Siren of the Waters by Michael Genelin

I took the recommendation from Amazon, and the author is new to our blog. This is the first novel by the author, the first of three about detective Jana Matinova who works in Slovakia, but in the pursuit of solving a murder, is pulled all over Europe. Jana is a compelling character, one who has been damaged by her own original family, by her marriage to a dysfunctional artist (is that a redundancy?), and by the communist regime in which she grew up. The author does a great job bouncing backward and forward in time, and most of the characters with whom Jana associates are believable. I found the story line sometimes had too many of those remarkable coincidences among characters, and sometimes those connections between people were too vague. But, I like reading about life behind the former Iron Curtain and the residual difficulties that come from the slow integration with Western culture. I was entertained and I might read the second book in the series. For a more complete review of the story, see the following.

http://www.eurocrime.co.uk/reviews/Siren_of_the_Waters.html

Movie: Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

I know we don't do movie reviews here. But . . .

As of today, Michael Connelly is the 2nd most reviewed author on this blog. This Mickey Haller novel is the 2nd movie based on Connelly's books - Blood Work starring Clint is the other. Matthew McConaughey plays Haller and Marisa Tomei plays his ex-wife Maggie McPhearson, aka Maggie McFierce. I read this book well before we started this blog.

Saw it this afternoon and for a Hollywood rendition of a best selling mystery, the film followed the overall plot of the book, something that isn't always the case (cf. the Firm, Red October, etc.). Should the movie moguls have any sense (a bit of a stretch, I know), they would continue the Haller character and Connelly's books. A very reasonable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Far better than the remake-reboot schlock currently so common today.

One thing I do when reading books is try to picture who might play a character in a movie. McConaughey is good casting for Haller. One of the minor characters in the film is a LA homicide detective and I wondered if it might be Harry Bosch, Connelly's other continuing character who for the life of me I've been unable to imagine who might play him. The character was played by Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame (and 2 or 3 straight Best Drama Actor Emmy's to his credit) and I was thinking, yeah that could be Bosch. Too bad. He was playing another cop named Langford.

If you've passed this film up, you might rethink that decision.

ECD

Chasing The Devil's Tail by David Fulmer

Funny how one finds books to read. I was sitting in a reading room with my mom where she lives and this book with a strange title font on the binding caught her eye so I pulled it out so she could look at it. After reading the liner notes, I decided to give it a go.

Storyville is a bit of a cloistered community in turn of the 20th century New Orleans. It's home to house after house of sporting girls and the guys who turn over their money for a few minutes of delight. Tom Anderson is the elected state representative to the area and works very hard to keep a lid on criminal activity lest the city and state try to shut down the main source of income for the residents. The working girls pay attention to Lulu White's wisdom, pose for photographs by E.J. Bellocq, and love the piano technique of a young musician who goes by Jelly Roll Morton. All real characters from Storyville's picturesque past. But Buddy Bolden is the King, the man on the coronet who on one hand is inventing jazz and on the other hand is losing his mind.

Working girls are dying. Each victim seems to be letting someone they know into their room only to suffer their fate with the only clue left by the murderer being a black rose. Word has it that Buddy Bolden knew most all the girls and the police are trying to make a case out fo thin air for the mad musician to get the murders off the front page.

One way Tom Anderson keeps things in order in Storyville is by his personal investigator, Valentin St. Cyr - a mulatto with black, white, Italian, and some creole in him that allows him access to places most couldn't or wouldn't care to enter. Buddy and "Tino" go way back to childhood and Valentin can't believe that Buddy, no matter how mad, could be part of the string of murders. Anderson has Valentin investigate each bordello, the bars where Buddy plays his horn, the police, a voodoo woman, the local insane asylum and still comes up empty.

Anderson thinks St. Cyr is covering up for Buddy and fires him leaving Valentin free to look wherever the clues take him. With the help of his girlfriend Justine, herself a sporting girl, they piece together a couple comments that seemed inconsequential at the time that now lead them to one particular madam and those who populate her house.

This book won a Shamus Award for best first mystery. Since that 2001 debut, Fulmer has about 8 books out. Some continue in the historical vein with St. Cyr as the continuing character plus a couple that are more contemporary. While I've been known to read some historical fiction (Goddard, Liss, McCammon, Blevins among others), I had a bit of a hard time getting into this story. While I can't say it dragged, it just never seemed to 'get it on' meaning it seemed take me far longer to finish a 6x9 paperback of 334 pages. I may give him another try, but whether it will be another St. Cry mystery or one of his others is up for grabs.

East Coast Don

Stone Cold by David Baldacci

This is the third book in the Camel Club series. It would be impossible not to like and hate the characters that Baldacci has created. This story further develops all of the main characters that have been set up in the first two books. There’s Oliver Stone, a.k.a., John Carr, the ex-CIA master assassin; Caleb Shaw, the rare book guy from the Library of Congress; Reuben Rhodes, the muscle of the group who has other talents; and Milton Farb, the true genius of the group with OCD. Given that the members of the group are all in their early 60s, they are easy for me to identify with. In the last book, Baldacci added the bad ass Jerry Bagger, casino owner, and his antagonist, the beautiful Annabelle Conroy, ace con woman, who successfully swindled the maniacal Mr. Bagger out of $40,000,000. In this book, Baldacci cleverly intertwines the troublesome past spy/espionage/assassination history of Stone/Carr with the current conflict of Bagger and Conroy. Not all of the characters survive the end of this story, and I can see good possibilities for the continuation of the saga. This was a good read and I’ll continue with the next one in the series. It’s of my “airplane book” category – enjoyable and entertaining, while not being more than that.

When the Bough Breaks by Jonathan Kellerman

I read this book on the basis of another recommendation from Cousin Dave, not the specific book, just the author. I found Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series, which now amounts to 25 books, and started with the first, released in 1985. This one was a winner from a number of perspectives. The main character, Dr. Delaware, is a child psychologist who was successful early in his career and retired at age 33, after his involvement in a particularly gruesome matter and when he realized that his own life had become empty as he blindly pursued his own financial and academic success. In retirement, he’s been having a good time, leading a fine life in Los Angeles when he gets pulled into a new crime. An LAPD detective wants him to interview a child who might have been witness to a murder but who won’t talk to the cops. Suddenly, Dr. Delaware finds meaning in his own life again, and he can’t let go of the matter, much like I felt as I read the book. This is about very dark stuff, the world of sociopathy, pedophilia, and worse. I kept wondering how Kellerman got so much right about the depraved and traumatized characters that he was writing about. Turns out, he’s a child psychologist who got his undergraduate degree from UCLA and his Ph.D. from USC. I don’t need to give you the plot, but please know that I had a hard time putting this book down. The various characters were believable, both the good guys for their altruistic qualities and human frailties, and the bad guys for their damaged egos. I also thought the quality of the writing was very literate, and I’ll give you one short example. Dr. Towle was one of the bad guys, a child psychiatrist who did not have his patients’ best interests at heart. Kellerman wrote of an encounter between Delaware and Towle: “[Towle] laughed. It was the first time I’d heard his laugh and I hoped it would be the last. It was a vacant discordant note, a blatant musical error screaming out in the middle of a symphony.” I’ve already acquired the second book in the series, “Blood Test.” Thanks Cousin Dave – a great recommendation.

Murder in the Marais by Cara Black

Maybe it’s because, unlike many Jews that I know, this Jew does not have an affinity for reading to reading holocaust related materials. In fact, I have an aversion to it. Most of the fiction I read is really just that, fiction, but the holocaust was not, and I’ve never found anything about it to be entertaining. So, maybe it’s just me. This is a current day story, a new murder of an elderly Jewish woman in the Marais, the Jewish section of Paris. Aimee, a detective who is more comfortable researching computer crimes, gets pulled into this mess by an old friend of her deceased father. She infiltrates the Les Blancs Nationaux, who are French skinheads that want to reenact crimes of the Third Reich against the Jews. And, Leduc Detective is about to go under, and Aime’s partner insists that she accept the big payments that are offered for her work. This book is the first in a long list of Aimee Luduc novels, a series that I saw recommended on Amazon. Even though this one was only rated 3.5/5 by Amazon readers, I thought I should start there, at the beginning. There must be a reason that it generated so many more stories. Right? It just didn’t work for me. I abandoned the book at the midway point.

The Silent Man by Alex Berenson

When we last left John Wells, he was recovering from being tortured by the Chinese, then averting a confrontation between the two superpowers that could have led to WW III. All in a day’s work.

The jihadists want to make one mega strike against the Great Satan. They ‘convince’ a couple Russian cousins who work at a Siberian nuclear storage facility to steal two warheads. The Russians wonder why because without the activate codes, held in Moscow, the bombs are useless. No matter. With some intricate planning, two warheads leave the facility and are trucked to the coast of the Black Sea (bye-bye cousins) where they will be smuggled into Hamburg for a clandestine boat ride across the Atlantic to Canada to eventually find their way to the stable of a rural farmhouse near Corning, NY owned by an Egyptian trauma surgeon.

In NY, an Iraqi physicist plans to open the warheads (with the help of the surgeon and the mastermind thief), remove the enriched uranium and mold a new bomb, bypassing the codes, all in time to transport to DC just in time for the State of the Union. (and OMG, am I glad that Berenson didn’t follow Clancy’s lead from Sum of All Fears and go into ridiculous detail about making the bomb. He kept that part brief, thankfully).

Wells and his fiancé, a CIA honcho, are on their way to work when an accident on the bridge stalls traffic allowing 2 motorcycles to come up each side of their SUV and open fire injuring Exley.

Naturally, Wells is honked off . . . seriously honked off. The dead hitters were Russian, so off to Moscow to corner the connection where he learns a couple things. The man behind the hit is Kowalski, the arms dealer from The Ghost War. Kowalski also knows a bit about stealing uranium. But Kowalski knows a honked off Wells on your tail is no way to live, so he trades some sanity for a name.

The chase shifts into double secret overdrive now to find the bomb’s whereabouts. Dang near every FBI agent east of the Mississippi is on the case and some dogged detective work traces the three stooges to the NY farm, but they are gone.

It’s interesting to read a series like this so close together. It’s almost like a Saturday serial at the local theater as Wells goes from one peril to the next. Now that flippant statement should not be construed to be critical. This is high octane, testosterone driven, balls to the wall action with Wells as the center of attention, reminiscent of Mitch Rapp, Kirk McGarvey, et al. Is this what the Clandestine Service of the CIA is like. Probably not, Like the genre? No question you’ll like this one.

I’ve ordered #4 from the library. Stay tuned for the next installment.

East Coast Don