As 2022 ends its eventful run and clears the way for 2023, we’re surely nearing an end to our accounting of “best books of the year” lists. There are just a few stragglers left.
• Lesa Holstine and her Library Journal colleague Liz French published a joint “Best Crime Fiction of 2022” post earlier this month. But Holstine is now back with an idiosyncratic compilation, in her own blog, of “favorite books” that includes the full range of works she read over the last 12 months. Half of her 10 choices come from the crime/mystery stacks, including Terry Shames’ Murder at the Jubilee Rally and Jenn McKinlay’s The Plot and the Pendulum.
• In mid-November I highlighted Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2022” picks. However, I failed to notice that Kirkus also released a “Best Indie Mysteries & Thrillers of 2022” tally. I confess to not having read any of those seven novels, but have heard complimentary things about Kim Hays’ Pesticide, and am already in possession of an advance reader copy of her next novel, Sons and Brothers, due out in April from Seventh Street Books.
• As I often include critiques from the blog Grab This Book in my “Revue of Reviewers” wrap-ups, I was interested to see which titles its UK-based author, Gordon McGhie, would applaud as his 10 most-prized works of the year. Simon Toyne’s Dark Objects, C.S. Robertson’s The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill, and Neil Lancaster’s The Blood Tide are among those making the cut. Yet it’s Dominic Nolan’s Vine Street that McGhie calls “my favourite book of 2022—I wish I could have the chance to read it for the first time all over again.”
• One of my most auspicious blog finds this year was Reading Reality, in which Atlanta librarian Marlene Harris comments smartly on not only mystery fiction, but books of all sorts. Her baker’s dozen of endorsements for 2022 mentions several entries from this genre, notably Karen Odden’s Under a Veiled Moon (which made my own honorable mentions roster) and Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (described invitingly as “The Thin Man in space”).
• Finally, ex-Rap Sheet contributor Jim Winter (aka T.S. Hottle), now a columnist for SleuthSayers, identifies the best book he read in 2022 as Under Color of Law, by Aaron Philip Clark.
READ MORE: “My Favorite Reads of 2022: Reading Room Recommendations,” by Kathy Reel (The Reading Room); “Review of the Year—2022,” by Steve Barge (In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel); “Raven’s Yearly Round-Up 2022 and Top 10ish Books of the Year,” by Jackie Farrant (Raven Crime Reads).
Friday, December 30, 2022
Thursday, December 29, 2022
The Book You Have to Read:
“Paris Trout,” by Pete Dexter
(Editor’s note: This is the 177th installment in The Rap Sheet’s now 14-year-old series about great but forgotten books. It comes from William Swanson, a Minneapolis journalist who publishes books under the pen name W.A. Winter. His works include three true-crime accounts as well as five suspense novels, the most recent of which are The Secret Lives of Dentists [2021] and My Name Is Joe LaVoie [2022], 
both published by Seventh Street Books. You can find out more at Winter’s Web site.)
I’m always surprised by how quickly even great contemporary books fade from the reading public’s eye. I shouldn’t be, considering that anywhere from 500,000 to one million books are published in the United States every year. Consider, for instance, the relative obscurity of Paris Trout (1988), Pete Dexter’s gritty, heartbreaking masterpiece. Granted, the novel was published more than 30 years ago. Despite its winning the National Book Award for Fiction, that’s a long stretch, one that’s been filled with thousands of other worthy titles. But this book still demands—and rewards—our attention.
I recently read Paris Trout for the third time, and was as dazzled, moved, and shaken as I was the first time. It’s one of the saddest, most unsettling books I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the best.
Dexter tells the tale of a small Georgia town named Cotton Point, circa mid-1950s. The place is stuck in the stratified depths of the Jim Crow South. The town’s wealth and power belong, of course, to its white elite, while its African-American residents are strictly confined to ramshackle areas such as Damp Bottoms and Indian Heights, far removed from Cotton Point’s money and influence. The ambient air is relentlessly sultry and oppressive. Recently, rabid foxes have put a scare into the community; one of them bites a 14-year-old black girl named Rosie Sayers, who, Dexter informs us, is “bothered by nightmares.” Echoes of William Faulkner and early Cormac McCarthy, yet in its storyline, tone, and characterization, Paris Trout is sui generis, quite unlike anything I’ve read before or since.
At its center is the eponymous Mr. Trout, a gnarled, middle-aged lawyer, businessman, and usurer (“banker” is too kind a word) from an old, influential family. A sister had been a court clerk; his mother, who now wastes away in a nursing home, once ran the family store. Whatever his antecedents, Trout is an avaricious, obsessive, and unregenerate racist. At one point in the novel, a large copperhead appears on a backwoods road. The snake—“thick as a man’s arm,” we’re told—has been run over and is “stuck to the highway in her own gum,” but, like the legally embattled Trout, it is cold-blooded, unpredictable, and still deadly.
(Above) Dexter’s novel was adapted as a 1991 Showtime TV movie starring Dennis Hopper as Trout, Barbara Hershey as his wife, Hanna, and Ed Harris as attorney Harry Seagraves.
Trout sets the narrative in motion when he shoots and kills luckless Rosie Sayers and an older woman who is attempting to protect her, when he and a henchman try to collect a debt from the girl’s brother. (Almost everyone, especially members of the town’s hardscrabble Black community, owes Trout money.) As the story progresses, Trout’s lunatic paranoia swells to monstrous proportions. While awaiting trial for murder, he rapes his wife with a water bottle, threatens various townspeople, and gives in to a madness that strains our understanding of the term. His wife tells his doctor, “He has been fortifying his room. He has covered the floor with glass and set the legs of his bed into overshoes. He sleeps with a sheet of lead under his mattress” to protect himself from an assassin he fears is lurking beneath his bed.
Eventually set against Trout are his conflicted lawyer, Harry Seagraves, another middle-aged scion of Cotton Point’s elite, Trout’s long-suffering wife, a refined former schoolteacher—Hanna’s marriage to Trout is one of the few incongruities in the book—and her callow attorney, Carl Bonner, an idealistic former Eagle Scout whom she hires to handle her divorce.
As he did in his brilliant 1983 debut, God’s Pocket, Dexter populates this tale with a memorable supporting cast—including a thuggish ex-cop who works for Trout, a pint-size judge who recesses court on especially hot days to retreat to his chambers and douse himself with talcum powder, and Seagraves’ wife, a former Miss Georgia, still beautiful but clueless. (When Harry tells her two black people have been shot, her first response is to ask if they “worked for anybody we know.”) He paints in vivid, if fading colors Cotton Point and surrounding Ether County, from the
elegant homes of its self-satisfied gentry to the dusty shacks of its Black underclass. Regardless of the address, everybody, it seems, is afraid of the sullen, solitary, serpentine Trout.
Although Paris Trout is immensely suspenseful, there is no mystery about how the story will end. It will end badly—probably worse than you expect. The sense of doom is announced by Dexter’s first several sentences: “In the spring of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia.” Mainly cattle were sickened, yet two persons were also reported to have been bitten by rabid foxes. The real threat here, however, is not rabies, but instead Paris Trout. The book offers a murder trial held in Cotton Point’s stifling historic courthouse, a drunken civic train ride celebrating the town’s sesquicentennial, and a mock trial on the courthouse lawn, complete with a functioning stocks for men judged guilty of not sprouting facial hair for the celebration. Those are distractions. Meanwhile, the suspense builds like a force of nature.
Throughout this book, Dexter’s prose is precise and often haunting. Shortly after Rosie’s shooting, for instance, Seagraves visits the site:
both published by Seventh Street Books. You can find out more at Winter’s Web site.)I’m always surprised by how quickly even great contemporary books fade from the reading public’s eye. I shouldn’t be, considering that anywhere from 500,000 to one million books are published in the United States every year. Consider, for instance, the relative obscurity of Paris Trout (1988), Pete Dexter’s gritty, heartbreaking masterpiece. Granted, the novel was published more than 30 years ago. Despite its winning the National Book Award for Fiction, that’s a long stretch, one that’s been filled with thousands of other worthy titles. But this book still demands—and rewards—our attention.
I recently read Paris Trout for the third time, and was as dazzled, moved, and shaken as I was the first time. It’s one of the saddest, most unsettling books I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the best.
Dexter tells the tale of a small Georgia town named Cotton Point, circa mid-1950s. The place is stuck in the stratified depths of the Jim Crow South. The town’s wealth and power belong, of course, to its white elite, while its African-American residents are strictly confined to ramshackle areas such as Damp Bottoms and Indian Heights, far removed from Cotton Point’s money and influence. The ambient air is relentlessly sultry and oppressive. Recently, rabid foxes have put a scare into the community; one of them bites a 14-year-old black girl named Rosie Sayers, who, Dexter informs us, is “bothered by nightmares.” Echoes of William Faulkner and early Cormac McCarthy, yet in its storyline, tone, and characterization, Paris Trout is sui generis, quite unlike anything I’ve read before or since.
At its center is the eponymous Mr. Trout, a gnarled, middle-aged lawyer, businessman, and usurer (“banker” is too kind a word) from an old, influential family. A sister had been a court clerk; his mother, who now wastes away in a nursing home, once ran the family store. Whatever his antecedents, Trout is an avaricious, obsessive, and unregenerate racist. At one point in the novel, a large copperhead appears on a backwoods road. The snake—“thick as a man’s arm,” we’re told—has been run over and is “stuck to the highway in her own gum,” but, like the legally embattled Trout, it is cold-blooded, unpredictable, and still deadly.
(Above) Dexter’s novel was adapted as a 1991 Showtime TV movie starring Dennis Hopper as Trout, Barbara Hershey as his wife, Hanna, and Ed Harris as attorney Harry Seagraves.
Trout sets the narrative in motion when he shoots and kills luckless Rosie Sayers and an older woman who is attempting to protect her, when he and a henchman try to collect a debt from the girl’s brother. (Almost everyone, especially members of the town’s hardscrabble Black community, owes Trout money.) As the story progresses, Trout’s lunatic paranoia swells to monstrous proportions. While awaiting trial for murder, he rapes his wife with a water bottle, threatens various townspeople, and gives in to a madness that strains our understanding of the term. His wife tells his doctor, “He has been fortifying his room. He has covered the floor with glass and set the legs of his bed into overshoes. He sleeps with a sheet of lead under his mattress” to protect himself from an assassin he fears is lurking beneath his bed.
Eventually set against Trout are his conflicted lawyer, Harry Seagraves, another middle-aged scion of Cotton Point’s elite, Trout’s long-suffering wife, a refined former schoolteacher—Hanna’s marriage to Trout is one of the few incongruities in the book—and her callow attorney, Carl Bonner, an idealistic former Eagle Scout whom she hires to handle her divorce.
As he did in his brilliant 1983 debut, God’s Pocket, Dexter populates this tale with a memorable supporting cast—including a thuggish ex-cop who works for Trout, a pint-size judge who recesses court on especially hot days to retreat to his chambers and douse himself with talcum powder, and Seagraves’ wife, a former Miss Georgia, still beautiful but clueless. (When Harry tells her two black people have been shot, her first response is to ask if they “worked for anybody we know.”) He paints in vivid, if fading colors Cotton Point and surrounding Ether County, from the
elegant homes of its self-satisfied gentry to the dusty shacks of its Black underclass. Regardless of the address, everybody, it seems, is afraid of the sullen, solitary, serpentine Trout.Although Paris Trout is immensely suspenseful, there is no mystery about how the story will end. It will end badly—probably worse than you expect. The sense of doom is announced by Dexter’s first several sentences: “In the spring of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia.” Mainly cattle were sickened, yet two persons were also reported to have been bitten by rabid foxes. The real threat here, however, is not rabies, but instead Paris Trout. The book offers a murder trial held in Cotton Point’s stifling historic courthouse, a drunken civic train ride celebrating the town’s sesquicentennial, and a mock trial on the courthouse lawn, complete with a functioning stocks for men judged guilty of not sprouting facial hair for the celebration. Those are distractions. Meanwhile, the suspense builds like a force of nature.
Throughout this book, Dexter’s prose is precise and often haunting. Shortly after Rosie’s shooting, for instance, Seagraves visits the site:
In the kitchen he stopped, knowing this was the place. It was the smallest room in the house, and the ceiling back here slanted down for reasons he could not discern. He imagined Trout, stooping to fit himself into this place where he did not belong.Unlike God’s Pocket, there are few laughs to be found in Paris Trout, unless you think the grotesqueries of a jerkwater Southern town amusing. Dexter, who spent part of his growing-up in Georgia, does not. This is not Mayberry R.F.D. There are no clowns or caricatures. Each character, from the town’s civic and legal establishment to the Black denizens of Damp Bottoms, is an individual, sharply and respectfully drawn. You believe them all, and fear their fate.
The pots and pans were hung from nails over the stove, a line of canning jars sat empty against the far wall. The door from the kitchen outside hung half off its hinges.
Paris Trout had come into this room, where there wasn’t anything, and taken a child’s life.
A Cache of Criminality
• The British blog Crime Fiction Lover concludes its series of “Top Five Books of 2022” postings with choices made by three of its better-known critics, Garrick Webster (aka CrimeFictionLover), Sandra Mangan (aka DeathBecomesHer), and Vicki Weisfeld. Deadly Pleasures editor George Easter rounds up all of CFL’s choices here.
• Booklist has its own opinions regarding this year’s finest crime, mystery, and thriller novels. It includes seven such releases among its 15 “Genre Fiction” picks for 2022: Wanda M. Morris’ Anywhere You Run, Adrian McKinty’s The Island, Ruth Ware’s The It Girl, Gary Phillips’ One-Shot Harry, Alex Segura’s Secret Identity, Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety, and Chris Pavone’s Two Nights in Lisbon.
• Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, who blogs as The Little Professor, includes in her “My Year in Books” recap the following brief tribute to one of our favorite mystery writers: “Author whose willingness to make himself look terrible in fiction never ceases to amaze: Anthony Horowitz’s [Daniel] Hawthorne series.”
• Allyson K. Abbott’s A Toast to Murder? Anna Ashwood Collins’ Deadly Resolutions? Rufus King’s Holiday Homicide? Valerie Wolzein’s ’Tis the Season to Be Murdered? Who knew there were so many New Year’s Day-related mystery novels? Well, Janet Rudolph did, and in Mystery Fanfare, she lists those and dozens of additional works you can crack open thus Sunday to help kick off a joyous 2023.
• Booklist has its own opinions regarding this year’s finest crime, mystery, and thriller novels. It includes seven such releases among its 15 “Genre Fiction” picks for 2022: Wanda M. Morris’ Anywhere You Run, Adrian McKinty’s The Island, Ruth Ware’s The It Girl, Gary Phillips’ One-Shot Harry, Alex Segura’s Secret Identity, Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety, and Chris Pavone’s Two Nights in Lisbon.
• Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, who blogs as The Little Professor, includes in her “My Year in Books” recap the following brief tribute to one of our favorite mystery writers: “Author whose willingness to make himself look terrible in fiction never ceases to amaze: Anthony Horowitz’s [Daniel] Hawthorne series.”
• Allyson K. Abbott’s A Toast to Murder? Anna Ashwood Collins’ Deadly Resolutions? Rufus King’s Holiday Homicide? Valerie Wolzein’s ’Tis the Season to Be Murdered? Who knew there were so many New Year’s Day-related mystery novels? Well, Janet Rudolph did, and in Mystery Fanfare, she lists those and dozens of additional works you can crack open thus Sunday to help kick off a joyous 2023.
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Revue of Reviewers: 12-27-22
Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.
Telly Toppers
For the eighth consecutive time, the British TV blog The Killing Times has begun releasing its selections of what it says are the “Top 20 Crime Dramas of the Year.” Its presentation comes in four parts, with the first one available here. The opening five choices are The Sinner (Series 4), Holding, Karen Pirie, The Tourist, and Sisterhood.
Expect to see more picks roll out as this week progresses.
In his introduction, founding editor Paul Hirons offers at least a few clues as to what we can expect. “Of course,” he writes, “there were things that just missed out [on being included]—Hjerson, The Whitstable Pearl, Wisting, Bosch: Legacy and Bloodlands, for instance; and Black Sands, The Patient and Netflix’s much-maligned Dahmer we didn’t get to see. And not having Trapped—a former crime drama of the year winner—in an end-of-year crime list (or Entrapped as series three called itself) felt like pure heresy.”
FOLLOW-UP: The Killing Times has finally posted all four parts of its “Top 20 Crime Dramas of the Year” package. You’ll find them here: 20–16, 15–11, 10–6, and 5–1.
Expect to see more picks roll out as this week progresses.
In his introduction, founding editor Paul Hirons offers at least a few clues as to what we can expect. “Of course,” he writes, “there were things that just missed out [on being included]—Hjerson, The Whitstable Pearl, Wisting, Bosch: Legacy and Bloodlands, for instance; and Black Sands, The Patient and Netflix’s much-maligned Dahmer we didn’t get to see. And not having Trapped—a former crime drama of the year winner—in an end-of-year crime list (or Entrapped as series three called itself) felt like pure heresy.”
FOLLOW-UP: The Killing Times has finally posted all four parts of its “Top 20 Crime Dramas of the Year” package. You’ll find them here: 20–16, 15–11, 10–6, and 5–1.
Monday, December 26, 2022
Easter Finally Comes Clean
George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, has spent much of the last three months tracking down “best crime fiction of 2022” lists and featuring them in his blog. But until today, he’d withheld his own list of favorite reads of the year. “My list may appear long compared to some,” he writes, “but it was very difficult for me to limit it to the number I did.” Below is Easter’s top-24 rundown.
Best Mystery/Crime Fiction Novels:
• Desert Star, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The Dark Flood, by Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Botanist, by M.W. Craven (Constable UK)
• Shifty’s Boys, by Chris Offutt (Grove Press)
• Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham (Sphere UK)
• City on Fire, by Don Winslow (HarperCollins)
• The Blackbird, by Tim Weaver (Michael Joseph UK)
• The Accomplice, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion UK)
Best First Mysteries:
• Even the Darkest Night, by Javier Cercas (Knopf)
• Blood Sugar, by Sascha Rothchild (Putnam)
• WAKE, by Shelley Burr (Morrow)
• The Maid, by Nita Prose (Ballantine)
Best Paperback Original Mysteries:
• The Lemon Man, by Keith Bruton (Brash)
• Goering’s Gold, by Richard O’Rawe (Melville House)
• May God Forgive, by Alan Parks (World Noir)
• Pesticide, by Kim Hays (Seventh Street)
Best Thrillers:
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• The Runaway, by Nick Petrie (Putnam)
• Sierra Six, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)
• Alias Emma, by Ava Glass (Bantam)
• Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
• Seventeen, by John Brownlow (Hanover Square Press)
• The Partisan, by Patrick Worrall (Bantam Press UK)
Best Short Story Collection:
Dalziel and Pascoe Hunt the Christmas Killer & Other Stories, by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins)
I read a handful of those same new novels, including Burr’s WAKE, Offutt’s Shifty’s Boys, and Parks’ May God Forgive. Yet only the first of that trio also appears among my favorites of 2022. A couple of others are still gathering dust in my to-be-read pile.
Clearly, Easter has either more time to spend in a reading chair than I do, or he gobbles up books a good deal faster. While I have so far completed almost 90 novels this year (which doesn’t count a dozen or so others I put down unfinished), he says he’s consumed 146 from the crime, mystery, and thriller field—just short of his 150 goal!
Best Mystery/Crime Fiction Novels:
• Desert Star, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The Dark Flood, by Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Botanist, by M.W. Craven (Constable UK)
• Shifty’s Boys, by Chris Offutt (Grove Press)
• Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham (Sphere UK)
• City on Fire, by Don Winslow (HarperCollins)
• The Blackbird, by Tim Weaver (Michael Joseph UK)
• The Accomplice, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion UK)
Best First Mysteries:
• Even the Darkest Night, by Javier Cercas (Knopf)
• Blood Sugar, by Sascha Rothchild (Putnam)
• WAKE, by Shelley Burr (Morrow)
• The Maid, by Nita Prose (Ballantine)
Best Paperback Original Mysteries:
• The Lemon Man, by Keith Bruton (Brash)
• Goering’s Gold, by Richard O’Rawe (Melville House)
• May God Forgive, by Alan Parks (World Noir)
• Pesticide, by Kim Hays (Seventh Street)
Best Thrillers:
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• The Runaway, by Nick Petrie (Putnam)
• Sierra Six, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)
• Alias Emma, by Ava Glass (Bantam)
• Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
• Seventeen, by John Brownlow (Hanover Square Press)
• The Partisan, by Patrick Worrall (Bantam Press UK)
Best Short Story Collection:
Dalziel and Pascoe Hunt the Christmas Killer & Other Stories, by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins)
I read a handful of those same new novels, including Burr’s WAKE, Offutt’s Shifty’s Boys, and Parks’ May God Forgive. Yet only the first of that trio also appears among my favorites of 2022. A couple of others are still gathering dust in my to-be-read pile.
Clearly, Easter has either more time to spend in a reading chair than I do, or he gobbles up books a good deal faster. While I have so far completed almost 90 novels this year (which doesn’t count a dozen or so others I put down unfinished), he says he’s consumed 146 from the crime, mystery, and thriller field—just short of his 150 goal!
And the Festivities Continue
I didn’t realize until just recently that there were doubts about the origin of “Boxing Day,” which is celebrated on the day after Christmas.
When I was a child, my British grandmother told me the name derived from the necessary household activities set aside for that occasion: boxing up all of one’s Christmas decorations and storing them away for another 12 months. Alternatively, notes Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph, “Boxing Day was a day off for servants and when they received a ‘Christmas Box’ [aka Christmas present] from the master. The servants would also go home to give ‘Christmas Boxes’ to their families.” Wikipedia adds that Boxing Day “originated as a holiday to give gifts to the poor”—which is quite the opposite of what many people now do on December 26, which is purchase gifts for themselves that they didn’t find under the tree on the 25th.
Whatever the source of its moniker, this holiday is an integral part of several crime novels, including Nicholas Blake’s Thou Shell of Death (1936) and Viveca Sten’s In Harm's Way (2018).
You’ll find more Boxing Day mysteries listed here.
When I was a child, my British grandmother told me the name derived from the necessary household activities set aside for that occasion: boxing up all of one’s Christmas decorations and storing them away for another 12 months. Alternatively, notes Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph, “Boxing Day was a day off for servants and when they received a ‘Christmas Box’ [aka Christmas present] from the master. The servants would also go home to give ‘Christmas Boxes’ to their families.” Wikipedia adds that Boxing Day “originated as a holiday to give gifts to the poor”—which is quite the opposite of what many people now do on December 26, which is purchase gifts for themselves that they didn’t find under the tree on the 25th.
Whatever the source of its moniker, this holiday is an integral part of several crime novels, including Nicholas Blake’s Thou Shell of Death (1936) and Viveca Sten’s In Harm's Way (2018).
You’ll find more Boxing Day mysteries listed here.
Sunday, December 25, 2022
PaperBack: “Murder for Christmas”
Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.
Murder for Christmas, edited by Thomas Godfrey (Mysterious Press, 1987). Godfrey was once the editor-in-chief of Mystery magazine and a regular film columnist for The Armchair Detective. Cover illustration by Gahan Wilson.
Murder for Christmas, edited by Thomas Godfrey (Mysterious Press, 1987). Godfrey was once the editor-in-chief of Mystery magazine and a regular film columnist for The Armchair Detective. Cover illustration by Gahan Wilson.
Friday, December 23, 2022
Favorite Crime Fiction of 2022,
Part VII: J. Kingston Pierce
J. Kingston Pierce wears an abundance of hats. He’s the editor of both The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers, the senior editor of January Magazine, and a contributing editor of CrimeReads.
• The Goldenacre, by Philip Miller (Soho Crime):
Every year brings at least one crime novel I can’t wait to give to everybody on my holiday gift list. Last year it was Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End; in 2022, it’s The Goldenacre, the third book from Scottish journalist, poet, and author Philip Miller. This tale introduces us to Thomas Tallis, an art authority from London, who’s come to Edinburgh, Scotland, to confirm the provenance of a captivating watercolor, worth a fortune: the final work
credited to renowned, real-life artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh. That painting is currently owned by Olivia and Felix Farquharson, but they hope to donate it to the city’s public gallery, and thereby offset some of the inheritance taxes they owe on their lately deceased father’s estate.
Tallis seems to be a man at the end of his tether. He was dismissed from his previous art-curating post under not entirely clear circumstances. He’s now embroiled in a bitter divorce, is trying desperately to speak with his beloved 7-year-old son, and is having still greater difficulty reaching his father, a former intelligence chief who seems to exist only at the cool remove of a phone-message system. Tallis is also having to deal with an impatient superior, who wants him to finish his authentication and hurry home, and isn’t happy to entertain suspicions about the Mackintosh canvas.
Shona Sandison is barely better off. A scrappy, refreshingly foul-mouthed senior reporter for the Edinburgh Post, a daily paper under attack by a new editor with inflated cost-cutting and digitization dreams, she’s assigned to cover the suspected murder of an acclaimed local painter found beaten to death in his residence. When that’s followed in short order by the similar brutalization of a city councilor, one who’d stood firmly in the way of an extensive but questionable real-estate development, even a journalist less seasoned than Sandison could catch the scent of a juicy story. An on-the-job injury that has left her to walk with a cane doesn’t slow her down any, as she pursues her inquiries, eventually linking the slayings with The Goldenacre’s rushed and rather mysterious donation.
The Goldenacre offers a slow-building but beautifully rendered amalgam of deceit, disappointments, and tragedy, delivered with noir stylings and a gasp-producing dénouement. Even at the end, there remain questions, and the administration of justice is credibly incomplete. A sequel is probably too much to hope for, but if Miller has more books in him, he can count on my reading them.
• Hot Time, by W.H. Flint (Arcade CrimeWise):
New York City was hell on earth in early August 1896, when a 10-day “hot wave” plagued the crowded metropolis, killing some 1,300 residents, mostly tenement dwellers packed into the Lower East Side. Daytime temperatures climbed to 90 degrees and above, with high humidity, and stubbornly refused to drop below the 70s at night. Beyond general fear for public health, officials worried the oppressive conditions might spark violence among the poor.
It’s crimes of a different sort, though, at the heart of Hot Time, a twisty, high-tension thriller by W.H. Flint, the pseudonym of historian and critic Gerard Helferich. In the summer of 1896, Theodore Roosevelt is in his late 30s, but already New York’s police commissioner,
with plans to expunge corruption from the department, much to the disgruntlement of officers who’ve benefited from more slipshod supervision. He and his special assistant Otto “Rafe” Raphael—one of the first Jewish NYPD officers—are summoned to an audience with corporate financier J.P. Morgan, who demands Roosevelt shut down a blackmail-through-innuendo scheme being employed by William d’Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, that has victimized many members of the city’s silk-stockinged Four Hundred. Soon after that, the commissioner meets privately with Mann, but is overheard threatening the publisher. Mann’s subsequent slaying, supposedly during an alleyway robbery, leads Rafe to wonder whether his boss and mentor might have had a hand in the man’s murder.
Working both with and around Roosevelt, Rafe—facing bigotry from his primarily Irish colleagues, and untrained in homicide investigation—determines to solve this killing, aided by an intrepid orphaned newsboy named Dutch, and Minnie Gertrude Kelly, Roosevelt’s young bicycle-riding stenographer. The author proves to be a dab hand at re-creating Gilded Age Gotham, with its corrosive poverty, ivy-shrouded brownstones, horse-drawn delivery wagons, and clanging trolleys. Although the pugnacious Roosevelt makes a habit of stealing scenes, Hot Time nicely fills out the characters of Rafe and his cohorts, and shifts the spotlight occasionally to historical figures such as muckraking journalist and photographer Jacob Riis, businessman-turned-Republican kingmaker Mark Hanna, and Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, at whose Madison Square Garden rally this novel’s cat-and-mouse finale takes place.
Because of their shared backdrop, Hot Time reminds me of William L. DeAndrea’s The Lunatic Fringe (1980). Yet Flint/Helferich brings to this mystery drama, compassion, and humor all his own. Let’s hope for Rafe Raphael’s return at some point in the near future.
• Blackwater Falls, by Ausma Zehanat Khan (Minotaur):
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, hate crimes are generally down in the United States as compared with previous years, yet “they are up against American Muslims.” So the decision by author Khan (Among the Ruins, A Dangerous Crossing) to make anti-Muslim hostility the focus of her latest novel—the opening entry in a new series—is timely as well as a powerful reminder of how much work the United States must still if it’s ever to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of being a nation where “all men are created equal.”
Detective Inaya Rahman is a half-Aghan, half-Pakistani member of the Denver, Colorado, police department’s compact Community Response Unit, charged with enforcing accountability in cases that involve cops under review for brutality. She’s been sent to a crime scene in Blackwater Falls, a (fictional) town in the Rocky Mountains not too distant from the capital, where she also lives. A Syrian refugee student,
Razan Elkader, has been found “nailed to the door of a mosque in a gruesome emulation of the Crucifixion,” her hijab stripped from her head. There are concerns that the town’s hard-line, middle-aged sheriff, Addison Grant, may harbor too many sexist and xenophobic opinions to handle this inquiry assiduously. Those doubts are heightened by the fact that a couple of Somali girls have recently gone missing, too, and Grant simply dismisses them as “runaways.” Rahman and her Palestinian-Iranian supervisor, Lieutenant Waqas Seif, must contend with a surfeit of negative complications—a motorcycle gang of white supremacists, an intolerant and deceptive evangelical church, etc.—as they dig for motives behind the multiplying horrors. Are they dealing with a series of manifest hate crimes? Or could the answers be hiding in the business affairs of a local meatpacking plant and an ambitious tech research firm? Equally concerning: Does Seif’s hesitancy to back Rahman in some endeavors suggest a hidden agenda?
Not everyone in this book is who they appear to be, but author Khan portrays Inaya Rahman quite clearly. Twenty-nine years old, earnest but not fearless, she’s a lawyer turned cop who still believes it’s possible to change the inequities of policing from inside the system, and who takes great pride in her work. She must frequently face the disappointment of her mother, who thinks Inaya ought to be starting a family by now and has turned instead to her younger sisters for satisfaction in marrying off one of her children. And as we learn in Blackwater Falls, our heroine is finding it difficult sometimes to fit in, seeking to maintain her identity as Muslim but substituting a more anonymous tight French braid for a traditional headscarf.
I’d says Khan’s latest series is off to a promising start, indeed.
• Death in Blitz City, by David Young (Zaffre UK):
Racism again raises its ugly head in this atmospheric yarn, set in 1942 in Kingston upon Hull (or simply Hull), a port city that suffered more harm than any other in England during World War II. Blitzkrieg raids by the German Luftwaffe between 1940 and 1945 damaged or leveled most of Hull’s buildings, and caused more than 1,200 deaths.
David Young is most familiar for his East German thriller series, beginning with 2017’s Dagger Award-winning Stasi Child. However, he’s no less skilled at bringing rubble-strewn Hull to life on the page. We meet here Detective Chief Inspector Ambrose Swift, a onetime cavalry officer who’s been left with a prosthetic arm as a result of his service in World War I. Because of his campaign on behalf of London’s Metropolitan Police Service to infiltrate a band of British fascists, he has been posted to Hull for his own protection. Now he’s tackling cases alongside a pair of working-class locals: part-time knuckle boxer and full-time
giant Sergeant Jim “Little” Weighton; and Kathleen Carver, a farmer’s daughter and a particularly bright member of the Women’s Police Auxiliary.
The year is 1942, and as this mystery kicks off we see Swift and Weighton being called out to a bomb site, where they find the corpse of a 20-something white woman, her heart “literally ripped out” of her chest. She’s no casualty of war, but instead a murder victim, one the inspector learns had been dating a Black American soldier stationed in the area. Before long, more sadistic slayings take place. Swift and his team follow every lead they can, but are stymied by U.S. Army officials, who resist their requests to search records and interview servicemen, and insist on dealing themselves with crimes perpetrated by their troops on British soil. As Swift links the atrocities to a Ku Klux Klan offshoot in America and subterfuge among prominent politicians, WPCA Carver is suddenly abducted, and the likelihood of imminent execution hangs over an African-American suspect Swift believes is innocent.
Young’s portrayal of Swift is particularly effective. The inspector tours the damaged town atop his own white horse; he doesn’t get along with his superior; he can be burdened with self-doubt, but is full of compassion for others. Details about how women police volunteers were treated in the early 20th century, and the challenges of wheeling a police vehicle around the countryside in a period of gas rationing and blackouts add to the book’s verisimilitude. For a reader like me, who gobbles up stories of ordinary crimes being probed during extraordinary wartimes, Death in Blitz City is a first-class find.
• WAKE, by Shelley Burr (Morrow):
Nannine is an erstwhile outback boomtown in New South Wales, Australia, that’s been reduced to a proliferation of padlocked stores and a minimum of essential businesses. It’s a wonder the place even bothers to exist anymore; as Burr remarks, “its primary industry now was stubbornness.” Had Nannine not been the site, 19 years ago, of pretty schoogirl Evelyn McCreery’s still-enigmatic disappearance, chances are nobody would remember its name.
That broken burg is where we still find Evelyn’s twin, Mina, who’s never really been able to move beyond the terrible night her sister was supposedly snatched from their shared bedroom. The mystery has since become Internet fodder, argued over by lonely people in their pajamas who theorize endlessly about the crime, one popular hypotheses being that Mina was behind it all. (There’s even an acronym that at once stresses Mina’s “rather striking resemblance to
Christina Ricci’s Wednesday [Addams]” in the 1993 film Addams Family Values, and pins her as the culprit: WAKE, or “Wednesday Addams Killed Evie.”) For years, the twins’ mother tried to keep law-enforcement agents on Evelyn’s trail; since her death, Mina’s self-protective silence on the matter has only fueled suspicions that she was complicit in Evelyn’s fate. The last thing Mina, now a semi-recluse in her late 20s, wants is for a private detective to come snooping around, hoping to reopen that case … but that’s exactly what Lane Holland has in mind. A specialist in missing-persons investigations, he is convinced it’s possible to find clues to Evelyn’s vanishing that eluded others—and he can sure use the $2 million reward for solving this puzzle. Trouble is, he’ll need Mina’s assistance to accomplish his goals, and she shows no immediate inclination to provide it. Holland perseveres, though, and slowly gains her trust, in part by helping a friend of Mina’s to locate her own lost sibling.
What she doesn’t realize is that Holland has ulterior motives for wanting to identify Evelyn’s kidnapper. Those will eventualy propel the sleuth to take risks that he as well as Mina come to regret.
An early version of this novel won the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger award in 2019. The favorable reception its publication received this year (The New York Times Book Review called WAKE “politically savvy, cleverly plotted … the kind of book that invites the ravenous language of binge reading”) suggests we will see additional fiction from Shelley Burr very soon.
Other 2022 Favorites: A Traitor’s Heart, by Ben Creed (Welbeck UK); Under a Veiled Moon, by Karen Odden (Crooked Lane); Yesterday’s Spy, by Tom Bradby (Atlantic Monthly Press); Queen High, by C.J. Carey (Quercus UK); and The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins).
• The Goldenacre, by Philip Miller (Soho Crime):
Every year brings at least one crime novel I can’t wait to give to everybody on my holiday gift list. Last year it was Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End; in 2022, it’s The Goldenacre, the third book from Scottish journalist, poet, and author Philip Miller. This tale introduces us to Thomas Tallis, an art authority from London, who’s come to Edinburgh, Scotland, to confirm the provenance of a captivating watercolor, worth a fortune: the final work
credited to renowned, real-life artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh. That painting is currently owned by Olivia and Felix Farquharson, but they hope to donate it to the city’s public gallery, and thereby offset some of the inheritance taxes they owe on their lately deceased father’s estate.Tallis seems to be a man at the end of his tether. He was dismissed from his previous art-curating post under not entirely clear circumstances. He’s now embroiled in a bitter divorce, is trying desperately to speak with his beloved 7-year-old son, and is having still greater difficulty reaching his father, a former intelligence chief who seems to exist only at the cool remove of a phone-message system. Tallis is also having to deal with an impatient superior, who wants him to finish his authentication and hurry home, and isn’t happy to entertain suspicions about the Mackintosh canvas.
Shona Sandison is barely better off. A scrappy, refreshingly foul-mouthed senior reporter for the Edinburgh Post, a daily paper under attack by a new editor with inflated cost-cutting and digitization dreams, she’s assigned to cover the suspected murder of an acclaimed local painter found beaten to death in his residence. When that’s followed in short order by the similar brutalization of a city councilor, one who’d stood firmly in the way of an extensive but questionable real-estate development, even a journalist less seasoned than Sandison could catch the scent of a juicy story. An on-the-job injury that has left her to walk with a cane doesn’t slow her down any, as she pursues her inquiries, eventually linking the slayings with The Goldenacre’s rushed and rather mysterious donation.
The Goldenacre offers a slow-building but beautifully rendered amalgam of deceit, disappointments, and tragedy, delivered with noir stylings and a gasp-producing dénouement. Even at the end, there remain questions, and the administration of justice is credibly incomplete. A sequel is probably too much to hope for, but if Miller has more books in him, he can count on my reading them.
• Hot Time, by W.H. Flint (Arcade CrimeWise):
New York City was hell on earth in early August 1896, when a 10-day “hot wave” plagued the crowded metropolis, killing some 1,300 residents, mostly tenement dwellers packed into the Lower East Side. Daytime temperatures climbed to 90 degrees and above, with high humidity, and stubbornly refused to drop below the 70s at night. Beyond general fear for public health, officials worried the oppressive conditions might spark violence among the poor.
It’s crimes of a different sort, though, at the heart of Hot Time, a twisty, high-tension thriller by W.H. Flint, the pseudonym of historian and critic Gerard Helferich. In the summer of 1896, Theodore Roosevelt is in his late 30s, but already New York’s police commissioner,
with plans to expunge corruption from the department, much to the disgruntlement of officers who’ve benefited from more slipshod supervision. He and his special assistant Otto “Rafe” Raphael—one of the first Jewish NYPD officers—are summoned to an audience with corporate financier J.P. Morgan, who demands Roosevelt shut down a blackmail-through-innuendo scheme being employed by William d’Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, that has victimized many members of the city’s silk-stockinged Four Hundred. Soon after that, the commissioner meets privately with Mann, but is overheard threatening the publisher. Mann’s subsequent slaying, supposedly during an alleyway robbery, leads Rafe to wonder whether his boss and mentor might have had a hand in the man’s murder.Working both with and around Roosevelt, Rafe—facing bigotry from his primarily Irish colleagues, and untrained in homicide investigation—determines to solve this killing, aided by an intrepid orphaned newsboy named Dutch, and Minnie Gertrude Kelly, Roosevelt’s young bicycle-riding stenographer. The author proves to be a dab hand at re-creating Gilded Age Gotham, with its corrosive poverty, ivy-shrouded brownstones, horse-drawn delivery wagons, and clanging trolleys. Although the pugnacious Roosevelt makes a habit of stealing scenes, Hot Time nicely fills out the characters of Rafe and his cohorts, and shifts the spotlight occasionally to historical figures such as muckraking journalist and photographer Jacob Riis, businessman-turned-Republican kingmaker Mark Hanna, and Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, at whose Madison Square Garden rally this novel’s cat-and-mouse finale takes place.
Because of their shared backdrop, Hot Time reminds me of William L. DeAndrea’s The Lunatic Fringe (1980). Yet Flint/Helferich brings to this mystery drama, compassion, and humor all his own. Let’s hope for Rafe Raphael’s return at some point in the near future.
• Blackwater Falls, by Ausma Zehanat Khan (Minotaur):
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, hate crimes are generally down in the United States as compared with previous years, yet “they are up against American Muslims.” So the decision by author Khan (Among the Ruins, A Dangerous Crossing) to make anti-Muslim hostility the focus of her latest novel—the opening entry in a new series—is timely as well as a powerful reminder of how much work the United States must still if it’s ever to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of being a nation where “all men are created equal.”
Detective Inaya Rahman is a half-Aghan, half-Pakistani member of the Denver, Colorado, police department’s compact Community Response Unit, charged with enforcing accountability in cases that involve cops under review for brutality. She’s been sent to a crime scene in Blackwater Falls, a (fictional) town in the Rocky Mountains not too distant from the capital, where she also lives. A Syrian refugee student,
Razan Elkader, has been found “nailed to the door of a mosque in a gruesome emulation of the Crucifixion,” her hijab stripped from her head. There are concerns that the town’s hard-line, middle-aged sheriff, Addison Grant, may harbor too many sexist and xenophobic opinions to handle this inquiry assiduously. Those doubts are heightened by the fact that a couple of Somali girls have recently gone missing, too, and Grant simply dismisses them as “runaways.” Rahman and her Palestinian-Iranian supervisor, Lieutenant Waqas Seif, must contend with a surfeit of negative complications—a motorcycle gang of white supremacists, an intolerant and deceptive evangelical church, etc.—as they dig for motives behind the multiplying horrors. Are they dealing with a series of manifest hate crimes? Or could the answers be hiding in the business affairs of a local meatpacking plant and an ambitious tech research firm? Equally concerning: Does Seif’s hesitancy to back Rahman in some endeavors suggest a hidden agenda? Not everyone in this book is who they appear to be, but author Khan portrays Inaya Rahman quite clearly. Twenty-nine years old, earnest but not fearless, she’s a lawyer turned cop who still believes it’s possible to change the inequities of policing from inside the system, and who takes great pride in her work. She must frequently face the disappointment of her mother, who thinks Inaya ought to be starting a family by now and has turned instead to her younger sisters for satisfaction in marrying off one of her children. And as we learn in Blackwater Falls, our heroine is finding it difficult sometimes to fit in, seeking to maintain her identity as Muslim but substituting a more anonymous tight French braid for a traditional headscarf.
I’d says Khan’s latest series is off to a promising start, indeed.
• Death in Blitz City, by David Young (Zaffre UK):
Racism again raises its ugly head in this atmospheric yarn, set in 1942 in Kingston upon Hull (or simply Hull), a port city that suffered more harm than any other in England during World War II. Blitzkrieg raids by the German Luftwaffe between 1940 and 1945 damaged or leveled most of Hull’s buildings, and caused more than 1,200 deaths.
David Young is most familiar for his East German thriller series, beginning with 2017’s Dagger Award-winning Stasi Child. However, he’s no less skilled at bringing rubble-strewn Hull to life on the page. We meet here Detective Chief Inspector Ambrose Swift, a onetime cavalry officer who’s been left with a prosthetic arm as a result of his service in World War I. Because of his campaign on behalf of London’s Metropolitan Police Service to infiltrate a band of British fascists, he has been posted to Hull for his own protection. Now he’s tackling cases alongside a pair of working-class locals: part-time knuckle boxer and full-time
giant Sergeant Jim “Little” Weighton; and Kathleen Carver, a farmer’s daughter and a particularly bright member of the Women’s Police Auxiliary.The year is 1942, and as this mystery kicks off we see Swift and Weighton being called out to a bomb site, where they find the corpse of a 20-something white woman, her heart “literally ripped out” of her chest. She’s no casualty of war, but instead a murder victim, one the inspector learns had been dating a Black American soldier stationed in the area. Before long, more sadistic slayings take place. Swift and his team follow every lead they can, but are stymied by U.S. Army officials, who resist their requests to search records and interview servicemen, and insist on dealing themselves with crimes perpetrated by their troops on British soil. As Swift links the atrocities to a Ku Klux Klan offshoot in America and subterfuge among prominent politicians, WPCA Carver is suddenly abducted, and the likelihood of imminent execution hangs over an African-American suspect Swift believes is innocent.
Young’s portrayal of Swift is particularly effective. The inspector tours the damaged town atop his own white horse; he doesn’t get along with his superior; he can be burdened with self-doubt, but is full of compassion for others. Details about how women police volunteers were treated in the early 20th century, and the challenges of wheeling a police vehicle around the countryside in a period of gas rationing and blackouts add to the book’s verisimilitude. For a reader like me, who gobbles up stories of ordinary crimes being probed during extraordinary wartimes, Death in Blitz City is a first-class find.
• WAKE, by Shelley Burr (Morrow):
Nannine is an erstwhile outback boomtown in New South Wales, Australia, that’s been reduced to a proliferation of padlocked stores and a minimum of essential businesses. It’s a wonder the place even bothers to exist anymore; as Burr remarks, “its primary industry now was stubbornness.” Had Nannine not been the site, 19 years ago, of pretty schoogirl Evelyn McCreery’s still-enigmatic disappearance, chances are nobody would remember its name.
That broken burg is where we still find Evelyn’s twin, Mina, who’s never really been able to move beyond the terrible night her sister was supposedly snatched from their shared bedroom. The mystery has since become Internet fodder, argued over by lonely people in their pajamas who theorize endlessly about the crime, one popular hypotheses being that Mina was behind it all. (There’s even an acronym that at once stresses Mina’s “rather striking resemblance to
Christina Ricci’s Wednesday [Addams]” in the 1993 film Addams Family Values, and pins her as the culprit: WAKE, or “Wednesday Addams Killed Evie.”) For years, the twins’ mother tried to keep law-enforcement agents on Evelyn’s trail; since her death, Mina’s self-protective silence on the matter has only fueled suspicions that she was complicit in Evelyn’s fate. The last thing Mina, now a semi-recluse in her late 20s, wants is for a private detective to come snooping around, hoping to reopen that case … but that’s exactly what Lane Holland has in mind. A specialist in missing-persons investigations, he is convinced it’s possible to find clues to Evelyn’s vanishing that eluded others—and he can sure use the $2 million reward for solving this puzzle. Trouble is, he’ll need Mina’s assistance to accomplish his goals, and she shows no immediate inclination to provide it. Holland perseveres, though, and slowly gains her trust, in part by helping a friend of Mina’s to locate her own lost sibling.What she doesn’t realize is that Holland has ulterior motives for wanting to identify Evelyn’s kidnapper. Those will eventualy propel the sleuth to take risks that he as well as Mina come to regret.
An early version of this novel won the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger award in 2019. The favorable reception its publication received this year (The New York Times Book Review called WAKE “politically savvy, cleverly plotted … the kind of book that invites the ravenous language of binge reading”) suggests we will see additional fiction from Shelley Burr very soon.
Other 2022 Favorites: A Traitor’s Heart, by Ben Creed (Welbeck UK); Under a Veiled Moon, by Karen Odden (Crooked Lane); Yesterday’s Spy, by Tom Bradby (Atlantic Monthly Press); Queen High, by C.J. Carey (Quercus UK); and The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins).
Slipping in Under the Wire
So there are a couple of very-late-comers to add to our “best books of 2022” round-up. First, Mary Picken, author of the Live and Deadly blog, weighs in with her 13 preferred reads of the year, mostly from the crime and mystery stacks (including C.S. Robertson’s The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill and Alan Parks’ May God Forgive). Second, listeners to Shane Whaley’s excellent Spybrary podcast have submitted the lists of favorite espionage novels enjoyed over the last year, pretty evenly split between new books and re-read works.
Let it be known, too, that I shall post the last of The Rap Sheet’s own “bests” lists at noon today, this one from yours truly. I hope you’ve enjoyed the whole series, and will let us know if there are other superior titles you would like to recommend.
Let it be known, too, that I shall post the last of The Rap Sheet’s own “bests” lists at noon today, this one from yours truly. I hope you’ve enjoyed the whole series, and will let us know if there are other superior titles you would like to recommend.
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Favorite Crime Fiction of 2022,
Part VI: Kevin Burton Smith
Kevin Burton Smith is the Montreal-born founder and editor of that essential resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site, as well as the Web Monkey for The Private Eye Writers of America and a contributing editor of Mystery Scene. He’s currently hiding out in Southern California’s High Desert region, where he’s still working on a non-fiction book 
about married detective couples with his wife, mystery author D.L. Browne (aka Diana Killian and Josh Lanyon), and waiting for the end of the world.
• Racing the Light,
by Robert Crais (Putnam):
Other private eyes may be darker or trendier or offer more wokeful nutrients, but nothing satisfies my P.I. jones more than high-fiving an old friend—and you can’t get much friendlier than Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole, the affable Hollywood dick with the loud shirts and the Pinocchio clock in his office. Crais has never let me down, but this one ranks right up there with 1999’s L.A. Requiem in the series; a hard-boiled thriller with more genuine heart than a truck load of Harlequins. That’s right—this one finally (at least for now) resolves the whole shit-or-get-off-the-pot Lucy relationship. I know, I know—some readers have a disdain for Lucy Chenier that reaches almost Susan Silverman levels, but not me. Either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft, but I like my detectives to have some sort of grown-up emotional life, preferably with someone boasting a little more depth than a potato chip, and who isn’t just a convenient plot point. An accomplished Louisiana lawyer, a single mom, and the survivor of a genuinely toxic marriage, Lucy and her son, Ben, are coming for a visit in this book—but that’s just a sidebar to the rollicking main event, because Elvis and his eternally fierce partner Joe Pike are in the midst of a complex missing-persons case that’s threatening to go completely off the rails. They’re hired by an eccentric woman with plenty of secrets of her own to find “Josh Shoe,” her muckraking podcaster son, who seems to have vanished while researching a story—as has a young sex worker he’d previously interviewed. Everyone dismisses Josh as just another social-media doofus trolling for likes, but soon enough, bodies start to pile up, and Elvis and Joe realize somebody out there is playing for keeps.
• Robert B. Parker’s Bye Bye Baby, by Ace Atkins (Putnam):
While the quality of continuation novels keeping the late Robert B. Parker’s other creations “alive” has fluctuated wildly, Atkins’ steady hand on Spenser has remained as constant as the North Star, offering sincere and faithful tributes to a much-loved character, while somehow breathing some new life into the apparently ageless Boston private eye’s literary career. So, how to mark Atkins’ 10th and allegedly final installment? Atkins goes out with a bang, not a whimper, leaving it all on the field, with the full roster of usual suspects in attendance: Hawk, Susan Silverman, Frank Belson, Gerry Broz—even Spenser’s former apprentice,
Z Sixkill, drops by to help out. And Spenser may need every ounce of assistance he can get, as he jumps into the political and cultural septic tank of our times to protect a mouthy young Congressperson, Carolina Garcia-Ramirez, while she campaigns in a Democratic primary election despite a barrage of threats. But who’s behind those? Her older rivals, whom she bested in the previous contest? Or maybe a band of white-power mouth-breathers? And what’s with all the organized-crime yahoos poking around? As one can expect, Spenser eats, cooks, drinks beer, spars with Hawk, flirts with Susan, walks Pearl the Wonder Dog, cracks wise, annoys various good and bad guys, and even allows that Hawk and he aren’t quite as young as they used to be. But even 50 years on, Spenser and company remain great company—smart, entertaining, still able to engage and even surprise. Atkins doesn’t reinvent the wheel here—nor would we want him to. But over the course of 10 books, Atkins has kept that wheel spinning straight and true; not so much cash-cow pastiche as an honest, respectful continuation; 
more canon than cannon fodder, with a true fan in the driver’s seat. Something for which Spenser enthusiasts all over the world should be grateful. Thanks for the ride, Ace.
• Random, by Penn Jillette (Akashic):
What’re the odds? I’m not sure exactly what Penn Jillette (the motormouth half of Penn & Teller) is trying to say in Random, but I definitely enjoyed him saying it. Anyone who’s caught the duo’s act, live or in countless TV appearances (including their brilliant but cancelled, myth-puncturing documentary series, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!), will know what to suspect. Random is a profane and perverted speed-rap, a crude and rude shaggy dog tale, a meandering ode to the fickle finger of Fate, delivered the way only Jillette could tell it—as a breakneck-paced, digressive rant that gleefully topples sacred cows and kicks narrative expectations in the backside. The story spins around a young Las Vegas flake, Bobby Ingersoll, who, after a bizarre streak of luck saves him from being killed on his 21st birthday, decides to base every decision, major and minor, in his life on a roll of the dice. (Shades of Luke Rhinehart’s darker The Dice Man!) I’m not even sure if Random qualifies as a crime novel, really, although there are plenty of touchstones here for fans of the genre: homicidal dirtbags, leg-breakers, hookers, card cheats, magicians, con artists, showgirls, killers, strippers, private detectives, and other miscreants all wander through a shape-shifting, picaresque yarn that switches direction with every role of Bobby’s dice. As he heads towards (or is it away from?) his comeuppance, you’ll start to wonder if the author used a similar method to plot this thing. All of which means you’ll either love the book, or hate it. But I’m betting you won’t forget it. Roll the dice.
• The Old Woman With the Knife, by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Hanover Square Press):
What a drag it is getting old … Hornclaw, the heroine of South Korean author Byeong-Mo’s first novel translated into English, is a stone-cold killer; a feisty 65-year-old assassin nearing retirement. Only thing? She’s not ready to go. Not just yet. She is beginning to feel her years, though, and it
doesn’t help that Bullfight, a smug young male rival, seems intent on openly challenging her competency, casting aspersions on her emotional ability to continue doing her job. Is he just another callous jackass with no respect for his elders, or is there something else behind his behavior? And why does Bullfight keep showing up? Even more troubling for Hornclaw, however, is that—after decades of a locked-down, compartmentalized life—she’s starting to feel something akin to … empathy. Empathy for a handsome young doctor who helped her out of a jam once. For his aging parents. For his young daughter. For a homeless dude who collects old cans. Even for her aging rescue dog, Deadweight. The Old Woman With the Knife is doled out in a Stark (as in Richard), matter-of-fact tone, pinned against a grim, unforgiving South Korea that’s far from the air-brushed cotton-candy world of K-Pop. It’s a slow burner, laced with pitch-black humor and take-no-prisoners observations on aging and how society (not just of the Korean variety) treats the elderly, leading to a white-knuckle, action-film-ready climax that plays out like a re-imagined, smarted-up Die Hard—as unexpected as it is satisfying.
• Hell and Gone, by Sam Wiebe (Harbour):
Beautiful British Columbia, my ass! Vancouver, B.C., has long been touted as one of North America’s most gorgeous cites, but Sam Wiebe’s series featuring young, idealistic local private eye Dave Wakeland and his partner, Jeff Chen, has always shone an unflinching and unflattering light on a Vancouver that visitors (with any luck) never see—and that the tourist industry certainly doesn’t mention. Beneath the peaceful, postcard-ready façade lies a simmering underworld of
organized and unorganized crime, and multiple layers of money launderers, drug dealers, swindlers, gangs both local and international, and of course, homicide. Not that Dave and Jeff really want to deal with such things—particularly not the always ambitious, businesslike Jeff, who has great plans for the agency. Dave doesn’t want to get involved with the rough stuff, either—at heart, he just hopes to help people. But all of that changes when Dave, working alone in their agency’s Chinatown office, witnesses a bloody shootout on the street outside, and everyone wants to know if he can identify the gunmen. Not wishing to become any more involved than he already is, Dave plays dumb. However, the cops, local bikers, various gangsters, retired Triad members, a shady international security company, and even Jeff all insist that Dave spill the beans. He stands firm, though—at least until some of the shooters themselves are killed, and Dave realizes silence is no longer an option.
Other 2022 Favorites: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime); Secrets Typed in Blood, by Stephen Spotswood (Doubleday); Knock Off the Hat, by Richard Stevenson (Amble Press); Follow Me Down, by Ed Brubkaer and Sean Phillips (Image Comics); and Secret Identity, by Alex Segura (Flatiron).
about married detective couples with his wife, mystery author D.L. Browne (aka Diana Killian and Josh Lanyon), and waiting for the end of the world.• Racing the Light,
by Robert Crais (Putnam):
Other private eyes may be darker or trendier or offer more wokeful nutrients, but nothing satisfies my P.I. jones more than high-fiving an old friend—and you can’t get much friendlier than Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole, the affable Hollywood dick with the loud shirts and the Pinocchio clock in his office. Crais has never let me down, but this one ranks right up there with 1999’s L.A. Requiem in the series; a hard-boiled thriller with more genuine heart than a truck load of Harlequins. That’s right—this one finally (at least for now) resolves the whole shit-or-get-off-the-pot Lucy relationship. I know, I know—some readers have a disdain for Lucy Chenier that reaches almost Susan Silverman levels, but not me. Either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft, but I like my detectives to have some sort of grown-up emotional life, preferably with someone boasting a little more depth than a potato chip, and who isn’t just a convenient plot point. An accomplished Louisiana lawyer, a single mom, and the survivor of a genuinely toxic marriage, Lucy and her son, Ben, are coming for a visit in this book—but that’s just a sidebar to the rollicking main event, because Elvis and his eternally fierce partner Joe Pike are in the midst of a complex missing-persons case that’s threatening to go completely off the rails. They’re hired by an eccentric woman with plenty of secrets of her own to find “Josh Shoe,” her muckraking podcaster son, who seems to have vanished while researching a story—as has a young sex worker he’d previously interviewed. Everyone dismisses Josh as just another social-media doofus trolling for likes, but soon enough, bodies start to pile up, and Elvis and Joe realize somebody out there is playing for keeps.
• Robert B. Parker’s Bye Bye Baby, by Ace Atkins (Putnam):
While the quality of continuation novels keeping the late Robert B. Parker’s other creations “alive” has fluctuated wildly, Atkins’ steady hand on Spenser has remained as constant as the North Star, offering sincere and faithful tributes to a much-loved character, while somehow breathing some new life into the apparently ageless Boston private eye’s literary career. So, how to mark Atkins’ 10th and allegedly final installment? Atkins goes out with a bang, not a whimper, leaving it all on the field, with the full roster of usual suspects in attendance: Hawk, Susan Silverman, Frank Belson, Gerry Broz—even Spenser’s former apprentice,
Z Sixkill, drops by to help out. And Spenser may need every ounce of assistance he can get, as he jumps into the political and cultural septic tank of our times to protect a mouthy young Congressperson, Carolina Garcia-Ramirez, while she campaigns in a Democratic primary election despite a barrage of threats. But who’s behind those? Her older rivals, whom she bested in the previous contest? Or maybe a band of white-power mouth-breathers? And what’s with all the organized-crime yahoos poking around? As one can expect, Spenser eats, cooks, drinks beer, spars with Hawk, flirts with Susan, walks Pearl the Wonder Dog, cracks wise, annoys various good and bad guys, and even allows that Hawk and he aren’t quite as young as they used to be. But even 50 years on, Spenser and company remain great company—smart, entertaining, still able to engage and even surprise. Atkins doesn’t reinvent the wheel here—nor would we want him to. But over the course of 10 books, Atkins has kept that wheel spinning straight and true; not so much cash-cow pastiche as an honest, respectful continuation; more canon than cannon fodder, with a true fan in the driver’s seat. Something for which Spenser enthusiasts all over the world should be grateful. Thanks for the ride, Ace.• Random, by Penn Jillette (Akashic):
What’re the odds? I’m not sure exactly what Penn Jillette (the motormouth half of Penn & Teller) is trying to say in Random, but I definitely enjoyed him saying it. Anyone who’s caught the duo’s act, live or in countless TV appearances (including their brilliant but cancelled, myth-puncturing documentary series, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!), will know what to suspect. Random is a profane and perverted speed-rap, a crude and rude shaggy dog tale, a meandering ode to the fickle finger of Fate, delivered the way only Jillette could tell it—as a breakneck-paced, digressive rant that gleefully topples sacred cows and kicks narrative expectations in the backside. The story spins around a young Las Vegas flake, Bobby Ingersoll, who, after a bizarre streak of luck saves him from being killed on his 21st birthday, decides to base every decision, major and minor, in his life on a roll of the dice. (Shades of Luke Rhinehart’s darker The Dice Man!) I’m not even sure if Random qualifies as a crime novel, really, although there are plenty of touchstones here for fans of the genre: homicidal dirtbags, leg-breakers, hookers, card cheats, magicians, con artists, showgirls, killers, strippers, private detectives, and other miscreants all wander through a shape-shifting, picaresque yarn that switches direction with every role of Bobby’s dice. As he heads towards (or is it away from?) his comeuppance, you’ll start to wonder if the author used a similar method to plot this thing. All of which means you’ll either love the book, or hate it. But I’m betting you won’t forget it. Roll the dice.
• The Old Woman With the Knife, by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Hanover Square Press):
What a drag it is getting old … Hornclaw, the heroine of South Korean author Byeong-Mo’s first novel translated into English, is a stone-cold killer; a feisty 65-year-old assassin nearing retirement. Only thing? She’s not ready to go. Not just yet. She is beginning to feel her years, though, and it
doesn’t help that Bullfight, a smug young male rival, seems intent on openly challenging her competency, casting aspersions on her emotional ability to continue doing her job. Is he just another callous jackass with no respect for his elders, or is there something else behind his behavior? And why does Bullfight keep showing up? Even more troubling for Hornclaw, however, is that—after decades of a locked-down, compartmentalized life—she’s starting to feel something akin to … empathy. Empathy for a handsome young doctor who helped her out of a jam once. For his aging parents. For his young daughter. For a homeless dude who collects old cans. Even for her aging rescue dog, Deadweight. The Old Woman With the Knife is doled out in a Stark (as in Richard), matter-of-fact tone, pinned against a grim, unforgiving South Korea that’s far from the air-brushed cotton-candy world of K-Pop. It’s a slow burner, laced with pitch-black humor and take-no-prisoners observations on aging and how society (not just of the Korean variety) treats the elderly, leading to a white-knuckle, action-film-ready climax that plays out like a re-imagined, smarted-up Die Hard—as unexpected as it is satisfying.• Hell and Gone, by Sam Wiebe (Harbour):
Beautiful British Columbia, my ass! Vancouver, B.C., has long been touted as one of North America’s most gorgeous cites, but Sam Wiebe’s series featuring young, idealistic local private eye Dave Wakeland and his partner, Jeff Chen, has always shone an unflinching and unflattering light on a Vancouver that visitors (with any luck) never see—and that the tourist industry certainly doesn’t mention. Beneath the peaceful, postcard-ready façade lies a simmering underworld of
organized and unorganized crime, and multiple layers of money launderers, drug dealers, swindlers, gangs both local and international, and of course, homicide. Not that Dave and Jeff really want to deal with such things—particularly not the always ambitious, businesslike Jeff, who has great plans for the agency. Dave doesn’t want to get involved with the rough stuff, either—at heart, he just hopes to help people. But all of that changes when Dave, working alone in their agency’s Chinatown office, witnesses a bloody shootout on the street outside, and everyone wants to know if he can identify the gunmen. Not wishing to become any more involved than he already is, Dave plays dumb. However, the cops, local bikers, various gangsters, retired Triad members, a shady international security company, and even Jeff all insist that Dave spill the beans. He stands firm, though—at least until some of the shooters themselves are killed, and Dave realizes silence is no longer an option.Other 2022 Favorites: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime); Secrets Typed in Blood, by Stephen Spotswood (Doubleday); Knock Off the Hat, by Richard Stevenson (Amble Press); Follow Me Down, by Ed Brubkaer and Sean Phillips (Image Comics); and Secret Identity, by Alex Segura (Flatiron).
Saving the “Bests” for Last
The flood of “best crime fiction of 2022” lists is definitely diminishing, with The Rap Sheet about to deliver its final two sets of picks. But there are still a few sets of selections dribbling in.
For instance, the Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine blog has recently posted “best” choices from its reviewers Steele Curry, L.J. Roberts, and Ted Hertel. Crime Fiction Lover’s Sonja van der Westhuizen offers her five favorites of the year, including Charlie Higson’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night and Lee Goldberg’s Movieland.
And Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple offers up what is headlined as “The Ultimate Best Books of 2022 List.” She has sifted through “35 lists from 29 publications” to determine which books, released over the last dozen months, appear most often on these end-of-the-year tallies. The only inarguable mystery/crime novel I see there is Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley), which apparently showed up on just four of the lists surveyed.
For instance, the Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine blog has recently posted “best” choices from its reviewers Steele Curry, L.J. Roberts, and Ted Hertel. Crime Fiction Lover’s Sonja van der Westhuizen offers her five favorites of the year, including Charlie Higson’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night and Lee Goldberg’s Movieland.
And Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple offers up what is headlined as “The Ultimate Best Books of 2022 List.” She has sifted through “35 lists from 29 publications” to determine which books, released over the last dozen months, appear most often on these end-of-the-year tallies. The only inarguable mystery/crime novel I see there is Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley), which apparently showed up on just four of the lists surveyed.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Favorite Crime Fiction of 2022,
Part V: Ali Karim
Ali Karim is The Rap Sheet’s longtime British correspondent, a contributing editor of January Magazine, and the assistant editor of Shots. In addition, he writes for Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, Crimespree Magazine, and Mystery Readers International.
• No Plan B, by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Delacorte Press):
As this 27th Jack Reacher yarn kicks off, our favorite fictional avenger finds himself in the usually quiet town of Gerrardsville, Colorado. Usually quiet, that is, until Reacher witnesses a murder: a man pushes a woman, one Angela St. Vrain, under a bus, then steals her handbag and makes his escape amid the ensuing commotion. After pursuing and dispatching the assailant, Reacher retrieves items belonging to the dead woman that he’d been trying to conceal in a black bin-liner. It seems the deceased worked at the privately operated Minerva Correctional Facility in Winson, Mississippi, and she was carrying a letter penned by a reformed gangster who’s scheduled for imminent release.
Unfortunately, before Reacher can learn more, he’s almost run down by a car wheeled by the hit man’s associate, and the handbag disappears.
The local police chief doesn’t want to hear Reacher’s version of events; he has another witness who claims Angela’s death was an accident, or suicide.
But of course, the ex-military cop can’t leave this mystery alone. He learns that the Mississippi prison where Angela worked has rooms without windows, and that she’d recently come back to Colorado to report the situation there to her former boss. That said boss had passed away from a reported heart attack less than a day before Angela perished only raises Reacher’s suspicions further. So in company with that dead boss’ ex-wife, he sets off for the South, not aware of the deadly opponents awaiting him there, determined that our oversized hero never learn the troubling truth behind Angela’s murder.
Released 25 years after Reacher debuted in Killing Floor, No Plan B is a classic tale of Child’s protagonist facing off against conspiracy and corporate greed. The story traverses several U.S. states, offers subplots about a boy in California trying to locate his biological father and a father seeking revenge for his son, and features plenty of bone-crunching action (some of it altogether cathartic).
Ian Chapman, whose parents persuaded British publishing house William Collins to add the soon phenomenally successful thriller writer Alistair Maclean to its stable of authors, has said, “Alistair thought of his novel writing as a formula. I think that’s to diminish his ability.” Lee Child and his younger brother, Andrew (the latter of whom is set to take over the Reacher series), also have their formulas. But as No Plan B proves, plenty of novelty, adventure, and excitement can still be wrung from those conventions.
• Desert Star, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown):
In this fifth outing for Los Angeles police detective Renée Ballard and Connelly’s longtime protagonist, Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. (following 2021’s The Dark Hours), the now-retired Bosch joins his colleague as a volunteer with the LAPD’s recently rebooted Open-Unsolved Unit. Among other cold cases, Ballard is hoping to take a second crack at the 1994 slaying of 16-year-old Sarah Pearlman, a tragedy that was greatly obscured by the murder, just one day later, of footballer/broadcaster O.J. Simpson’s wife. Meanwhile, Bosch wants to amass new evidence regarding the 2013
killing of industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher and his family, a crime that has haunted him ever since (and which reminds this reader of Connelly’s earlier City of Bones). That he was not able to close that case represents a failure to him, because a psychopath remained free to roam society and strike again.
Bosch is feeling his years in this story, annoyed by the medicines he must take to stay active. Yet his mind remains as sharp as ever. Which is good news for Ballard, as her investigation proves to be both more surprising and more problematic than either of them had expected. Bosch’s own struggle to pin the Gallagher homicides on Finbar McShane, who vanished in their aftermath, is comparatively methodical and less dramatic, but familiar for Bosch’s intensity and his pathological attention to detail. This is Bosch at his most Bosch-like.
Desert Star, taking its title from a tiny white desert flower, is a masterwork of intricate plotting and careful character development, with a dénouement as rewarding as it is stunning. It’s a fine reminder that Connelly is a professional among more amateur rivals.
• Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham (Sphere UK):
I recall remarking, in my review of Robotham’s first Cyrus Haven novel, Good Girl, Bad Girl (2019), that “there are unanswered questions [here] I hope the author with flesh out, as this novel cries out for an encore.” The Australian writer has since given us two sequels, 2020’s When She Was Good and this year’s Lying Beside You, the latter of which goes a long way in fleshing out British forensic psychologist Haven’s life and painful past.
In these pages we find Haven being summoned by Detective Lenny Pavel to a bloody crime scene in Nottingham, England. A pensioner has been savagely attacked in his residence, and his daughter, Maya Kirk, is nowhere to be found. Pavel wants to know whether Maya could have been complicit in the carnage. Clues, however, suggest a break-in, and that Maya fled to protect herself. Can police find her before she, too, loses her life? And might that pensioner’s demise be linked to the
concurrent mystery of an apparently intoxicated woman who Evie Cormac, Haven’s brilliant but damaged young ward, tried one night to help find a share ride home—but who never reached her destination?
As all of this plays out, we also watch Haven grapple with the imminent release of his elder brother, Elias, from a secure psychiatric hospital. Twenty years ago, Elias murdered the remainder of their family during a schizophrenic episode. Although he still harbors doubts as to whether he can forgive his sibling for ruining their childhood, Haven—ever determined to save lost souls—has agreed to take the man into his home while Elias acquaints himself with a world now unfamiliar to him. Robotham offers a split narrative here, delivering both Haven’s viewpoint on developments, and the perspective of 21-year-old Evie, whose skills as a “truth-seer,” someone who can tell when people are lying, will come in very handy as this tale progresses.
This may be the third Cyrus Haven novel (due for release in the States in February), but it reads like a standalone thriller, making it a reasonable entry point for anyone wishing to break into the series. Just beware: Lying Beside You is Robotham’s darkest work yet. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it might prove to be a strong contender for one or more of next year’s crime-fiction awards.
• The Furies, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton UK):
How is it possible that this book is the 20th to feature Portland, Maine, private investigator Charlie “Bird” Parker? It seems like just a few years ago (rather than 23!) that Irish journalist-turned-author Connolly welcomed into the world his disturbing debut novel, Every Dead Thing, for which he earned the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award—making him the first non-American to be so honored. Connolly has gone on since to prove he is no
one-trick pony, concocting tales outside the limits of crime and mystery, and scoring prizes to encourage his audacity in trying new things.
The Furies is a coda, a continuation or rather an expansion of work he did during the modern plague we call COVID-19. It pairs two novellas. First comes The Sisters Strange, which Connolly wrote serially during the pandemic, rolling out 64 daily installments on his Web site, while his readers hunkered down inside their homes, fearful of the deadly, headline-grabbing contagion that spread around them. That tale introduces the eponymous Strange Sisters: Dolors and Ambar Strange, who operate a Portland coffee shop and both once romanced Raum Buker, an evil ex-con recently returned to town. A lumber company exec, now sweet on one of the sisters, wants Parker’s aid in protecting her from Buker. That assignment leads the P.I. to suspect Buker of involvement in a theft of valuable coins, which are connected to the murder of a collector found choked to death with his own ancient booty. The second novella, The Furies, has Parker employed by a mobster’s widow, who’s being harried by her husband’s ex-associates, because they think she knows the whereabouts of a good deal of stolen money.
These twinned narrative works share a sense of claustrophobia, a decided air of urgency, and a feeling of doom, thankfully leavened to some degree by the presence of Parker sidekicks Angel, Louis, and the Fulci Brothers. As ever, Connolly evokes the supernatural in his stories, and his use of language paints pictures in the mind that may occasionally leave the reader in a fugue-like state. Odious characters come and go, rubbing shoulders with the innocent, but all the while the reader is forced into contemplation as the narratives progress. Anyone interested in dark yarns outside the traditional boundaries of crime fiction should give Connolly’s Parker outings a try.
• The Accomplice, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion UK):
Make no mistake: this is not your average serial-killer novel. First off, the repeat offender—identified as ex-hedge fund manager Daniel Miller, better known by his appellation, The Sandman (a reference to his grotesque modus operandi)—has been horribly successful, taking almost 20 lives in just over a year’s time. Second, he’s vanished from view despite a frantic FBI manhunt. As the media ramp up pressure on New York law-enforcement agencies to do more in ending this murder spree, a decision is made to arrest
and prosecute Miller’s wife, Carrie, despite her protestations that she doesn’t know what her husband is up to and can’t say where he is.
With public opinion and the wheels of the U.S. legal system determined to incarcerate Carrie as her husband’s willing abettor, New York City-based con man-turned-attorney Eddie Flynn (last seen in 2021’s The Devil’s Advocate) is asked by Carrie’s family lawyer to take over her defense. As we all know by now, Flynn only accepts clients he’s convinced are innocent, no matter what crucial evidence seems stacked against them. It takes some convincing before he accepts Carrie Miller’s case, especially as there are only days left before her trial commences, but he finally believes her. And then, once he signs on as her advocate, things really get dicey. Carrie’s husband, still in the wind and not at all hesitant to employ violence, learns of her predicament and comes out of hiding in order to hunt down prosecution witnesses and apply unpleasant pressure on Flynn to secure his wife’s release.
The Accomplice’s engaging premise—its “hook”—makes it one of 2022’s best crime novels. Multiple narrative threads are presented and wound together in deliberately unsettling fashion, until Northern Irish lawyer/novelist Steve Cavanagh (aka Stephen Mearns) finally untangles them for readers, delivering a whiplash climax. To call this thriller “fast paced” is to do it—pardon the pun—an injustice, because the narrative velocity is light-speed. However, packed within its pages are deeper themes and meticulous research that provoke thought and insight as to the relationship between good and evil.
Other 2022 Favorites: The Book of the Most Precious Substance, by Sara Gran (Faber and Faber UK).
• No Plan B, by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Delacorte Press):
As this 27th Jack Reacher yarn kicks off, our favorite fictional avenger finds himself in the usually quiet town of Gerrardsville, Colorado. Usually quiet, that is, until Reacher witnesses a murder: a man pushes a woman, one Angela St. Vrain, under a bus, then steals her handbag and makes his escape amid the ensuing commotion. After pursuing and dispatching the assailant, Reacher retrieves items belonging to the dead woman that he’d been trying to conceal in a black bin-liner. It seems the deceased worked at the privately operated Minerva Correctional Facility in Winson, Mississippi, and she was carrying a letter penned by a reformed gangster who’s scheduled for imminent release.
Unfortunately, before Reacher can learn more, he’s almost run down by a car wheeled by the hit man’s associate, and the handbag disappears.The local police chief doesn’t want to hear Reacher’s version of events; he has another witness who claims Angela’s death was an accident, or suicide.
But of course, the ex-military cop can’t leave this mystery alone. He learns that the Mississippi prison where Angela worked has rooms without windows, and that she’d recently come back to Colorado to report the situation there to her former boss. That said boss had passed away from a reported heart attack less than a day before Angela perished only raises Reacher’s suspicions further. So in company with that dead boss’ ex-wife, he sets off for the South, not aware of the deadly opponents awaiting him there, determined that our oversized hero never learn the troubling truth behind Angela’s murder.
Released 25 years after Reacher debuted in Killing Floor, No Plan B is a classic tale of Child’s protagonist facing off against conspiracy and corporate greed. The story traverses several U.S. states, offers subplots about a boy in California trying to locate his biological father and a father seeking revenge for his son, and features plenty of bone-crunching action (some of it altogether cathartic).
Ian Chapman, whose parents persuaded British publishing house William Collins to add the soon phenomenally successful thriller writer Alistair Maclean to its stable of authors, has said, “Alistair thought of his novel writing as a formula. I think that’s to diminish his ability.” Lee Child and his younger brother, Andrew (the latter of whom is set to take over the Reacher series), also have their formulas. But as No Plan B proves, plenty of novelty, adventure, and excitement can still be wrung from those conventions.
• Desert Star, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown):
In this fifth outing for Los Angeles police detective Renée Ballard and Connelly’s longtime protagonist, Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. (following 2021’s The Dark Hours), the now-retired Bosch joins his colleague as a volunteer with the LAPD’s recently rebooted Open-Unsolved Unit. Among other cold cases, Ballard is hoping to take a second crack at the 1994 slaying of 16-year-old Sarah Pearlman, a tragedy that was greatly obscured by the murder, just one day later, of footballer/broadcaster O.J. Simpson’s wife. Meanwhile, Bosch wants to amass new evidence regarding the 2013
killing of industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher and his family, a crime that has haunted him ever since (and which reminds this reader of Connelly’s earlier City of Bones). That he was not able to close that case represents a failure to him, because a psychopath remained free to roam society and strike again.Bosch is feeling his years in this story, annoyed by the medicines he must take to stay active. Yet his mind remains as sharp as ever. Which is good news for Ballard, as her investigation proves to be both more surprising and more problematic than either of them had expected. Bosch’s own struggle to pin the Gallagher homicides on Finbar McShane, who vanished in their aftermath, is comparatively methodical and less dramatic, but familiar for Bosch’s intensity and his pathological attention to detail. This is Bosch at his most Bosch-like.
Desert Star, taking its title from a tiny white desert flower, is a masterwork of intricate plotting and careful character development, with a dénouement as rewarding as it is stunning. It’s a fine reminder that Connelly is a professional among more amateur rivals.
• Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham (Sphere UK):
I recall remarking, in my review of Robotham’s first Cyrus Haven novel, Good Girl, Bad Girl (2019), that “there are unanswered questions [here] I hope the author with flesh out, as this novel cries out for an encore.” The Australian writer has since given us two sequels, 2020’s When She Was Good and this year’s Lying Beside You, the latter of which goes a long way in fleshing out British forensic psychologist Haven’s life and painful past.
In these pages we find Haven being summoned by Detective Lenny Pavel to a bloody crime scene in Nottingham, England. A pensioner has been savagely attacked in his residence, and his daughter, Maya Kirk, is nowhere to be found. Pavel wants to know whether Maya could have been complicit in the carnage. Clues, however, suggest a break-in, and that Maya fled to protect herself. Can police find her before she, too, loses her life? And might that pensioner’s demise be linked to the
concurrent mystery of an apparently intoxicated woman who Evie Cormac, Haven’s brilliant but damaged young ward, tried one night to help find a share ride home—but who never reached her destination?As all of this plays out, we also watch Haven grapple with the imminent release of his elder brother, Elias, from a secure psychiatric hospital. Twenty years ago, Elias murdered the remainder of their family during a schizophrenic episode. Although he still harbors doubts as to whether he can forgive his sibling for ruining their childhood, Haven—ever determined to save lost souls—has agreed to take the man into his home while Elias acquaints himself with a world now unfamiliar to him. Robotham offers a split narrative here, delivering both Haven’s viewpoint on developments, and the perspective of 21-year-old Evie, whose skills as a “truth-seer,” someone who can tell when people are lying, will come in very handy as this tale progresses.
This may be the third Cyrus Haven novel (due for release in the States in February), but it reads like a standalone thriller, making it a reasonable entry point for anyone wishing to break into the series. Just beware: Lying Beside You is Robotham’s darkest work yet. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it might prove to be a strong contender for one or more of next year’s crime-fiction awards.
• The Furies, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton UK):
How is it possible that this book is the 20th to feature Portland, Maine, private investigator Charlie “Bird” Parker? It seems like just a few years ago (rather than 23!) that Irish journalist-turned-author Connolly welcomed into the world his disturbing debut novel, Every Dead Thing, for which he earned the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award—making him the first non-American to be so honored. Connolly has gone on since to prove he is no
one-trick pony, concocting tales outside the limits of crime and mystery, and scoring prizes to encourage his audacity in trying new things.The Furies is a coda, a continuation or rather an expansion of work he did during the modern plague we call COVID-19. It pairs two novellas. First comes The Sisters Strange, which Connolly wrote serially during the pandemic, rolling out 64 daily installments on his Web site, while his readers hunkered down inside their homes, fearful of the deadly, headline-grabbing contagion that spread around them. That tale introduces the eponymous Strange Sisters: Dolors and Ambar Strange, who operate a Portland coffee shop and both once romanced Raum Buker, an evil ex-con recently returned to town. A lumber company exec, now sweet on one of the sisters, wants Parker’s aid in protecting her from Buker. That assignment leads the P.I. to suspect Buker of involvement in a theft of valuable coins, which are connected to the murder of a collector found choked to death with his own ancient booty. The second novella, The Furies, has Parker employed by a mobster’s widow, who’s being harried by her husband’s ex-associates, because they think she knows the whereabouts of a good deal of stolen money.
These twinned narrative works share a sense of claustrophobia, a decided air of urgency, and a feeling of doom, thankfully leavened to some degree by the presence of Parker sidekicks Angel, Louis, and the Fulci Brothers. As ever, Connolly evokes the supernatural in his stories, and his use of language paints pictures in the mind that may occasionally leave the reader in a fugue-like state. Odious characters come and go, rubbing shoulders with the innocent, but all the while the reader is forced into contemplation as the narratives progress. Anyone interested in dark yarns outside the traditional boundaries of crime fiction should give Connolly’s Parker outings a try.
• The Accomplice, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion UK):
Make no mistake: this is not your average serial-killer novel. First off, the repeat offender—identified as ex-hedge fund manager Daniel Miller, better known by his appellation, The Sandman (a reference to his grotesque modus operandi)—has been horribly successful, taking almost 20 lives in just over a year’s time. Second, he’s vanished from view despite a frantic FBI manhunt. As the media ramp up pressure on New York law-enforcement agencies to do more in ending this murder spree, a decision is made to arrest
and prosecute Miller’s wife, Carrie, despite her protestations that she doesn’t know what her husband is up to and can’t say where he is.With public opinion and the wheels of the U.S. legal system determined to incarcerate Carrie as her husband’s willing abettor, New York City-based con man-turned-attorney Eddie Flynn (last seen in 2021’s The Devil’s Advocate) is asked by Carrie’s family lawyer to take over her defense. As we all know by now, Flynn only accepts clients he’s convinced are innocent, no matter what crucial evidence seems stacked against them. It takes some convincing before he accepts Carrie Miller’s case, especially as there are only days left before her trial commences, but he finally believes her. And then, once he signs on as her advocate, things really get dicey. Carrie’s husband, still in the wind and not at all hesitant to employ violence, learns of her predicament and comes out of hiding in order to hunt down prosecution witnesses and apply unpleasant pressure on Flynn to secure his wife’s release.
The Accomplice’s engaging premise—its “hook”—makes it one of 2022’s best crime novels. Multiple narrative threads are presented and wound together in deliberately unsettling fashion, until Northern Irish lawyer/novelist Steve Cavanagh (aka Stephen Mearns) finally untangles them for readers, delivering a whiplash climax. To call this thriller “fast paced” is to do it—pardon the pun—an injustice, because the narrative velocity is light-speed. However, packed within its pages are deeper themes and meticulous research that provoke thought and insight as to the relationship between good and evil.
Other 2022 Favorites: The Book of the Most Precious Substance, by Sara Gran (Faber and Faber UK).
Ayo’s Assortment
Let us take just a moment out from the self-indulgent exercise of revealing our critics’ “favorite crime fiction of 2022” lists to note that the talented Ayo Onatade, Shots contributor and principal author of its Shotsmag Confidential blog, this morning released her own picks of 2022’s “best.” The following 12 books are featured:
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (John Murray)
• The Devil Takes You Home, by Gabino Iglesias (Headline)
• Three Assassins, by Kotaro Isaka (Vintage)
• The Skeleton Key, by Erin Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Confidence, by Denise Mina (Vintage)
• Blue Water, by Leonora Nattrass (Profile)
• Breaking Point, by Olivier Norek (Quercus)
• Secret Identity, by Alex Segura (Flatiron)
• The Spirit Engineer, by A.J. West (Duckworth)
• City on Fire, by Don Winslow (HarperCollins)
• A History of Treason: The Bloody History of Britain Through the Stories of Its Most Notorious Traitors, by Chris Day, Daniel Gosling, Neil Johnson, and Euan Roger (John Blake) — non-fiction
• The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins) — non-fiction
There are still more to come.
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (John Murray)
• The Devil Takes You Home, by Gabino Iglesias (Headline)
• Three Assassins, by Kotaro Isaka (Vintage)
• The Skeleton Key, by Erin Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Confidence, by Denise Mina (Vintage)
• Blue Water, by Leonora Nattrass (Profile)
• Breaking Point, by Olivier Norek (Quercus)
• Secret Identity, by Alex Segura (Flatiron)
• The Spirit Engineer, by A.J. West (Duckworth)
• City on Fire, by Don Winslow (HarperCollins)
• A History of Treason: The Bloody History of Britain Through the Stories of Its Most Notorious Traitors, by Chris Day, Daniel Gosling, Neil Johnson, and Euan Roger (John Blake) — non-fiction
• The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins) — non-fiction
* * *
Elsewhere in the world of British book blogging, Crime Fiction Lover is slowly revealing its reviewers’ 2022 top-five choices. It began with picks from Paul Burke, moved on to those from Michael Parker (aka RoughJustice), and today posted the selections of Erin Britton.There are still more to come.
Monday, December 19, 2022
Favorite Crime Fiction of 2022,
Part IV: Stephen Miller
Stephen Miller was a regular contributor to Mystery News, writing the “In the Beginning” column about new crime-fiction writers for several years. He has also penned posts for The Rap Sheet and reviews for January Magazine. Originally from Central Ohio, Miller now makes his home in Massachusetts with his wife, Leslie, and spends his days as an independent consultant in the insurance industry and as an on-air host at public radio station WICN-FM.
• Heat 2, by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (Morrow):
I’m one of those people who consistently rolls his eyes whenever he hears the word “prequel”. Even though I have been pleasantly surprised from time to time (Exhibit A: AMC-TV’s Better Call Saul), I always consider this to be an especially heavy lift. That was certainly the way I felt when I learned that Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner would be releasing Heat 2, based on the best heist movie of all time.
In fact, Heat 2 is a prequel and a sequel. Mann and Gardiner toggle between what occurred before the action of the 1995 film as well as what came
after. Readers see inside the Neil McCauley crew, the scores they took down in Chicago before arriving in Los Angeles, as well as what became of thief Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer), the only principal character—SPOILER ALERT!—who survived the end of the iconic film.
Shiherlis, consumed with guilt and anger over the demise of his partner McCauley, and vowing revenge upon LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), has been spirited out of L.A. to the ultimate free-trade zone of South America, working for a Taiwanese crime syndicate, and ultimately joining an international cartel that extends to Asia.
Running parallel to this is the backstory of not only the McCauley gang, but also of Vincent Hanna, the obsessed hunter of robbery crews. We learn about his origins in Chicago and his pursuit of one particularly sadistic gang, which specializes in breaking into affluent homes while their residents are sure to be present.
This novel has much to recommend it, the most impressive component being how Mann and Gardiner are able to revisit and inhabit the characters created for a single film nearly three decades ago. The cadences of Hanna’s dialogue sound just like Pacino’s rhythm in the movie, and the novel’s set pieces can easily be visualized with Mann’s signature directorial haze-and-darkness style. Supporting characters such as those played in the picture by Danny Trejo and Jon Voight are on hand. You wouldn’t ever want to run into those characters in a darkened alley, or inside a bank, but from the safety of your favorite reading chair, it’s fun to reconnect.
• The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, by Martin Edwards (Collins Crime Club):
The current renaissance in classic detective fiction owes a great deal to British author Martin Edwards. In addition to being a first-rate novelist and short story writer, Edwards is president of the Detection Club, a frequent anthologist, and the creator of some of the most noteworthy crime-fiction historical documents of recent years. The Golden Age of Murder
won him a trophy case full of awards following its publication in 2015. Howdunit, his master class in mystery construction, was warmly received in 2020. Now comes the culmination of decades of writing and reading: The Life of Crime.
Dipping into this book can be a bit intimidating. At more than 600 pages long (not including its bibliography and indices), and spanning 55 chapters, the breadth and depth of the work is staggering. It seems that no one of significance has escaped Edwards’ attention and erudition. Covering English, American, and international authors, books and themes, The Life of Crime is both an exhilarating survey course and a graduate-level seminar in the genre. And yet, despite its length and level of detail, the book is immensely readable. By taking the reader’s hand in his collegial style, Edwards almost lets you believe it was you who discovered such bygone writers as Frank Froest and Anthony Wynne (the latter being a Scottish enthusiast of the locked-room mystery—a specialty of this book). While there are some readers, I suppose, who will tackle The Life of Crime cover to cover as they would a novel, I preferred to consume a handful of chapters a week as an appetizer to whatever else I was enjoying. This allowed me to remember that crime fiction is a continuum, stretching from the past to today. By conveying its treasures in such delightful fashion, Edwards guarantees his book’s place in the pantheon of popular-culture historical works.
Other 2022 Favorites: An Honest Living, by Dwyer Murphy (Viking); and Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld, by T.J. English (Morrow).
• Heat 2, by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (Morrow):
I’m one of those people who consistently rolls his eyes whenever he hears the word “prequel”. Even though I have been pleasantly surprised from time to time (Exhibit A: AMC-TV’s Better Call Saul), I always consider this to be an especially heavy lift. That was certainly the way I felt when I learned that Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner would be releasing Heat 2, based on the best heist movie of all time.
In fact, Heat 2 is a prequel and a sequel. Mann and Gardiner toggle between what occurred before the action of the 1995 film as well as what came
after. Readers see inside the Neil McCauley crew, the scores they took down in Chicago before arriving in Los Angeles, as well as what became of thief Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer), the only principal character—SPOILER ALERT!—who survived the end of the iconic film.Shiherlis, consumed with guilt and anger over the demise of his partner McCauley, and vowing revenge upon LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), has been spirited out of L.A. to the ultimate free-trade zone of South America, working for a Taiwanese crime syndicate, and ultimately joining an international cartel that extends to Asia.
Running parallel to this is the backstory of not only the McCauley gang, but also of Vincent Hanna, the obsessed hunter of robbery crews. We learn about his origins in Chicago and his pursuit of one particularly sadistic gang, which specializes in breaking into affluent homes while their residents are sure to be present.
This novel has much to recommend it, the most impressive component being how Mann and Gardiner are able to revisit and inhabit the characters created for a single film nearly three decades ago. The cadences of Hanna’s dialogue sound just like Pacino’s rhythm in the movie, and the novel’s set pieces can easily be visualized with Mann’s signature directorial haze-and-darkness style. Supporting characters such as those played in the picture by Danny Trejo and Jon Voight are on hand. You wouldn’t ever want to run into those characters in a darkened alley, or inside a bank, but from the safety of your favorite reading chair, it’s fun to reconnect.
• The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, by Martin Edwards (Collins Crime Club):
The current renaissance in classic detective fiction owes a great deal to British author Martin Edwards. In addition to being a first-rate novelist and short story writer, Edwards is president of the Detection Club, a frequent anthologist, and the creator of some of the most noteworthy crime-fiction historical documents of recent years. The Golden Age of Murder
won him a trophy case full of awards following its publication in 2015. Howdunit, his master class in mystery construction, was warmly received in 2020. Now comes the culmination of decades of writing and reading: The Life of Crime.Dipping into this book can be a bit intimidating. At more than 600 pages long (not including its bibliography and indices), and spanning 55 chapters, the breadth and depth of the work is staggering. It seems that no one of significance has escaped Edwards’ attention and erudition. Covering English, American, and international authors, books and themes, The Life of Crime is both an exhilarating survey course and a graduate-level seminar in the genre. And yet, despite its length and level of detail, the book is immensely readable. By taking the reader’s hand in his collegial style, Edwards almost lets you believe it was you who discovered such bygone writers as Frank Froest and Anthony Wynne (the latter being a Scottish enthusiast of the locked-room mystery—a specialty of this book). While there are some readers, I suppose, who will tackle The Life of Crime cover to cover as they would a novel, I preferred to consume a handful of chapters a week as an appetizer to whatever else I was enjoying. This allowed me to remember that crime fiction is a continuum, stretching from the past to today. By conveying its treasures in such delightful fashion, Edwards guarantees his book’s place in the pantheon of popular-culture historical works.
Other 2022 Favorites: An Honest Living, by Dwyer Murphy (Viking); and Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld, by T.J. English (Morrow).
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Favorite Crime Fiction of 2022,
Part III: Jim Napier
Jim Napier is a crime-fiction critic based in Canada. Since 2005, more than 600 of his reviews and interviews have appeared in newspapers and on various crime-fiction and literary Web sites, including on his own award-winning review site, Deadly Diversions. Legacy, the first entry in his Colin McDermott mystery series, was published in 2017; a sequel, Ridley’s War, came out in 2020 from FriesenPress.
• A Heart Full of Headstones, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown):
A new book from Ian Rankin is always a source of joy. Over the past three and a half decades that Scottish author has dominated the international crime-writing scene, perfecting a subgenre that has come to be known as Tartan noir. His protagonist John Rebus personifies the independent yet dedicated copper who always seems to be squeezed between the corrupt and the corrupted, as he struggles to achieve a tiny bit of justice in the gloomy streets of Edinburgh.
To the consternation of everyone around him, Rebus is his own man, and plays by his own rules (the term “loose cannon” comes to mind). Colleagues and senior offices alike are left to cope with the
consequences, and he’s never far away from a reprimand, or suspension, or worse.
In A Heart Full of Headstones (the first book in a two-novel deal with UK publisher Orion), things are very much worse. Now retired and suffering from poor health, but still working, Rebus finds himself in the dock, accused of murder. His prospects are bleak.
The ex-detective inspector had earlier been drawn into an investigation going back to his days as a young detective assigned to Tynecastle, a local nick infamous for its misconduct and misfeasance. A detective there, one Frances Haggard, is facing charges of spousal abuse, and in a bid to avoid the consequences of his actions, is threatening to go public with some of the dirty laundry at Tynecastle Station—unless his mates can find a way to make the charges go away. There are a lot of skeletons in Tynecastle’s closet, so it comes as no surprise when Haggard is soon after found stabbed to death. That only serves to intensify the investigation into the corrupted station house.
Having previously been assigned to Tynecastle, Rebus becomes a person of interest, and his own past actions are placed under the microscope. It’s not giving too much away to say that before this novel is over, more people will die—and Rebus will face the possibility of spending the remainder of his days in lock-up.
John Rebus is one of the most fascinating and complex characters in modern crime fiction, carving out a tortured path between legal justice and cosmic justice, often annoying his friends and enraging his enemies. Yet he somehow emerges from the tumult victorious in the end. This time, though, even Rebus’s own doggedness may not be enough to keep him on the streets.
• Not Your Child, by Lis Angus (Wild Rose Press):
Susan Koss is enjoying a rewarding life as a consulting family psychologist and single parent, rearing her 12-year old daughter, Maddy, in Ottawa, Ontario's upscale Glebe district, when her comfortable world is suddenly turned upside down. An elderly man named Daniel Kazan has spotted Maddy on the street. Convinced that she is his long-lost granddaughter,
who vanished after her parents were killed in a vehicle accident more than a decade earlier, Daniel follows Maddy home and tries to get closer to the family. He is clearly obsessive, and Susan fears for her child’s safety.
Susan is also made personally uncomfortable by these developments. After all, she is Maddy’s birth mother, and they have been together for her daughter’s entire life. But when Susan suggests DNA tests to resolve the issue, she receives not one surprise, but two: the results indicate that Susan is not Maddy’s mother, and even more ominously, they don’t rule out the possibility that Daniel might be Maddy’s grandfather after all. This is all bad enough, to be sure, but things get a whole lot worse when Maddy suddenly disappears from the family home, and despite a thorough police search, there is no sign of her. It seems Susan’s comfortable world has finally come crushing down.
Not Your Child is among the strongest debut novels I’ve read. It is original and polished, with believable dialogue and an impressive sense of atmosphere. The characters are engaging and nuanced; the author is particularly effective in portraying the obsessed grandfather in a partly sympathetic light. With a crisp pace that keeps readers engaged until the very end, this tale is highly recommended.
• Going to Beautiful, by Anthony Bidulka (Stonehouse):
Toronto, Ontario: celebrity chef, author, and restaurateur Jake Hardy, together with his husband, successful fashion designer Eddie Kravets, are living a dream life. Comfortably ensconced in spacious digs on the top floor of a fashionable apartment building, they go from success to success, pausing only to realize just how fortunate they are.
But even dreams aren’t perfect. In one morning’s early hours, Jake is awakened abruptly by the police, who break the news that his partner’s
body has been found on the ground just below their balcony. Eddie Kravets is dead.
Over the weeks that follow, Jake and the closest of those around him wrestle with a toxic mix of well-meaning sympathizers, nosy gawkers, and online gossip-mongers, all of them having the effect of ripping a bandage off the fresh wound that is now Jake’s daily reality. He finds only a tiny measure of solace in sifting through Eddie’s left-behind things. Ever the planner, Eddie had made a list of places he wanted his ashes spread. They include, enigmatically, the single word Beautiful. Further searching reveals that the word in not simply a placeholder, but an actual place in rural Saskatchewan.
Determined to honor Eddie’s final wishes, Jake begins his odyssey. He will discover along the way that, far from living up to its name, the small prairie town of Beautiful harbors more than its fair share of dark secrets—and more than one murderer.
With its richly textured and layered plot, nuanced characters, and sometimes brooding environment, Going to Beautiful moves between being a lyrical celebration of life and an unflinching exploration of the dark recesses of twisted souls. It offers an inventive and evocative journey that will keep you enthralled throughout. If you’ve never before encountered the work of Anthony Bidulka, creator of the Russell Quant private-eye series and a multiple winner of both the Arthur Ellis and Lambda Literary awards, you’re in for a real treat.
• Blind Date, by Brenda Chapman (Ivy Bay Press):
Successful Canadian crime writer Brenda Chapman (Shallow End, Closing Time) recently launched a new series, this one featuring an engaging amateur sleuth named Ella Tate.
Blind Date finds Ella attempting to mark out a new career for herself. Formerly a journalist working the crime beat for an Ottawa newspaper, she’s now gone online with a true-crime podcast. She’s already amassed quite a following, when an intriguing case falls into her lap. A young teacher, Josie Wheatly, has been assaulted. After leaving the hospital prematurely, she’s found in her apartment, murdered by hanging. It just so happens that the apartment where this tragedy took place used to belong to Ella, and the deceased looks remarkably similar to her. Josie even appropriated Ella’s name for online dating purposes.
The implications are impossible to miss: Could Josie’s killer have mistaken that other woman for Ella herself? When two other people close to the podcaster are also victimized by violent crime, the answer seems all too clear.
Ella strives to connect the dots here, but is frustrated at every turn. Then she begins to receive ominous messages, some on her podcast, then, more ominously, on her cell phone: “You’re next, bitch.” Does the solution to all of this lie somewhere in the podcasts she’s been airing, which expose peoples’ wrongdoing? Or should she be looking closer to home? Like Angus’ Not Your Child, this yarn is set largely in Ottawa’s Glebe area, and the city has seldom looked so threatening.
Never at a loss when it comes to creating a spellbinding thriller, author Chapman draws on her considerable skills to weave a credible, well-crafted plot that will leave readers hungering for more.
• L.A. Burning, by D.C. Taylor (Crooked Lane):
From former movie and TV screenwriter David C. Taylor, L.A. Burning is a gripping read that draws upon events rooted in the real world of Hollywood in order to paint a picture
altogether less glamorous, and a great deal more disturbing, than that imagined by fans of the silver screen.
Ex-street kid Cody Bonner has just been released from a five-year stretch in prison for bank robbery, and she’s a gal on a mission. While she was locked up, her twin sister, Julie, had been brutally murdered, her body washed up on a beach in Malibu. The two had been especially close. Now Cody is committed to finding out how Julie died, and why. The trail will lead her into the dark recesses of Tinseltown, a world of sleazy agents and even sleazier movie moguls. Throughout her investigation, Cody will also have to navigate the Byzantine world of her mother, a fading film star who seems less concerned about her daughter’s death than her own tenuous position in the ephemeral heights of the Hollywood firmament. Cody, though, has two things going for her: the skills she picked up while behind bars, and her own dogged determination to solve her sibling’s slaying.
L.A. Burning is a riveting tale that turns on the seamy underside of an industry built on image, power, and to some extent, perversion. Seamlessly plotted, and with compelling characters and crackling dialogue, this novel is guaranteed to satisfy.
• Fenian Street, by Anne Emery (ECW Press):
This immersive tale—set in Dublin, Ireland, during the turbulent years between 1969 and 1975, and ripe with both historical detail and real-life characters—introduces us to Seamus “Shay“ Rynne. He’s the son of Thomas “Talkie” Rynne, a former Irish Republican Army supporter who’d been interned during the Emergency—known elsewhere as the Second World War. Shay was born shortly after that war ended. Now a young man, he has come under the wing of Colm Griffith, a detective sergeant in the Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. With his support, Shay joins the Garda as a police constable.
In the impoverished neighborhood where he grew up, one filled with public housing and bent toward animosity against government officials, to be a cop is viewed as only one small step above being an informer. Shay must therefore work extra hard to earn his friends’ respect. So when Rosie McGinn, a young woman he knew from his schooling,
turns up dead at the hotel where she worked, her neck bruised with fingermarks, Shay resolves to bring her killer to justice, even though it means going up against some intimidating local figures.
On the strength of that success, Shay is promoted to detective, and thereafter joins DS Griffith in tackling the case of Darragh McLogan, a member of the Irish parliament, who was found brutally murdered in his back yard following a party held there the night before. Shay’s inquiry will plumb the depths of the local power structure and even lead him to Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. This is a knotty case, made still more complicated by the fact that Shay’s own father emerges as a prime suspect in the politician’s demise.
Readers benefit from the research Emery did before penning Fenian Street. She integrates Shay Rynne’s story expertly into the larger drama of 1970s Irish politics, and delivers both with prose that fairly leaps off the pages. A propulsive and gripping mystery, to be sure.
Other 2022 Favorites: Like a Sister, by Kellye Garrett (Mulholland); When It Was Cold, by Howard Shrier (e-book, short stories); and Call Me a Cab, by Donald E. Westlake (Hard Case Crime).
• A Heart Full of Headstones, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown):
A new book from Ian Rankin is always a source of joy. Over the past three and a half decades that Scottish author has dominated the international crime-writing scene, perfecting a subgenre that has come to be known as Tartan noir. His protagonist John Rebus personifies the independent yet dedicated copper who always seems to be squeezed between the corrupt and the corrupted, as he struggles to achieve a tiny bit of justice in the gloomy streets of Edinburgh.
To the consternation of everyone around him, Rebus is his own man, and plays by his own rules (the term “loose cannon” comes to mind). Colleagues and senior offices alike are left to cope with the
consequences, and he’s never far away from a reprimand, or suspension, or worse.In A Heart Full of Headstones (the first book in a two-novel deal with UK publisher Orion), things are very much worse. Now retired and suffering from poor health, but still working, Rebus finds himself in the dock, accused of murder. His prospects are bleak.
The ex-detective inspector had earlier been drawn into an investigation going back to his days as a young detective assigned to Tynecastle, a local nick infamous for its misconduct and misfeasance. A detective there, one Frances Haggard, is facing charges of spousal abuse, and in a bid to avoid the consequences of his actions, is threatening to go public with some of the dirty laundry at Tynecastle Station—unless his mates can find a way to make the charges go away. There are a lot of skeletons in Tynecastle’s closet, so it comes as no surprise when Haggard is soon after found stabbed to death. That only serves to intensify the investigation into the corrupted station house.
Having previously been assigned to Tynecastle, Rebus becomes a person of interest, and his own past actions are placed under the microscope. It’s not giving too much away to say that before this novel is over, more people will die—and Rebus will face the possibility of spending the remainder of his days in lock-up.
John Rebus is one of the most fascinating and complex characters in modern crime fiction, carving out a tortured path between legal justice and cosmic justice, often annoying his friends and enraging his enemies. Yet he somehow emerges from the tumult victorious in the end. This time, though, even Rebus’s own doggedness may not be enough to keep him on the streets.
• Not Your Child, by Lis Angus (Wild Rose Press):
Susan Koss is enjoying a rewarding life as a consulting family psychologist and single parent, rearing her 12-year old daughter, Maddy, in Ottawa, Ontario's upscale Glebe district, when her comfortable world is suddenly turned upside down. An elderly man named Daniel Kazan has spotted Maddy on the street. Convinced that she is his long-lost granddaughter,
who vanished after her parents were killed in a vehicle accident more than a decade earlier, Daniel follows Maddy home and tries to get closer to the family. He is clearly obsessive, and Susan fears for her child’s safety.Susan is also made personally uncomfortable by these developments. After all, she is Maddy’s birth mother, and they have been together for her daughter’s entire life. But when Susan suggests DNA tests to resolve the issue, she receives not one surprise, but two: the results indicate that Susan is not Maddy’s mother, and even more ominously, they don’t rule out the possibility that Daniel might be Maddy’s grandfather after all. This is all bad enough, to be sure, but things get a whole lot worse when Maddy suddenly disappears from the family home, and despite a thorough police search, there is no sign of her. It seems Susan’s comfortable world has finally come crushing down.
Not Your Child is among the strongest debut novels I’ve read. It is original and polished, with believable dialogue and an impressive sense of atmosphere. The characters are engaging and nuanced; the author is particularly effective in portraying the obsessed grandfather in a partly sympathetic light. With a crisp pace that keeps readers engaged until the very end, this tale is highly recommended.
• Going to Beautiful, by Anthony Bidulka (Stonehouse):
Toronto, Ontario: celebrity chef, author, and restaurateur Jake Hardy, together with his husband, successful fashion designer Eddie Kravets, are living a dream life. Comfortably ensconced in spacious digs on the top floor of a fashionable apartment building, they go from success to success, pausing only to realize just how fortunate they are.
But even dreams aren’t perfect. In one morning’s early hours, Jake is awakened abruptly by the police, who break the news that his partner’s
body has been found on the ground just below their balcony. Eddie Kravets is dead.Over the weeks that follow, Jake and the closest of those around him wrestle with a toxic mix of well-meaning sympathizers, nosy gawkers, and online gossip-mongers, all of them having the effect of ripping a bandage off the fresh wound that is now Jake’s daily reality. He finds only a tiny measure of solace in sifting through Eddie’s left-behind things. Ever the planner, Eddie had made a list of places he wanted his ashes spread. They include, enigmatically, the single word Beautiful. Further searching reveals that the word in not simply a placeholder, but an actual place in rural Saskatchewan.
Determined to honor Eddie’s final wishes, Jake begins his odyssey. He will discover along the way that, far from living up to its name, the small prairie town of Beautiful harbors more than its fair share of dark secrets—and more than one murderer.
With its richly textured and layered plot, nuanced characters, and sometimes brooding environment, Going to Beautiful moves between being a lyrical celebration of life and an unflinching exploration of the dark recesses of twisted souls. It offers an inventive and evocative journey that will keep you enthralled throughout. If you’ve never before encountered the work of Anthony Bidulka, creator of the Russell Quant private-eye series and a multiple winner of both the Arthur Ellis and Lambda Literary awards, you’re in for a real treat.
• Blind Date, by Brenda Chapman (Ivy Bay Press):
Successful Canadian crime writer Brenda Chapman (Shallow End, Closing Time) recently launched a new series, this one featuring an engaging amateur sleuth named Ella Tate.
Blind Date finds Ella attempting to mark out a new career for herself. Formerly a journalist working the crime beat for an Ottawa newspaper, she’s now gone online with a true-crime podcast. She’s already amassed quite a following, when an intriguing case falls into her lap. A young teacher, Josie Wheatly, has been assaulted. After leaving the hospital prematurely, she’s found in her apartment, murdered by hanging. It just so happens that the apartment where this tragedy took place used to belong to Ella, and the deceased looks remarkably similar to her. Josie even appropriated Ella’s name for online dating purposes.
The implications are impossible to miss: Could Josie’s killer have mistaken that other woman for Ella herself? When two other people close to the podcaster are also victimized by violent crime, the answer seems all too clear.Ella strives to connect the dots here, but is frustrated at every turn. Then she begins to receive ominous messages, some on her podcast, then, more ominously, on her cell phone: “You’re next, bitch.” Does the solution to all of this lie somewhere in the podcasts she’s been airing, which expose peoples’ wrongdoing? Or should she be looking closer to home? Like Angus’ Not Your Child, this yarn is set largely in Ottawa’s Glebe area, and the city has seldom looked so threatening.
Never at a loss when it comes to creating a spellbinding thriller, author Chapman draws on her considerable skills to weave a credible, well-crafted plot that will leave readers hungering for more.
• L.A. Burning, by D.C. Taylor (Crooked Lane):
From former movie and TV screenwriter David C. Taylor, L.A. Burning is a gripping read that draws upon events rooted in the real world of Hollywood in order to paint a picture
altogether less glamorous, and a great deal more disturbing, than that imagined by fans of the silver screen.Ex-street kid Cody Bonner has just been released from a five-year stretch in prison for bank robbery, and she’s a gal on a mission. While she was locked up, her twin sister, Julie, had been brutally murdered, her body washed up on a beach in Malibu. The two had been especially close. Now Cody is committed to finding out how Julie died, and why. The trail will lead her into the dark recesses of Tinseltown, a world of sleazy agents and even sleazier movie moguls. Throughout her investigation, Cody will also have to navigate the Byzantine world of her mother, a fading film star who seems less concerned about her daughter’s death than her own tenuous position in the ephemeral heights of the Hollywood firmament. Cody, though, has two things going for her: the skills she picked up while behind bars, and her own dogged determination to solve her sibling’s slaying.
L.A. Burning is a riveting tale that turns on the seamy underside of an industry built on image, power, and to some extent, perversion. Seamlessly plotted, and with compelling characters and crackling dialogue, this novel is guaranteed to satisfy.
• Fenian Street, by Anne Emery (ECW Press):
This immersive tale—set in Dublin, Ireland, during the turbulent years between 1969 and 1975, and ripe with both historical detail and real-life characters—introduces us to Seamus “Shay“ Rynne. He’s the son of Thomas “Talkie” Rynne, a former Irish Republican Army supporter who’d been interned during the Emergency—known elsewhere as the Second World War. Shay was born shortly after that war ended. Now a young man, he has come under the wing of Colm Griffith, a detective sergeant in the Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. With his support, Shay joins the Garda as a police constable.
In the impoverished neighborhood where he grew up, one filled with public housing and bent toward animosity against government officials, to be a cop is viewed as only one small step above being an informer. Shay must therefore work extra hard to earn his friends’ respect. So when Rosie McGinn, a young woman he knew from his schooling,
turns up dead at the hotel where she worked, her neck bruised with fingermarks, Shay resolves to bring her killer to justice, even though it means going up against some intimidating local figures.On the strength of that success, Shay is promoted to detective, and thereafter joins DS Griffith in tackling the case of Darragh McLogan, a member of the Irish parliament, who was found brutally murdered in his back yard following a party held there the night before. Shay’s inquiry will plumb the depths of the local power structure and even lead him to Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. This is a knotty case, made still more complicated by the fact that Shay’s own father emerges as a prime suspect in the politician’s demise.
Readers benefit from the research Emery did before penning Fenian Street. She integrates Shay Rynne’s story expertly into the larger drama of 1970s Irish politics, and delivers both with prose that fairly leaps off the pages. A propulsive and gripping mystery, to be sure.
Other 2022 Favorites: Like a Sister, by Kellye Garrett (Mulholland); When It Was Cold, by Howard Shrier (e-book, short stories); and Call Me a Cab, by Donald E. Westlake (Hard Case Crime).
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