connected--however, figuring out how will take every skill he possesses. Add in juggling the complex affections of two powerful women, maneuvering village politics, and managing his irrepressible puppy, Balzac, and Bruno has his hands full once again.”

I listened to the audiobook format which was once again narrated by the very capable Robert Ian MacKenzie. Another important reason for my enjoyment of this series which takes place in rural France is that the author skillfully ties the location of the small village and its inhabitants to past wars. Geography is an important topic in all of these books. Thus, while St. Denis is a rural village, it has not been free from traumas in the world which have left scars on its population.

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The Mogul

 

This is the 11^th R.G. Belsky book that has been reviewed in this blog, and it’s my fifth one. We have reviewed about 500 different authors, and there are only a few of them that we’ve read more than Belsky. I can say without doubt that he’s one of our favorites. The book is entitled The Mogul and the characters who wrote stories for the The Sentinel, a daily newspaper in New York City. The story takes place mostly during the 1980’s which was really the highlight era of print journalism. The Sentinel hired hundreds of reporters, and this paper had a daily subscription of one million readers. The primary protagonists were the owner of the newspaper, Billy Blaine, and the paper’s city editor, Nick Marston. Nick was already a reporter for the paper when Billy bought it. Although Billy was an unpredictable and demanding owner, he and Nick got along well until the end. It was clear that they both were willing to cut corners and manipulate the stories they were printing, all of the sake of selling papers.

Meanwhile, the private lives of both men were highly dysfunctional, especially Billy’s. We learn early on that Nick’s son was killed at the age of 18 in a traffic accident. That happened on a night that Nick was supposed to go with Sean to a Yankees game, but as he often did, Nick opted out of the game because of a story that he was working on. The death of Sean was the beginning of the end for Nick’s marriage. Meanwhile, Billy’s son, Wilson, was overly protected by his parents and given the privileges of being from a very wealthy family. Wilson had scrapes with the legal system, but good lawyers always got him out of any real punishment.

Among all the reporters was Carrie Anne Cody, a 23-year-old beauty who had just graduated from the school of journalism at Northwestern. On paper, she looked like a straight A student, although it was eventually discovered that she lied about that. Although she was being paid relatively low wages as a beginning reporter, she somehow afforded to pay rent in the most ritzy area of Manhattan. She lied about having her income subsidized by her wealthy father and she really wanted nothing to do with her parents. Both Nick and Wilson found her presence to be entrancing.

The principal characters in this book were believable and three-dimensional. The reader learns that Carrie Anne Cody knew that Billy was running illegal schemes to support his extravagant life style, and she knew that Nick was going along with Billy’s illegal schemes. It became her goal to bring them both to public shame and bankruptcy. Carrie Anne was writing a novel that would expose Billy’s schemes. Meanwhile, she sought information about the business dealings of The Sentinel, and she was willing to do anything to get the information she wanted. As the book progressed, we learned the remarkable origins of Billy’s past relationships and how that tied into Carrie Anne’s history.

The plot is very well-developed, and the reader is not given enough information until the end of the book to know who it was that killed her. The ending to this story is most cleverly revealed. The pace of the story was fantastic. I read it in only two sittings on consecutive days. Given my reading of Belsky’s prior books, I expected to be totally entertained, and this work did not disappoint.

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The Devil's Cave

 The Devil’s Cave is the fifth book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. If you’ve been following my reviews of the first four books in this 21-novel series, you’ll know I’m hooked, and yes, I’ve already downloaded the sixth book, all of which I’ve enjoyed in audiobook format by the excellent narrator Robert Ian MacKenzie. This book opens with a dead woman floating down a river towards St. Denis. The formerly beautiful woman was lying face up for the world to see her nakedness. Her identity was the first mystery in the story. Then there were the satanic symbols that marked her body.

Complicating the story was a domestic physical abuse case, the promise of a high end real estate development that just might keep this small town afloat (unlike so many countryside towns which had been abandoned), and the return of the Red Countess who had a long and very controversial history dating back to before WWII.

Once again, the author Martin Walker has provided an excellent plot with the further development of the usual cast of characters, Bruno, Isabelle, Pamela, J.J., the Baron, and the news photographer. Importantly, a new basset hound Balzac is introduced along with Hector, Bruno’s horse. I am fully entertained by these stories.

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The Crowded Grave

 The Crowded Grave by Martin Walker is the fourth book in the Bruno, Chief of Police series. Once again, the skillful narrator was Robert Ian MacKenzie. As usual, while focusing on the idyllic St. Denis in France’s Perigord region, which is in a westerly central very rural area of the country, Walker brings in significant outside forces. In this case it was a French-Spanish summit being held there while being threatened by Basque separatists. At the same time, an outside animal rights group was descending on St. Denis because this was the region that produced nearly all of the foie gras that was consumed in France and was exporting that worldwide. They were demonstrating against the force feeding of geese to produce this product. Also, there was the discovery of a prehistoric grave in which a man, woman, and child were found, huddling with one another. There was an archaeological dig going on there, and at this same site, a 20-year-old murder victim was discovered. It was thought he had been involved in the Basque-separatist movement. Walker skillfully moves his protagonist and antagonists in and out of the issues in St. Denis and the world at large.

Bruno continued to be admired by most of the local citizens, and his culinary skills and taste in wines were described in detail. He was a single man who continued to struggle with making a choice among the women who he was seeing. The plot was well developed, and the characters that surrounded Bruno were three-dimensional, and this reader found them to be struggling with their own emotions. In other words, I found myself caring about them. I won’t detail it here, but there is a heart-breaking end to one of the important characters in the series.

In searching for the author in this blog, I found that ECD had previously reviewed a book by Walker. Pointing out one of the differences between the reviewers was that ECD was not drawn to the focus of life in the Perigord, while I (WCD) was enamored by it. ECD reviewed The Coldest Case, the 14^th book in the series. I expect that I’ll eventually read these books in order, so it will be a while until I get to that particular Bruno story.

The Bruno series – my advice is to keep reading.

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The Equation: The Secret They Don't Want You to Know

 The Equation is a future dystopian story written by Ivan Carl. The protagonist is Nathan Brooks, a graduate student whose beloved professor, Adrian Holt, was murdered. The timing of the book was at least a couple hundred years in the future, probably even further ahead. Governments were no longer as we know them today. Rather, there are a group of people who make decisions that affect everyone on the planet. They believed that humans needed to be managed. It is their goal to keep everyone working harder and harder, not ever to attain contentment. It is their belief that those who were content were a threat to the society that they had created. It was Holt who developed an equation that represented that circumstance. The equation was C= H+W/T, or contentment equal health plus wealth divided by time. Holt was murdered by the conspirators known as The Continuum because they thought if Holt’s finding were published, it would lead to their undoing.

Holt left Nathan some obscure clues that he was able to follow. Then he was joined by Lucia who had worked on behalf of the Continuum for 12 years, either killing or discrediting various people who wanted to challenge the Continuum. When Nathan appeared on the scene, she had a change of heart. Lucia felt guilty about her skilled help to suppress whatever the Continuum wanted shut down. At the risk of her own life, she decided to become Nathan’s partner since she knew just how the Continuum would track him. Hiding from them was impossible. As Nathan and Lucia worked to find data that would support their views, it was Lucia who said of the Continuum, “They’re protecting their own relevance. Their own power. The system doesn’t fear chaos. It fears sufficiency. Because sufficient people don’t need to be managed.”

I actually tried to enjoy this book, but I could not reach an understanding of why contentment or sufficiency were such a danger. There were parts of the book that hit me as being redundant, but the conspiracy to control by keeping people in the dark about the value of their work simply did not seem so dire. On the one hand, Carl was also writing about the world we live in now in which I see people working 80 hours a week to just get ahead in life, but they never quite reach satisfying lives. Certainly there are people alive today who work so hard the lives they lead are actually very unfulfilling, but by the 50% mark of the book, I was simply uninterested in reading any more. While I was quite sorry to see that Holt had been killed and that Nathan’s life was also in danger, the story just never actually gripped me in a way that I expect from a god book. I doubt that my opinion will be universal – the book just wasn’t for me.

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Black Diamond

 Black Diamond is the third novel in the Bruno, Chief of Police series by Martin Walker. See the reviews of the first two books which I've written recently. Once again, the narrator is the wonderful voice of Robert Ian MacKenzie. I’ve obviously gotten hooked by the team work of Walker and MacKenzie, so I’ve already gotten the next two books. I suppose you could read the books out of order or to consider them stand alone books, but I think reading them in the order of publication is very entertaining as the reader has a chance to learn about Bruno and his cohorts in the order the author intended.

As we learn more about the delightful life in rural France, we learn a lot about their cuisine and their wines, all of which seem to be more important to Bruno than many of the murder mystery characters that I’ve read in the past. In this book Bruno, a single man, continues his romantic entanglements, and it is clear that he loves life in St. Denis as much as anything else. One of his favorite culinary treats are truffles, and Walker spends some time explaining how they are best prepared. As the Chinese have discovered truffles, the value of them has increased several fold. It’s the truffle market that provides the scene for one of Bruno’s friends. Bruno is determined to solve that crime. The continued development of Bruno’s character and the cast that surrounds him is most enjoyable. The unfolding of the plot is done perfectly. Just planned to get hooked on this series the way I have. The next two books which I'll start shortly are The Crowded Grave and The Devil’s Cave. 

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With a Mind to Kill

 I’ve read another novel by Anthony Horowitz, an audiobook format narrated by the great Rory Kinnear. This story is a very clever James Bond novel, and I think it was probably Ian Fleming that first got me hooked on books about murder and espionage. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I devoured all of Fleming’s novels. I’ve seen all the movies more than once, starting with the second one, From Russia with Love, which debuted in 1963. I’ve not read a Fleming book since then, and what fun it has been to read Horowitz’s take on this master spy and assassin.

The novel is entitled With a Mind to Kill. Horowitz reviews the prior James Bond adventures and neatly fits his novel into that sequence. After being badly injured during his last assignment in Japan, Bond had mostly recovered. His director, “M” thought Bond was ready for a new assignment, and M thought that it was only Bond who could take on the next specific challenge. After faking M’s death at Bond’s hands, the hero was allowed to be captured by the Russians. There was a subset of powerful Russians who believed that Nitkita Khurshchev, the head of the country from the mid 1950’s to 1964, was too weak to lead the country in the direction that they wanted. They wanted the country to return to the terror of Stalin. It was the brainwashing of an expert in that technique that believed he could turn Bond into the assassin who could do that. The international balance of power was at stake.

Of course, there was a stunning woman, a psychiatrist who had been trained in that discipline from a distorted Russian perspective, who was sent to determine if the brainwashing of Bond had been complete. Predictably and delightfully, she fell in love with him.

There are many more details, but if you’re a Bond junkie like me, this review should draw you to the writing of Horowitz and narration of Kinnear. Just as the Fleming books were rather short, this is not a long book. It is, however, most satisfying.

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Poontown

 

Warning, this book is not a murder mystery. It’s just a very good story.

Poontown is the second novel I’ve read by L. M. Weeks. Four years ago, I raved about his first novel Bottled Lightning. I wrote, “In short, this story is a fast ride of international intrigue, one that will keep you spellbound.” 

Poontown is not what I expected based on the title, but then I’m not a fly fisherman. Poon is the nickname for tarpon, a game fish that is typically found in warm coastal waters, so they are often found in Florida. Fishing for tarpon is about the fight to land them. They can weigh over 200 pounds and are known to repeatedly leap and fight against capture. Tarpon are not good to eat, so typically this is a catch-and-release effort. It’s a sport that becomes addicting to the fisherman who hunt them.

While there are famous real tarpon fishing contests, this story is about the fictional Sabalo Cup. It’s an invitational tournament that takes place in Southern Florida, and only for the best five teams of tarpon fishermen or fisherwomen, although women are not usually invited to compete. The contest consists of teams of two people, an angler and a guide, and the tournament lasts five days. There are strict rules that must be adhered to, and the bigger and better the fish, the more points that are scored. There is a $3,000 entry fee.

The fisher-people in this story all know each other since they’ve been competing against one another in a variety of tournaments, but the Sabalo (the Spanish work for tarpon) Cup is the most important one, the World Series of tarpon fishing. A woman has a key role in this tournament, Olivia, and her guide is Nathan. I won’t list the names of the other competitors here, but if you read this book, you’ll learn about them, along with other people that are associated with tarpon fishing. Weeks has written about a fascinating cast of characters. Weeks also weaves into the story a man who is trying to sell three rare and valuable orange pygmy alligators, and the reaction of the contestants when they learn about that.

I think it’s because I’m not a fisherman that I got a bit tired of the details of the contests and all the catches and losses. However, if you’re a fisherman, I think you’ll get caught up in the battles to land and release these magnificent creatures. The personalities of the contestants and their histories of competing are really fantastic.

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The Dark Vineyard

 I recently reviewed the first book in the Martin Walker 21-book series, Bruno, Chief of Police. I was so excited about the quality of that murder mystery novel, that I quickly acquired through the app Libby the second book The Dark Vineyard, published in 2009, a year after the first one. I see that author Walker has written a book a year since then, so assuming the quality of his stories continues there’s lots to look forward to.

Chief of Police Bruno Courreges is the only police officer in the small rural village of Saint-Denis located in the Perigord region in southwestern France. He has learned to love the quiet and intimate life in the village. Bruno only spoke a limited amount of English, which was all he needed in the countryside. The intense romantic relationship that Bruno had begun with police investigator Isabelle Perrault was interrupted as the result of her transfer back to her home base in Paris. That interruption seemed to be a great disappointment to both of them. But Bruno did not like the idea of living in Paris, and Isabelle was ambitious and thought working in Paris would provide her with the best chance at promotion.

As author Walker described delightful day-to-day life in Saint-Denis, there were frequent references to the local cuisine and many references to wine that might be consumed at any time of day. This second book started over a special vineyard where GMO crops were being tested, but many of the locals were not happy about it. While this venture was supposed to be kept secret, there really were not many secrets in this small village. When the crops were torched by an arsonist, it became a worldwide story. It turned out a large international producer of wines was considering making a major land purchase in Saint-Denis which surely would have changed the quality of life there. Some of the locals including the mayor saw the opportunity make a lot of money, but others were against the changes that this huge industry would bring

We learned about a cast of characters that included locals who worked in various businesses and people from the large wine company. It was when this quiet town experienced two deaths of longstanding beloved villagers that the tale got most interesting. Meanwhile, Bruno struggled with missing the wonderful relationship he had been building with Isabelle, as well as his attraction to one of the women who had made Saint-Denis her home of choice.

This book masterfully revealed a great plot and the developed a fascinating cast. Once again, the narrator of this audiobook was Robert Ian MacKenzie, and he was fantastic. I might just have to keep following Mr. MacKenzie for whatever books he narrates. Now, I will get my hands on Bruno book #3, Black Diamond.

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