Line of Darkness by Max Tomlinson

Remember. Colleen Hayes is an ex-con who did 10yr for killing her abusive husband in Colorado. It’s 1978 and she’s in San Francisco trying to get her life in order attempting to her PI license.

A German businesswoman, in SF for a conference, hires Colleen to track down her missing nephew. The two were to meet in SF but he never showed up so Colleen gets enlisted to do what the local cops can’t or won’t do. She finds the guy in a fleabag hotel and tells the aunt. Quick resolution. Cash the check. It’s up to the aunt to make contact.

Tidbits picked up by Colleen don’t sit well with her. She broke into the guy’s hotel room and found half of an old British five-pound note, a pistol, and a photograph. All neatly hidden in a heating duct. The more she digs, the more confusing are the clues and her client.

Turns out that the connection between the aunt and nephew dates back to a German concentration camp. And Colleen starts to wonder if the two really are related. Colleen has been told by SFPD to lay off the case, but that’s not in her DNA. She must find out about the nephew, the businesswoman, the torn 5-pound note and the connection to an international trail of murders that all seem to date back to that one concentration camp.

Tomlinson has four books about Colleen Hayes and the third reviewed by the boys at MRB. I’ve found this series to be quite entertaining, fun to read and certainly not a waste of my time. If I had to assign a category, I might say that it’s high-quality PI pulp that is a great way to kill some time.

And did I forget to mention? It’s from Oceanview Publishing. So for, I’ve not gone wrong with any Oceanview mystery. Need to find the one title I’m missing.

ECD

Bad Axe County by John Galligan

This is my second Heidi Kick/Bad Axe County, Wisconsin book, but it’s the first in what so far, is a four-book series. The fourth book in the series, Bad Day Breaking, has been reviewed by the boys here at MRB. Reading this book out of order means it provides plenty of backstory to the Heidi Kick saga.

As a teenager, Heidi Kick was sort of an anomaly: a high-achieving train wreck. Maybe a well-liked community nuisance. Coming out of high school, she had to good (or mis) fortune to be crowned Wisconsin’s Dairy Queen, a title that has followed her into adulthood. After a number of fits and starts, she went into law enforcement and when there is an opening for an interim county sheriff, Heidi ends up in charge, to the chagrin of a large chunk of Bad Axe County. She still carries around the burden of the death of her parents maybe 15 years ago; a crime originally recorded as a murder-suicide that Heidi never believed. She’s married to a former high school baseball hero now coach and has three kids.

It's winter in Wisconsin and an ice storm hits SW Wisconsin. A young girl is missing in the storm. Heidi follows what trail she can find and gets pulled into rural stag parties held in abandoned dairy farms and all the crap that can go on at a gathering of thugs. The clues lead not only to a junkyard (and a corpse hidden for a decade) but also to a legendary baseball game her husband pitched. What she finds has the potential to seriously upset longstanding ‘values’ of the county.

Call this Dairy Noir. The story is dark, intense, and quite disturbing because of its misogyny, rape, abuse, hero worship, family feuds, and so much more. And Heidi is in the middle of it all trying to make sure another young girl doesn’t end up as a corpse.

Galligan populates the county with a mixed corps of ne’er do wells with almost as many who support Heidi and there are who want Heidi long gone. Having lived in the area for a couple years, I think I can attest that the real-life Bad Axe County (Vernon County) isn’t like what Galligan presents. But that doesn’t make the story any less believable.

When necessary, the sheriff of Bad Axe County is one bad ass.

ECD

Shadow Reels by CJ Box

Dark Sky left off in the fall with Joe Pickett recovering from an episode with a wolverine and with Nate Romanowski appropriately pissed off after Axel Soledad, a fellow falconer gone rogue, had killed 3 of Nate’s birds, stolen 12 others, and more importantly, had attacked Nate’s wife and threatened his toddler daughter.

Shadow Reels picks right up there. Joe is slowly recovering, Nate is chasing Soledad into Colorado, Thanksgiving week has arrived, and his three daughters are all due to arrive in short order.

It’s Wednesday. Mary Beth Pickett, the town of Saddlestring’s library director, arrives a bit early for work, sees a man placing a package at the door of the library and then hustles off to avoid detection. She picks up the package, carefully opens it, and finds an old photo album dated 1937. Its cover is decorated with swastikas. The photos show some mid-level Nazi functionary with a who’s who of Nazis: Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, etc. While the pictures are disgusting, the bigger questions are who dropped the album at the library, why, and why now?

That same morning, an old rancher calls Joe saying he thinks there is a dead moose bull on the edge of his property. When Joe arrives to investigate, he quickly learns that something’s dead, but not a moose. It’s a fishing guide that has been beaten, tortured, set afire, and tossed across the fence.

While murder isn’t under the purview of the Wyoming Fish and Game, Pickett can’t help but be curious despite being told by the sheriff to butt out. Mary Beth is somewhat spooked by the presence of the photo album but manages to ultimately learn that two members of the infamous Band of Brothers company (the company that liberated Berchtesgaden) were native to Wyoming and both were known to have pilfered some of Hitler’s personal property (including photo albums). One album had surfaced years ago but the other remained hidden, until now. One of the two WY natives was the father of the man just found murdered. Someone wants the album, obviously. The ‘why’ is the question.

Meanwhile, Nate is using his falconry connections to track Alex Soledad who was just seen in Denver by another falconer named Geronimo Jones. Turns out that Soledad is high up in the antifa movement and is trying to bring down the social order of the US. Nate and Geronimo track Soledad from Denver to Idaho to Seattle and finally to Portland. (Geronimo is a tres cool character. Hope he resurfaces in future books).

It’s Thursday. Thanksgiving. The 3 Pickett girls are in for the dinner. So is Nate’s wife and daughter. So is an Asian girl/college friend (of one of the girls. Can’t remember which one is still in college). During early morning meal prep, Mary Beth sees a neanderthal-looking man peering in the window. He’s one of two brothers (from Hungary) charged with finding the photo album.

Mary Beth makes a considerable leap of faith and concludes that the peeper is the killer, is looking for the album, and is willing to do whatever in necessary to obtain it.

OK. Here’s what should be obvious. Shadows Reel has two stories running in parallel. It is less about Joe and more about Mary Beth and the girls. The Romanowski-Soledad trail is more to clean up a loose end from the previous book (Dark Sky). Personally, I liked the way Box organizes and presents the non-intersecting stories. Box is such a good writer that the story flows effortlessly into a fast read (picked it up at the library on Thursday afternoon, done at Saturday breakfast).

I looked at some reviews on GoodReads. Many weren’t too happy with Box on this one. Phrases like ‘mailed it in’ or ‘getting by on reputation’ were seen. Others weren’t happy with Joe being, for all intents and purposes, a bit player. This is Mary Beth’s book. And the girls. One person commented that maybe Joe Pickett as the lead has run its course and Box is setting up one or more of the daughters to carry on with the story. I’m OK with that. Clancy took Jack Ryan about as far as he could before bringing in Ryan’s son. Other authors have also done so. Readers need not be so angry if the author decides to venture off his previously well-worn track, give him a break; this is Box’s 22^nd Joe Pickett book.

Bottom line: This is a good book and a quick enjoyable read. Storytelling and enjoyment that is up to Box’s standard. Whether it’s the beginning of a shift in the direction of Box’s stories or not, I’m still going to be reading about Joe Pickett.

ECD

The Coldest Case by Martin Walker

The setting called the Perigord, a rural southwestern corner of France, perhaps a 90 minute drive from Bordeaux, and follows the local valley police detective Bruno. Looks like the region is somewhat famous for its prehistoric relics. Bruno's chief, who goes by J-J, keeps a photo of a skull on his door to remind him of an unsolved case from 30 years ago when J-J was new on the force. The identity of the victim and the killer have evaded him for three decades. 

After viewing a museum display about what neanderthals might've looked like, based on anthropological reconstructions, Bruno enlists the renowned anthropologist's aid in doing the same thing with J-J's skull. A student is given the assignment and travels to the Perigord region of France. Her arrival, along with some dogged investigation of media photographs of various festivals of the day, the DNA from the skull (those techniques weren't available back then), and records searches of any database they can find identify the alleged killer and victim, both of whom have/had connections with the cold war era East Germany.

The investigative aspects of this story are quite interesting and entertaining. My problem was that the author spends almost as much time on life in the Perigord as that on the cold case. Page after page after page after page about Bruno jogging with his dog, riding his horse with neighbors, wine selection-tasting-discussion-reminiscing-production yadda yadda yadda, and cooking. Bruno is quite the cook and the author let's us know in no small detail what does into planning, preparing, cooking, serving, sampling, eating, and of course the accompanying wine options. I'd bet the book's content was nearly half and half the cold case and life in the region. And I can't forget to mention that the region is France's version of Southern California when it comes to summer wildfires season, the preparations, assignments, logistics, and the ever present 'improvise-overcome-adapt' that the towns have to do when a wildfire approaches. I really wasn't interested in the good life of the Perigord and would skip dozens and dozens of pages unrelated to the actual subject of the book. The cold war connections are interesting from a Charm School by Nelson Demille (the best espionage book I've ever read) or the TV show The American's perspective.

Walker is the author of what appears to be 14 other Bruno stories and about a half dozen non-fiction books, so he is an established writer with a following of significant size to keep him turning out Detective Bruno books. Now if the author's intent was to portray the comings and goings of what could well be an idyllic region of France, then he was successful. I just wasn't that interested. 

ECD

Assassin's Lullaby by Mark Rubinstein

Mark Rubinstein is one of my colleagues although we’ve never known one another. We’re both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, but he’s a real thriller writer and I’m only a wanna be novelist. His work has been highly praised by the best writers in the thriller murder mystery genre. However, I’m beginning to think that I’ve read too many murder mysteries., certainly more than one thousand of them. I found myself reading Assassin’s Lullaby and not being particularly impressed. 

 

It seemed like an old story of an assassin, originally trained by the Mossad (sounds like Gabriel Allon in the Daniel Silva books), who is growing older (now 39) and is questioning the choices he's made in his life. It’s a kill or be killed existence, but how does he get out of the life. The author describes a hit man who has no presence in the data world. No one knows what he looks like or where he is from. He’s a language master and speaks multiple languages fluently and without accent. He makes his contracts through a dark web site, and he only deals with his clients by that means. Also, Rubenstein repeatedly makes the point that his protagonist, Eli Dagan, has already accumulated money to live comfortably for the rest of his life, so he really does not need to take another job. But, inexplicably, he does so. Yet, he denies being attracted by the financial arrangements which provide him with his highest fees ever. Then, inexplicably, he suddenly agrees to break his anonymity by meeting face-to-face with a mob boss that wants him to kill another mob boss, although Dagan is required to make it look like a natural death, not an assassination.

 

Dagan gets entangled with a woman of remarkable beauty. In his lust for her and for a new life, he seems to shut down all of his usual wariness of such relationships, a decision which nearly leads to his death. While I’m interested in reading more of Rubensteins works, especially Beyond Bedlam’s Door, I cannot give Assassins Lullaby a great recommendation.

 

WCD

 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, published in 1960, is an American classic Pulitzer Prize winning novel that needs no review in this blog. I hadn’t read this book or seen the movie in decades, and when I saw it on the NY Times list as one of the best 30 audiobooks of all time, I decided to give it a listen. The book was narrated by Sissy Spacek was all I hoped for. Spacek was fabulous, so I recommend this book at the top of my recommendation scale. Adding to the joy was my walking along the Baja shoreline while throwing frisbees for my dog. Life does not get any better.

 

WED

Closer Look by David Ellis

Simon Dobias and Vicky Lanier Dobias are a respectable well to do Chicago couple, married nearly ten years.  Simon is a law professor applying for tenure at University of Chicago and Vicky works with victims of domestic abuse at a nonprofit.  They anticipate a large inheritance from Simon’s father’s trust at their ten year anniversary.  Simon has a brilliant mind and outwardly appears to lead a successful and happy life.  Inwardly, he despises his now deceased father and blames him and his former mistress now beautiful socialite, Lauren Betancourt for killing his mother.  He doesn’t want his father’s money but his diabolical mind is obsessed with thoughts of revenge for his loving mother.  Both Simon and Vicky have secrets but he cleverly uses these secrets to fool the police when Lauren is found dead hanging by her neck in the two story entryway to her home.  Clues are revealed so timely and often the reader soon stops guessing the outcome.  Nothing is as it seems.  The couple’s lives are rife with past grudges and missteps that facilitate numerous twists and turns. A cast of shady supporting characters with sleazy self-serving motives of their own add to the complex plot.  Who exactly is conning whom?

You’ll remember David Ellis as the house prosecutor during Rod Blagojevich’s impeachment trial.  Blagojevich is the former governor of Illinois who was convicted of selling Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat when Obama vacated it to run for President.  This minded bending life experience pales in comparison to Ellis’s genius creativity in writing fiction.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance read.