Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part VII: J. Kingston Pierce

J. Kingston Pierce is the overworked editor of both The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers, the senior editor of January Magazine, and now a columnist with Down & Out: The Magazine.

• The Dry, by Jane Harper (Flatiron):
There’s no mystery as to why Jane Harper’s debut novel, The Dry, won not only this year’s Gold Dagger award from the British Crime Writers’ Association, but also Australia’s 2017 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and the 2017 Davitt Award for Best Adult Novel. It’s one hell of a tale, its character development finely tuned, raw human emotions roiling across its pages, and a whodunit plot at its center, the dimensions of which are revealed with the utmost patience. Set in the fictional, drought-ravaged Australian farming community of Kiewarra, northwest of Melbourne, this harrowing yarn builds around what looks like a murder-suicide case. Evidence suggests that Luke Hadler turned his shotgun on himself after first ending the lives of his wife and 6-year-old son; only his baby daughter—too young to serve as a witness—survived the carnage. However, Aaron Falk isn’t convinced by that straightforward solution to the Hadler family’s end. A federal police officer specializing in white-collar crime, Falk grew up in Kiewarra, but 20 years ago, when he was 16, he and his father were booted out following the suspicious demise of Aaron’s girlfriend. Luke Hadler was Aaron’s best friend back then, and it’s Luke’s funeral that has finally brought him back to town. Despite the hostile reception he receives in Kiewarra, Falk agrees to remain there after Luke’s mother requests his help in unraveling the truth behind her son’s alleged crimes. But by sticking around, Falk also runs the risk that a long-buried secret from his childhood will be uncovered. The British-born Harper, currently a journalist with Melbourne’s Herald Sun, has created in The Dry a claustrophobic mystery filled with ominous flashbacks and innumerable engaging misapprehensions of the truth. If I have any criticism of the book, it’s that the solution to the present-day crime isn’t as twisted as I expected. A sequel, Force of Nature, is slated for release on both sides of the Atlantic in February.

• The Force, by Don Winslow (Morrow):
“Cops fall into two categories—grass eaters and meat eaters,” Don Winslow says in his 18th novel. “The grass eaters are the small-timers—they take a cut from the car-towing companies, they get a free coffee, a sandwich. They take what comes, they’re not aggressive. The meat eaters are the predators, they go after what they want—the drug rips, the mob payoffs, the cash.” Sergeant Denny Malone is definitely of the latter herd. A repeatedly decorated 18-year veteran of the New York City Police Department, he’s risen to lead an elite but insufficiently overseen task force charged with working the front lines of gun, gang, and drug hostilities. Trouble is, Malone has learned not only how to follow the rules, but more importantly from his perspective, how to deftly break them. Any reluctance he once had about delivering (and accepting) payoffs, “testilying” to help the District Attorney’s Office win convictions, and dispensing vigilante justice long ago went by the wayside. Malone still believes in the Job—his crucial function in keeping Manhattan’s busy streets from turning barbarous—but he’s also interested in securing a comfortable future for himself and his small family, even if that requires under-the-table dealings. Following a particularly large heroin bust, Malone spots and intends to seize an opportunity to feather his nest a bit more. Only after he’s caught on camera funneling dirty dough to an assistant D.A. does the precarious balance of Malone’s world begin to crumble. While Gotham seethes with racial tensions, Malone tries to bargain with federal agents, hoping to save his brother officers and the other people he loves, but quickly learns that no amount of cooperation with his superiors or betrayal of his colleagues guarantees his salvation. As much as The Force is about corrupt cops, it’s no simplistic indictment of U.S. law enforcement. It’s about a culture that demands integrity but too often rewards its opposite. Malone may be a self-destructive protagonist with a hard-luck mistress, a ready supply of bad habits, and an inflated sense of invulnerability, but he somehow manages to come off here as more pathetic than contemptible.

• If We Were Villains, by M.L. Rio (Flatiron):
Comparisons between the debut novels of M.L. Rio and Donna Tartt are inevitable. Both this year’s If We Were Villains and Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) are about over-privileged students at small colleges who are involved in murders and then try to cover them up, becoming increasingly burdened by the weight of their confidences. But I’d say that Rio’s If We Were Villains is the more tightly composed and suspenseful (and less annoying) of the two works. Its story takes place at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, an elite arts school in Illinois, and focuses on “seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of [them]”—a quartet of men, a trio of women, all fourth-year students—studying and performing the works of William Shakespeare. Their interest in the Bard has, in fact, become an obsession, as is evident on those many occasions when lines from his plays infiltrate even their exchanges off the stage. Having rehearsed and acted together so many times, and been rather stereotyped in roles throughout, the members of this septet now display characteristics familiar from the parts they’ve been asked to inhabit, whether it be arrogance, seductiveness, or audacity. By 1997, though—the students’ last year at Dellecher—the easy-going relationship between them starts to fray. Jealousies, rages, power struggles, and other tensions that were once subsumed beneath a mutual affection for the theater are coming to the fore. When, after some unexpected casting changes precede an ugly and violent opening-night party, and one of their number is found drowned in a nearby lake, it upsets the order of these friends’ lives and forces them to show their true acting mettle, as they endeavor to convince the police—and each other—that they weren’t to blame. Rio, who holds a master’s degree in Shakespeare studies, skillfully uses her cloistered college environment as a Petri dish where the taxing demands of thespianism mix hazardously with the stumbling efforts of young adults to establish their social and sexual identities. Most of her tale unrolls in flashbacks from 2007, when one of those seven actors is being released after a 10-year prison sentence for having confessed to the killing, and may finally be prepared to tell the truth about what really happened that fateful opening night. Rio has created, in If We Were Villains, a mystery worth more than one standing ovation.

• Lightning Men, by Thomas Mullen (Atria/37 INK):
As revealing and richly atmospheric as I thought Thomas Mullen’s Darktown was, its sequel is better still. Again, we’re introduced into the company of Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, partners in a small, new, and widely suspect squad of black policemen charged with maintaining peace in the crowded, post-World War II “colored neighborhoods” of racially divided Atlanta, Georgia. The year is now 1950, and the Georgia capital is changing, not necessarily for the better. Ever since Prohibition, there’s been a profitable trade there in illegal booze, but now the “white lightning” distillers—mostly Caucasian thickheads from outside the city limits—are branching out into marijuana, as well, happily peddling their wares in Darktown, the district for which Boggs, a college-educated preacher’s son, and the more street-savvy Smith are responsible. Following a fatal encounter with a moonshine runner, these two cops set off to identify and topple the drug sellers before street fights and gunplay can get out of hand. Trouble is, they aren’t allowed to question, much less apprehend, white folks. And they can’t expect assistance from the APD’s other officers, most of whom hold racist viewpoints. A rare exception is Denny Rakestraw (“Rake”), a half-German war hero turned flatfoot, who at least believes segregation should be made more fair. But he’s busy enough already with family troubles. It seems his Klansman brother-in-law, Dale Simpkins, agreed to demonstrate “moral authority” by beating someone he’d been told was a sinful man—a sinful white man, as it turns out. When that task takes a horrible turn, Rake must decide whether to help simpleton Simpkins, or hand him over to the law and in so doing, hurt his sister, Simpkins’ wife. Mullen mixes far more ingredients into this yarn, including Boggs’ courting of a domestic servant with ex-boyfriend woes and a scheme to curtail the encroachment of better-off black families into whites-only sectors of town. And he does so quite adroitly, illuminating the ugliness of America’s racist past, while giving greater dimensions to his principal players and testing their loyalties to one another. It’s welcome news, indeed, that Thomas Mullen has already completed a third entry in this rewarding series.

• Magpie Murders,
by Anthony Horowitz (Harper):
It’s extremely rare for two Rap Sheet critics to put forward, in any given year, the same crime novel as a favorite. So when three do so in 2017, you know there’s something special going on. Like Kevin Burton Smith and Ali Karim, I’m a big fan of screenwriter-author Anthony Horowitz’s Agatha Christie homage, Magpie Murders. This wasn’t at all predictable, since I don’t usually select my reading material from the genre’s cozier edge. But Horowitz manages at once to respect, even applaud, the hoary conventions of Golden Age whodunits, while reinvigorating them in a multi-layered, dark puzzler of a story. We’re introduced initially to Susan Ryeland, an editor with a minor London publishing house, who has just sat down to peruse the manuscript of the ninth, and apparently concluding, entry in author Alan Conway’s best-selling mystery series starring Atticus Pünd, a 65-year-old half-Greek, half-German concentration camp survivor who, since the end of World War II, has set himself up in London as a private investigator. From that point, Horowitz propels us into the midst of Conway’s twisted narrative, which is set in a fictional English village in 1955. We learn about the stairway death there of Mary Blakiston, a controlling woman who had served for many years as the housekeeper at Pye Hall, the local ancestral abode of Sir Magnus Pye. There’s gossip that Blakiston’s “accident” might have been something else—perhaps homicide, with her rebellious son, Robert, imagined as the architect of her exit. Robert’s fiancée has sought Pünd’s help in putting that gossip to rest, but he’s preoccupied with news that a cranial tumor will soon cost him his life, and turns her down. Not until a second slaying occurs—Sir Magnus being the victim on this occasion—does Pünd begin probing both tragedies. The Hercule Poirot-esque sleuth successfully unearths motives, clues, and suspects galore. However, before he can unmask the killer (or killers?), Conway’s manuscript … abruptly ends. Horowitz’s story line bounces back to the present, where we find editor Ryeland in pursuit of the book’s missing chapters. Her hunt hits a daunting roadblock with Conway’s sudden suicide, but it is made more intriguing by the parallels she discovers between the author’s life and the plot of his valedictory work. Concealed codes and word games—perfect tests for Ryeland’s detail-oriented mind—help move the plot toward a resolution, but I, for one, didn’t figure everything out before Horowitz provided the answers. Playful, poignant at times, and boasting an intricately knotted scenario, Magpie Murders is likely to be a major contender for next year’s book awards.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part VI: 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, and Mystery Readers International.

• Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper):
Anthony Horowitz’s love for the British Golden Age mystery is evident in this intricate homage to Dame Agatha Christie. Reviewers are often on the hunt for something new, something fresh, and Magpie Murders is just that—a most unusual, and almost flawless, take on the classic mystery yarn. Horowitz offers here a “novel within a novel” that, in addition to its plotting strengths, reflects on the state of modern crime-fiction publishing and blends the names of real people (such as his own publicity manager, Angela McMahon) with purely fictional ones. When, in an introduction, literary editor Susan Ryeland acquaints readers with Magpie Murders, the 1950s-set work at the center of this book, around which Horowitz wraps a second mystery, she makes clear that the novel changed her life. The rest of this tale shows us why. Magpie Murders, we soon learn, is best-selling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel starring half-Greek, half-German detective Atticus Pünd, a very Hercule Poirot-like figure. It kicks off with the funeral of one Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye of Somerset. She apparently tripped over a vacuum cleaner cable and tumbled down a staircase to her death. Or did she? That’s the puzzle facing Pünd, who’s summoned from his London abode to investigate, and for whom this case might be his last—it seems he’s facing a terminal condition of his own, which he has yet to reveal publicly. From editor Ryeland’s perspective, the yarn is rolling smartly along, with mysteries being solved or on their way to resolution, when suddenly author Conway’s manuscript just … ends. The final chapters are missing. Turning sleuth herself, Ryeland sets off to find out what happened to the omitted pages, a challenge made more tricky by the fact that Conway has committed suicide. To figure out who was behind the killings in Magpie Murders, and perhaps also determine why Conway died by his own hand, Ryeland must parse the connections between the author’s life and his final knotty, fictional plot. This book boasts more red herrings than a coastal fishing vessel, a testament to Horowitz’s devious mind. Yet working your way through them is decidedly satisfying. In two words, Magpie Murders is “bloody good.”

• The Saboteur, by Andrew Gross (Minotaur):
After penning a succession of modern “suburban thrillers,” about everyday people suddenly caught up in frightening situations, Andrew Gross shifted gears last year with The One Man, about a near-impossible mission to help a scientist escape from the World War II-era Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. He followed that up last summer with The Saboteur, another fictionalized recounting of events from the same war, only this time the plot focuses on efforts by clandestine Norwegian subversives to stop Nazi Germany from acquiring heavy water created at a hydro plant in Vemork, Norway—heavy water (deuterium oxide) being a product Adolf Hitler’s cruel regime could have used in its nuclear weapons development. After the Allies fail disastrously in their initial campaign to destroy the remote and heavily fortified Norsk Hydro Ammonia Fertilizer Plant (NH3), they turn for assistance to Leif Tronstad, a scientist who had been engaged in the Norwegian resistance movement before fleeing to England. With the backing of British Special Operations (SOE) and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to today’s CIA), Tronstad helps engineer a second sabotage attempt on the facility, this one led by Kurt Nordstrum. The assignment is spectacularly dangerous, and Nordstrum’s special squad faces a competent foe, Captain Dieter Lund, representing Norway’s post-occupation government and its Nazi puppet dictator, Vidkun Quisling. Lund is a bitter man, who exploits his allegiance to the Nazi conquerors to achieve power and respect he was never able to win as a civilian. While he once attended the same school as Nordstrum, their ideals can hardly be more different. Yes, Lund and Nordstrum hold the leads in this yarn, but the secondary characters are perhaps even more intriguing, with particular applause due Nordstrum’s covert field agents—Ox, Hella, Einar and Alf Larson, along with Austrians Natalie Ritter and her grandfather, cellist August Ritter of the Viennese Philharmonic Orchestra. The Saboteur is an elegant and nerve-shredding thriller in the Alistair MacLean tradition, with enough intrigue and action to keep one on the edge of his or her seat. (No wonder that same raid on the Vemork power station inspired a 1965 Kirk Douglas/Richard Harris film, The Heroes of Telemark.)

• The Switch, by Joseph Finder (Dutton):
When Boston coffee company executive Michael Tanner inadvertently picks up the wrong laptop computer while traversing transportation security at Los Angeles International Airport, his life definitely takes a turn for the worse. It appears the machine he mistook for his own actually belongs to powerful U.S. Senator Susan Robbins of Illinois. In most cases, this wouldn’t be a big problem: Tanner could contact authorities and the laptops would be switched back. However, the Mac Tanner walked off with is not only Robbins’ personal one, but in a serious breach of protocol, the politician has downloaded onto it top-secret files concerning a National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program. If her computer should tumble into the wrong hands, it would not only present a severe security risk to the United States (and potentially other countries as well), but scandalously terminate her dreams of being elected to the White House. While Robbins’ chief of staff puts into gear a stop-at-nothing operation to retrieve the senator’s laptop, Tanner’s investigative reporter friend, Lanny Roth, advises him to keep hold of the computer until he can make a deal with the NSA for its return. But Roth’s death soon afterward, disguised as suicide, makes Tanner realize the true dimensions of the danger he’s facing. And not only him, but his family too. This novel’s terse and concise chapters, coupled with a building dread that seeps through its pages, makes The Switch an addictive but anxiety-producing read, laying bare some of the many worrisome downsides of our digital age. If ever a thriller novel deserved to come with a health warning, this is the one.

• The Word Is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz (Century UK):
Wait, another Anthony Horowitz novel makes my top-five list of crime fiction for 2017? Yes, but with good cause. The Word Is Murder is metafiction of a high order, with Horowitz casting himself as a character in his yarn. Here’s the set-up: Diana Cowper is a wealthy 60-year old widow living in modern London, who is found murdered by strangulation only hours after she’d arranged her own funeral. Robbery doesn’t appear to have been a motive for her demise, but there are other incidents in her past—notably, a fraud scheme and an automobile accident that cost a young boy his life—that may provide clues to her fate. Called in by the Metropolitan Police to consult on the investigation is Daniel Hawthorne, a standoffish former Met detective with whom Horowitz has struck a business deal: He’ll write a book about the case and Hawthorne’s involvement in it, and the two men with split the profits 50-50. The trail Hawthorne and Horowitz follow here in hopes of solving Cowper’s homicide is quite curious, with strands reaching Hollywood as well as a seaside resort in Kent, England. The narrative provides grief and misfortune, and there are more than a few suspects worth grilling. If the case wasn’t complicated enough from the outset, it becomes further so when another killing occurs—one that relates to an earlier tragedy poorly understood by police. Although The Word Is Murder is somewhat weird in terms of storytelling structure and the fact that it weaves real people into its plot (among them Horowitz’s publisher, Selina Walker), the novel offers splendid insights into Horowitz’s life as a writer and the publishing business, in general. And the Cowper mystery is solved in fair-play fashion, with Horowitz drawing our attention to its facets with all the precision of a stage magician, pulling back the curtains to expose past misdeeds and twists from the dark edge of human behavior. A U.S. edition of The Word Is Murder is due out in June 2018 from Harper.

Let me leave you with one additional pick, this one plucked from the crime non-fiction shelves …

• Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America’s Greatest Unsolved Murder, by Piu Eatwell (Liveright):
It was 70 years ago—on January 15, 1947—that a dead young brunette was found in a weedy vacant lot in south Los Angeles, her body severely mutilated and drained of blood. The identity of that 22-year-old would soon come to light in the newspapers: Elizabeth Short, though history remembers her best as “The Black Dahlia.” However, the name of her killer remains officially unknown. In the decades since, much has been written about Short’s murder, both in fiction (James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, Max Allan Collins’ Angel in Black) and non-fiction. And the case continues to pique the public’s imagination, as demonstrated by the widespread interest shown in a book published earlier this year titled Black Dahlia, Red Rose, by Piu Eatwell, a British TV producer and documentary maker. This is a most unusual work, racked on non-fiction shelves yet composed in a novelistic style that adds dramatic flair to its real-life horrors. The research Eatwell did before drafting her text and postulating as to who was behind the tragic destiny of waitress and would-be starlet Short seems extraordinary, and is spelled out in detailed notes, glossaries, an index, and footnotes—all of which might have run against the work’s novelistic structure, but only wind up contributing to the ominous ambiance that overlays her narrative. This is by no means a fast read, but that is perhaps for the best of reasons: one is quickly caught up in Eatwell’s rich re-creation of post-World War II Hollywood, with its beacon summoning misfits from around the country in search of fame, fortune, or love (as was the case with Short). The author frames the Black Dahlia story with observations about the darker side of the American Dream, an ample enumeration of the Los Angeles Police Department’s corruption scandals of that era, and a look back at how local newspapers fueled the public’s appetite for the sordid and the sensational. Doubts have been raised, notably by former L.A. Times editor Larry Harnisch, as to some of this publication’s facts and conclusions. Nonetheless, Eatwell’s attempt to drain the murky mire of mythology surrounding Short’s murder in order to reveal a most likely suspect in her long-ago homicide is commendable. The appeal of Black Dahlia, Red Rose as a story is obvious, yet it must be said that it’s troubling, too. Is it simply part of human nature that we gravitate toward lurid mysteries?

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part V: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• August Snow, by Stephen Mack Jones (Soho Crime):
August Snow is a former Marine and ex-cop who, after winning a wrongful-termination lawsuit, takes his pile of cash and returns to his old Detroit neighborhood, Mexicantown, a once-thriving haven for families that was cruelly hit by years of “white flight.” Snow is the kind of guy you want watching your back. He also believes in redemption. As he recalls his late father saying: “We are defined by those we could have helped and chose not to …” In this, his debut outing, the protean Snow is asked by a former foe, Eleanor Paget, to investigate improprieties at her private wealth management bank. But Snow isn’t ready to tackle detective work again, and turns her down. When Paget is subsequently found dead, an apparent victim of suicide, Snow has more than a few doubts about the circumstances. A man of intelligence and curiosity, he launches his own probe of her demise. This brings him into contact with crooked cops, the FBI, Russian assassins, a dysfunctional family circle, and international money laundering. As interesting as the case being tackled here is, it’s Snow—a “Blaxican” (the son of an African-American policeman and a Mexican mother)—who draws and rewards the reader’s attention most. He is at heart a mensch, a person exhibiting integrity and honor, and the 800-pound metaphors of second chances in this book drive that home. Author Jones is a Detroit-area poet and a playwright whose love of language makes every page of this novel resound with meaning. Plans to turn August Snow into a TV series protagonist may have been disrupted by the fact that the Hollywood heavyweight spearheading that idea was now-disgraced film producer and Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein, but it’s said Jones is working on a second Snow novel.

• Down to No Good, by Earl Javorsky (Story Plant):
This paranormal noir gives one the sensation of walking through a darkened room, stepping tentatively with care and trepidation so as to not trip over the furniture, bang one’s head, and be cast as a fool. But once readers wrap their minds around Javorsky’s darkly blithe thriller and sense the geography of the world he has created, the humanity of his narrative will draw them in as quickly and completely as did Thorne Smith’s Topper series. A follow-up to 2014’s Down Solo, this new novel finds ex-junkie and single-dad private investigator Charlie Miner still adapting to his Twilight Zone metabolism, which allowed him to survive being shot dead by multiple bullets. After hearing a “voice” tell him how to heal his wounds, he arose from a slab at the morgue, stole clothes from a corpse, and kept on keeping on. Not only did Miner resurrect himself, but he now possesses another superpower: the ability to leave his body and “roam.” Miner can also enter the bodies of others, “like a hermit crab, taking over an abandoned home.” In Down to No Good he is called in to help his old pal, Los Angeles Homicide Detective Dave Putnam, after Tamara Gale— “psychic to the stars” —begins giving the media vital information about several murders, making the LAPD appear clueless. Putnam, who is privy to Miner’s extraordinary secret, wants the P.I. to gather some insights into Tamara and Philip, her unctuous and lethal husband, who’ll stop at nothing to promote themselves. You might think Miner’s skills would make him the perfect crime solver. But Javorsky tempers his protagonist’s abilities with discretion. Miner isn’t given an all-access pass to every room or person—he is nowhere near that cartoonish. Nor is he so flawed and humanized a character that, like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, he verges on being an antihero. Charlie Miner has a mission—to save lives in order to stay alive—and a sense of humor that makes him an engaging enigma.

• The Fallen, by Ace Atkins (Putnam):
Ace Atkins has definitely made it in the world. The Robert B. Parker estate commissioned him to take over the long-running Spenser series of private eye novels. He’s won the Edgar Award three times, and is a respected journalist. Yet The Fallen—the seventh book in his series starring Quinn Colson, a former U.S. Army Ranger and current sheriff of Mississippi’s Tibbehah County—is proof that success hasn’t spoiled Atkins, and that his man Colson will be around for some time to come. The story finds Colson on the trail of a sophisticated gang of former Marines turned bank robbers, who disguise themselves in Donald Trump masks and warn bank patrons, “Anyone moves and I’ll grab ’em by the pussy.” It’s only their misfortune to knock over the Jericho National Bank, giving Colson clues as to how he might bring their run on financial institutions to a close. The sheriff, though, can’t focus solely on that goal. His old nemesis, Johnny Stagg, a local politician who prospered in the gambling and prostitution business, might have finally been incarcerated, but the vacuum he left behind is promptly filled by one Fannie Hathcock, who’s opened a strip club of her own in Jericho. Then there’s the matter of two missing teenage girls; Colson’s younger sister, Caddy, and the drama of her keeping her nose clean while running an outreach program; the so-called Dixie Mafia and its tentacles reaching all the way to the statehouse; and Maggie Powers, a childhood friend of Colson, whose move to Jericho kicks up romantic sparks. All of this would tax any normal gent’s capacity as a father figure and guiding force in a small town. However, it’s all part of a day’s work for Quinn Colson. Any loose ends Atkins leaves in these pages are intentional, clearing up troubles from previous books and setting traps to be sprung in future entries in this fine series.

• Fast Falls the Night, by Julia Keller (Minotaur):
Over a 24-hour period, America’s too-often-ignored opioid epidemic turns a hard-luck former coal-mining town in Raythune County, West Virginia, into a graveyard of dead junkies in Keller’s sixth Bell Elkins novel. Elkins, the county’s chief prosecutor, discovers that cheap heroin flooding the area around Acker’s Gap, the county seat, has been cut with lethal quantities of an elephant tranquilizer, and as more overdoses are reported, it’s up to her and the local sheriff’s department to find the source—as hopeless a task, Keller writes, as “finding a needle—make that a syringe in a hay stack.” EMTs do what they can, treating near-dead junkies with a dwindling supply of Narcan, but residents of the town are conflicted about the plight of these victims, some choosing to do no better than bid them a hateful farewell: “good riddance to bad rubbish.” The sufferers, though—who’ve come to see dope as “the quickest way out of Acker’s Gap”—aren’t all luck-starved white trash; a few are prominent citizens. While the sheriff’s department tries to identify the distributor of these tainted narcotics, Bell Elkins is also struggling with the decision of whether to leave West Virginia, the home to which she returned eight years ago, in order to take a job with a Washington, D.C., law firm. She must contend, too, with her sister, Shirley, who did time for killing their abusive father. An unrepentant alcoholic (“Who needs stained-glass windows if you had liquor bottles on a lighted shelf?”), Shirley here drops a figurative atom bomb into her relationship with Bell; and that information sets up a situation to be dealt with in a coming installment of this series by Keller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The heroin problem in Appalachia and other rural areas is a hot topic in fiction, but few have handled it as beautifully as this author.

• Gangster Nation, by Tod Goldberg (Counterpoint):
Rabbi David Cohen, the mobster and hit man once known as Sal Cupertine, is back in Gangster Nation, Tod Goldberg’s follow-up to 2014’s wonderfully over-the-top Gangsterland. It’s now September 2001, and although David/Sal has become firmly ensconced in his Las Vegas synagogue and the profitable doings of the Jewish mob, things aren’t getting any easier for him. An obsessed FBI agent (whose associates Sal had killed) is closing in, the plastic surgery on Sal’s face is failing, and the pain he feels for having abandoned his wife and son in Chicago more than three years ago is becoming unbearable—to the point that the former hit man is planning a return to the Windy City. During his time studying the Torah and ministering to the congregants of his Vegas temple, Sal has become a very sage man, wise about the plights of others … as well as his own. “If Sal Cupertine came to Rabbi David Cohen, what would David tell him?” he muses, as he places his predicament onto a larger stage. Yet Cupertine remains a gangster, working the angles whenever he can, convinced that life (and the new PATRIOT Act) is basically a con and a scam. That’s the kind of jaded thinking that might force a man to make mistakes—just what a fake rabbi can ill afford.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, 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 working in the insurance industry.

• Bluebird, Bluebird, by Attica Locke (Mulholland):
Attica Locke’s fourth novel (following Pleasantville, which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction) is a masterpiece. Bluebird, Bluebird is a crackling police procedural set in rural East Texas in the present day. Texas Ranger and law school dropout Darren Matthews is on suspension after testifying before a grand jury on what could well have been a calculated murder committed by one of his friends. While cooling his heels waiting to see if an indictment is handed down, Matthews is talked into investigating a pair of murders in a small town that may be related and appear to have been racially motivated. One victim was an African-American Chicago lawyer who wandered into a roughneck bar known to be an Aryan Brotherhood hangout; the second was the hapless wife of one of the ex-con Aryans. When the Chicago victim’s estranged wife arrives on the scene, followed by a television reporter, the tensions escalate and the secrets refuse to stay buried. Much of the action takes place in a diner owned by Geneva Sweet, the acknowledged matriarch of the local African-American community who has, over the years, buried both her husband and son, neither of whom met natural ends. Watching over Geneva, both literally and figuratively, is Wallace Jefferson III, the head of the current generation of the white family who calls all the shots in this backwater county. Reviews of Bluebird, Bluebird have centered on the locale of Lark, Texas (population 178), in heralding Locke’s book as a great Southern mystery. While this is true, the themes here transcend the setting. At many points in the narrative, the character of Matthews struck me as a modern-day incarnation of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, if the latter had gone into more traditional law enforcement. Bluebird, Bluebird will likely be found on many Best Books of 2017 lists, and deservedly so. I hope it’s also remembered come 2018 award season.

• Bosstown, by Adam Abramowitz (Thomas Dunne):
Ever since my wife and I moved to Boston, I have been seeking out books that take place in New England. I’ve been working my way through backlists of Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, and Linda Barnes, so I was excited to hear about Bosstown, by debut novelist Adam Abramowitz. Here, the kinetic energy of the city is complimented by a gripping story. Zesty Myers is a bike messenger shooting through Boston streets, delivering anonymous packages to faceless recipients, when he is plowed over in an intersection by a hit-and-run Buick that seemed to gun for him. After regaining consciousness, Zesty looks around to see a shower of money that was in the package he’d just picked up from a record store in Back Bay. Later, when he is visited by agents from the FBI, he learns that the dough he lost in the accident may have been the proceeds from an armed robbery of a Wells Fargo truck that left one security guard dead. This is not Zesty’s first encounter with Boston’s sometimes sordid history. His father was a legendary local “fixer,” tight with both cops and pols. His long-gone mother was an explosions expert who worked with a band of bank robbers reminiscent of the Weather Underground. And his brother, Zero (OK,so the names are a bit much), runs a local moving company where he employs ex-cons … and at least one freshly dead Wells Fargo guard. In the midst of all this storytelling is a parallel plot involving Zesty’s father, now in the grip of Alzheimer’s, and how his former life intertwines with Zesty’s current troubles. A criminal mastermind clearly modeled on Whitey Bulger supplies the thread to tie these plot lines together. It all results in a bit of a jumble that, for this reader, required a second run-through. Yet as unnecessarily complicated as Abramowitz’s yarn can be on occasion, those frustrations are nitpicks when the overall book performs in high gear, racing along much like Zesty on his bike. I particularly enjoyed Bosstown’s high-octane dialogue, highly stylized but always smile-inducing, not unlike that of another Boston crime-fiction legend, George V. Higgins.

Gone to Dust, by Matt Goldman (Forge):
Fans of private-eye fiction who are weary of stories that lay the noir ambiance on with a trowel will find much to like in Matt Goldman’s inaugural novel, Gone to Dust. Highly entertaining without lapsing into triviality, Goldman writes an engaging story about Nils Shapiro (known as “Shap” by one and all), who is hired by a suburban police force outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, to help solve the baffling case of a recent divorcée who was murdered in her home without signs of forced entry. The great hook of this yarn is that the killer contaminated the crime scene with copious amounts of dust brought in from an unknown outside source. Goldman, a former writer of television comedies (Seinfeld, Ellen), demonstrates in his fiction both skill and humor (for instance, he calls one setting “the kind of neighborhood where every parent makes their kid take piano lessons but no parent wants their kid to be a musician”). And he weaves into his whodunit issues relating to U.S immigration policies and a terrorist investigation underway by the FBI. Gone to Dust is not groundbreaking, but it returns to the tradition of American private-eye tales exemplified by Robert B. Parker, Arthur Lyons, and the chronically underappreciated Roger L. Simon. Shap is a sleuth without a dark and predictable back story, which keeps the narration from turning maudlin and overbearing. A very promising series introduction.

Finally, a couple of fine works from the crime non-fiction shelves …

• The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, by Martin Edwards (Poisoned Pen Press)
• The Otto Penzler Collection of Bibliomysteries: A Catalogue of First Editions of Mystery Fiction Set in the World of Books, 1849-2000 (The Mysterious Bookshop):
This year brought two superb reference books that crime-fiction aficionados should consider adding to their own library. In 2016, British author Martin Edwards won just about every award possible for The Golden Age of Murder, his entertaining study of classic crime fiction published between the two world wars. He now follows up with The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, an esoteric collection of seminal works both famous and obscure in the development of traditional crime fiction. In this latest offering, Edwards expands his focus to the period 1900-1950 and, as he puts it in the introduction, “My choice of books reflects a wish to present the genre’s development in an accessible, informative, and engaging way.” To the extent that Edwards both manages to remind me that Winnie-the-Pooh’s creator, A.A. Milne, penned a well-regarded locked-room whodunit (1922’s The Red House Mystery) and introduces me to dozens of authors I had not previously encountered, he has been successful in his mission. If, like me, you occasionally seek out the obscure for a good read, Edwards’ latest study of the genre should be placed within arm’s reach.

Someday a statue will be erected in honor of Otto Penzler. Or perhaps, more appropriately, a grand library. The founder of The Mysterious Press and New York City’s renowned Mysterious Bookshop, and an editor as well as a seemingly tireless anthologist, Penzler is the Protector of the Faith in the world of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Given this pedigree, it comes as no surprise to learn that he is also without peer as a collector of works from this genre. His interest in that enterprise has now led to the compiling of The Otto Penzler Collection of Bibliomysteries. This significant work is a directory of Penzler’s astounding assortment of mystery stories with a bookish theme. There are, of course, the expected entries (such as John Dunning’s Booked to Die and Lawrence Block’s Burglar series), but this index also runs to the enigmatic (G.B. Vale’s The Mystery of the Papyrus) and works pointing back to Penzler (including a 1999 chapbook by Ed McBain, I Saw Mommy Killing Santa Claus, which is set in The Mysterious Bookshop). If you are afflicted with what American author Nicholas A. Basbanes terms “the gentle madness” of bibliomania, then Penzler’s directory is a great source for helping you decide what to read next. Also included with each entry is a purchase price, should you wish to acquire one of Penzler’s books for your personal stock.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part III: Linda L. Richards

Linda L. Richards is a journalist, photographer, and the author of 15 books, including three series of novels featuring strong female protagonists. She is the former publisher of Self-Counsel Press and the founder and publisher of award-winning January Magazine. Richards is currently based in Vancouver, Canada, but you can find her wherever her laptop decides to rest for awhile.

• Every Breath You Take, by Mary Higgins Clark and
Alafair Burke (Simon & Schuster):
While on the surface of things, this fourth entry in the Higgins Clarke/Burke partnership might seem like an outlier in a best-of-the-year round-up, I just can’t help but love these books that much. Their Under Suspicion series is high-end candy for suspense lovers. Or maybe top-of-the-line caviar. The good stuff, anyway. In Every Breath You Take, Higgins Clark and Burke have us again spending time with TV producer Laurie Moran as she goes about solving another cold case. This time it’s the Met Gala Murder, and the goal is to discover who shoved wealthy widow Virginia Wakeling to her death from atop Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although Wakeling’s much-younger boyfriend seems like a ready-made guilty party, as Laurie begins to probe the crime, she discovers that the victim’s super-rich family has a lot to hide … and they might even prove dangerous to Laurie herself, if provoked. Higgins Clark and Burke are both master plotters in their own rights. But get them together? This is the kind of novel for which the term “unputdownable” was created. The only thing I don’t like: the authors are going to make me wait a while for the next entry in their series.

• Invisible Dead, by Sam Wiebe (Quercus):
Sam Wiebe is one of the few writers I would read no matter the topic or genre or day of the week. Margaret Atwood is another. Stephen King. Salman Rushdie. A mixed bag, certainly, but good company, any way you figure it. This young author’s second novel (after 2014’s Last of the Independents) is a stunning accomplishment. Wiebe here grabs at a whole bunch of the tropes of crime fiction and turns them around, pulling them masterfully beyond the cliché. Dave Wakeland is an ex-cop turned private eye. In Invisible Dead he’s hired by a terminally ill woman to find her adopted daughter, who vanished a decade earlier. Like Sheena Kamal’s debut yarn, highlighted below, Wiebe’s tale deals at its core with the disappearance and loss of indigenous Canadian women from Vancouver, British Columbia’s Downtown East Side, and the horror and travesty of the fact that not more has been made of their loss. Both books are brilliant, though in starkly different ways. Wiebe navigates crime fiction’s mean streets in a manner that absolutely honors the heritage of his subgenre, yet pushes it towards sharp new directions. Ever wanted to find the perfect P.I. novel? This is it.

• The Lost Ones (aka Eyes Like Mine), by Sheena Kamal (Morrow):
The thing I like least about Sheena Kamal’s debut work is that it was published under different titles in North America and in the UK. This may confuse readers who are trying to figure out which of her books they’ve already picked up. Relax: until sometime in mid-2018, there is only one. Like Sam Wiebe’s Invisible Dead, the action in these pages focuses around an indigenous Canadian woman gone missing from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. And while, on the surface of things, that would seem to make them very similar books, they just could not be more different. Both are magnificent in their own right. A lot of the tension and, in fact, the success of The Lost Ones comes to us through Nora, Kamal’s damaged and world-weary narrator. In reviews, this story has often been compared to Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—and not without reason. There is an equivalent darkness and edge to the two novels, and thanks to the British Columbia backdrop of The Lost Ones, even some shared feeling of spiritual and emotional overcast. There is an unexpected virtuosity in Kamal’s pen. This is the first installment in a promised trilogy, and though the story concludes solidly, The Lost Ones leaves us, quite appropriately, wanting more.

• Montreal Noir, edited by John McFetridge and
Jacques Filippi (Akashic):
Montreal, Quebec, isn’t like other places. It’s a holdout from old Europe, nestled in a traditionally largely Anglo country. That juxtaposition hasn’t always been entirely comfortable. Montreal is not like the rest of Canada, that’s what I’m saying. Culturally, physically, and emotionally, Montreal is not like any other place at all. The totality of its differences play a part in the melting-pot soup that is Montreal Noir. This diverse collection of short fiction, like the city itself, is not always easy or even. It’s not always comfortable. The 15 stories gathered here were written originally in English and French, the latter having been translated for this latest volume in Akashic Books’ Noir series. The writers contributing to this work will mostly be unfamiliar to readers outside (and possibly even within) Canada: Samuel Archibald, Michel Basilières, Arjun Basu, Tess Fragoulis, Peter Kirby, Robert Pobi, Patrick Senécal, Geneviève Lefebvre, Ian Truman, Johanne Seymour, Howard Shrier, Martin Michaud, Melissa Yi, Catherine McKenzie, and Brad Smith. In their introduction, editors McFetridge and Filippi say that “Today, the city has its own language: Franglais (or Frenglish). Maybe the first word spoken in that language was noir …” Appropriate, then, to have it said here in so many ways. For me, this was an eye-opening collection, showing off parts of my country that I didn’t know existed, in ways that I won’t easily forget.

• The Seagull, by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur):
During a recent interview, bestselling author Ann Cleeves told me that The Seagull is her most personal book to date. That’s because it is set in the English seaside town where she has lived for many years. But it also may be because Cleeves’ best-known and best-loved creation, Vera Stanhope, is dealing here with a case that has deeply personal roots, leading back to Detective Inspector Stanhope’s very own late father and some of his cronies. There is something of a British Columbo about Vera Stanhope. She has a sort of bumbling energy, is the furthest thing one can imagine from a fashion plate, and occasionally seems to solve crimes despite herself. Even so, Vera is no fool and there is no element of comedy—except as it is naturally found in life—about either her or the action in The Seagull. The fictional nightclub that gives this book its title looms over the story, even though it was destroyed many years before the book’s present day. It was a luxury establishment, run by the son of a Scottish mobster, and the illegal goings-on that took place there were always suspected though never proven. The themes in this story are the family ties that bind and how old secrets can eat through the heart of a community. This is Cleeves’ eighth outing for Vera Stanhope, in a book series that has received a great deal of attention, not only because of the excellent BBC-TV production based on it, but also because of Shetland, which is based on Cleeves’ newer series featuring Inspector Jimmy Perez. In both series the writing—and also the television!—is top-notch. Anne Cleeves has always been a fantastic writer. It’s good to see her getting the attention she deserves.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part II: Jim Napier

Jim Napier is a crime-fiction critic based in Quebec, Canada. He’s also the creator of the award-winning Web site Deadly Diversions, which features more than 500 reviews and interviews with leading crime-fiction writers. In the spring of 2017, Napier’s own crime novel, Legacy, was published by FriesenPress. It’s the opening installment in a series of Britain-based police procedurals.

• Cold Earth, by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur):
Even in today’s interconnected world, Scotland’s far-north Shetland Islands remain inarguably isolated, their inhabitants’ lives shaped largely by the bleak local weather and the cloistered existence typical in that remote corner of the world. As Cold Earth opens, we find Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez having joined a group charged with burying Magnus Tait, an elderly resident of the nearby village of Ravenswick. But they’re interrupted in their labors by a sudden and ominous rumbling. It has rained heavily in recent days, apparently loosening the ground and now sending a mammoth wall of mud and stone hurtling down from an adjacent hill toward the mourners. Perez and his fellow grievers scramble out of the way, with the DI pulling one of their older members to safety. Happily, when the excitement has run its course, no one seems to have been hurt. However, the slide has engulfed a nearby and supposedly empty cottage, and a search of the debris reveals the body of a woman in a red silk dress. Someone had been living there, after all. Perez and his team initially focus on the routine task of identifying the deceased. But their work takes on a new significance when the pathologist reveals that the victim had not died in the mudslide. She had been strangled, and as their efforts morph into a murder enquiry, revelations will turn the quiet village upside down. Cold Earth is perfectly paced and structured, the plot enhanced by Cleeves’ masterful misdirection. It is also a compelling portrait of a people at once simple and straightforward, and yet harboring dark secrets from one another. A superb read.

• The Late Show, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown):
In the jaded jargon of the Los Angeles Police Department, the duty shift between midnight and 8 a.m. is known as the Late Show. That’s not only because it comes at the end of the day, but because it’s when a lot of the criminal elements surface at local nightclubs and on the streets, at 24-hour service stations and convenience stores, taking advantage of the darkness to ply their illicit trades. Thirty-something Detective Renée Ballard works the Late Show. It wasn’t her choice. After reporting that she’d been sexually harassed by her superior officer, her then partner—who could have confirmed Ballard’s allegations—didn’t stand up for her. As a result, she was bounced from Robbery-Homicide down to exile on the Hollywood Division’s post-midnight stint. It’s a slot few officers like. For one thing, the incidents she encounters on the street during those early hours are turned over to daytime teams at the end of her shift, so there’s no continuity, and given their caseload, often no follow-through. This is frustrating for Ballard, who only wants to close cases and see justice done for the injured parties. While working one routine graveyard shift, checking out the transgender victim of a vicious assault who lies in a coma in a nearby hospital, Ballard is called away to a club known as Dancers, where multiple attacks have just taken place. Four people are dead and a fifth victim is fighting for her life. Even in L.A. that’s a big deal, and all available police detectives and forensics support folks are focused on this case. Leading the investigation is Lieutenant Robert Olivas. That’s bad news for Ballard, because he is the senior officer she’d accused of sexual harassment two years ago. Hoping to sideline her, Olivas assigns Ballard to notify the victims’ next of kin—his not-so-subtle way of saying he doesn’t want her anywhere near the Dancers case. But Ballard doesn’t let go of things that easily, and when another cop working the same investigation, Detective Kenny Chastain—Ballard’s former Robbery-Homicide partner—is found executed in his own driveway, she decides to get to the bottom of these crimes, regardless of her orders. The Late Show marks yet another milestone in Michael Connelly’s already impressive fiction-writing career. With an engaging protagonist, a complex back story, and Connelly’s characteristically crackling dialogue and diligent attention to detail, this series premiere has me clamoring for a sequel. And I bet I’m not alone in that.

• Munich, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson UK):
The prizewinning English author of 11 previous novels and five non-fiction works, Harris this year delivered a compelling thriller about the interwoven fates of two men—one British, the other German—whose paths cross on the eve of the Second World War. Both of them had attended Oxford two decades earlier, but they haven’t seen each other in half a dozen years. Now, though, during four eventful days in May 1938, with tensions growing across Europe, they find themselves on opposite sides, as each of them struggles to head off another global conflict. Hugh Legat is a junior private secretary to UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain; his friend Paul von Hartmann is a German diplomat who’s also a part of a resistance movement hoping to launch a coup against Adolf Hitler before the Führer can put his cataclysmic plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia into action. Formidable opponents stand in the way of these two players. Legat must contend with the naïveté of a leader whose sole aim is preventing another war destined to damage Britain, and who refuses to accept the fact of Hitler’s deviousness; Chamberlain’s intransigence is abetted by Cabinet sycophants and senior War Office figures who understand that Britain is woefully unprepared for major hostilities, and are playing for time. Meanwhile, Paul Hartmann is surrounded by Nazi loyalists who distrust him and watch his every move. The faces of Hitler, German officials Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hermann Göring, and Italians Benito Mussolini and Gian Ciano are to be seen in these pages, but their roles are secondary to that of a Gestapo officer who suspects Hartmann of being far too close to his old college friend, Legat. Munich is a high-stakes tale of individuals pitted against historic forces that were set in motion by the flawed treaty ending the First World War, and of men whose friendship and, indeed, very lives, are at risk in this examination of loyalty and betrayal, family and country. Meticulously researched and incorporating authentic characters and incidents interwoven with Harris’ fictional ones, Munich is a fine, gripping story about power and self-deception, and an insightful portrait of the people, attitudes, and events that led to the outbreak of the 20th century’s worst military conflict. The U.S. edition of Harris’ latest novel is due out in January from Knopf.

• Shallow End, by Brenda Chapman (Dundurn):
When sexual offenses become the focus of a crime novel, seldom are convicted sexual predators portrayed effectively and in depth. Canadian author Chapman tries for a better result in Shallow End, giving full dimensionality to a woman imprisoned for assaulting a young person in her care. It is an ambitious effort, and succeeds brilliantly. Jane Thompson, a former English teacher, has recently been paroled from prison, where she’d served a four-year sentence as a child predator. Her already fragmented life is soon further shattered by the discovery of a body on the shores of Lake Ontario. It doesn’t take long for the corpse to be identified as that of 17-year-old Devon Eton. His head has been bashed in, and his mother is certain she knows who did it: Jane Thompson, who had been one of Devon’s instructors four years earlier, and been convicted of violating the boy. The evidence produced at her trial was persuasive and damning: text messages exchanged between Devon and Thompson setting up meetings; naked photos of Devon on Thompson’s home computer; a witness who’d supposedly seen the two in “compromising positions” and testified that Devon had confided to him that he and his teacher had been having sex together; and Thompson’s DNA found on clothing in Devon’s gym bag. Against such proof of misbehavior, the teacher’s denials and her claim that she’d been set up appeared pathetically flimsy. A year after her conviction, she’d confessed to the charges. In the end, Jane Thompson lost her family, her job, her reputation, and her freedom. Now she’s the most likely suspect in Devon’s demise, and no one—certainly not the police—takes her assertion of innocence seriously. Nonetheless, Detective Kala Stonechild of the Kingston, Ontario, police department pursues the facts surrounding Devon’s murder. Something of a loner, Stonechild has challenges of her own to grapple with as well. A native Canadian from a First Nations reserve, she has faced all the tribulations common to people of her heritage. She lived on the streets for a while, and after that fact became public she lost custody of her niece, Dawn, while the girl’s parents were in prison. On top of that, Stonechild’s partner, Paul Gundersund, is going through the breakup of his marriage to a woman who is convinced that Gundersund will go running to Stonechild if she gives him up. More than enough on Stonechild’s plate, then. But not enough to keep her from getting to the bottom of things. Brenda Chapman has written a textured, nuanced account of people caught up in the whirlwind of a major criminal investigation. She sensitively explores the shifting boundaries between accusation and guilt, public image and self-worth, and Shallow End ranks among the very best of recent Canadian crime writing.

Finally, a book from 2016 that I only caught up with in paperback this year …

• Night Work, by David C. Taylor (Forge):
When former movie and TV screenwriter David C. Taylor launched his debut crime novel, Night Life, back in 2015, I predicted good things for his future. Night Life (which went on to win the 2016 Nero Award) was a stylish noir yarn, set during the McCarthy era of the 1950s and perfectly capturing those troubled times. In his protagonist, Michael Cassidy, Taylor concocted the portrait of an honest New York City police detective facing off against a powerful adversary that was both compelling and impressive. The sequel, Night Work, picks up Cassidy’s story four years later, not long after Fidel Castro’s revolution turned his Cuban homeland into a Communist showpiece a scant 90 miles off America’s coastline. Castro has plenty of mortal enemies, and when he schedules a visit to the headquarters of the United Nations in Manhattan—in part, so he can thumb his nose at capitalist imperialists—his personal safety is seriously tested. Cassidy is dragooned into the security detail responsible for keeping the Cuban leader alive, but he’s not at all sure the people pulling the strings want him to succeed. Complicating matters further, when Cassidy was in Havana only months prior to all of this, he ran into (and eventually rescued) an old flame, a woman he’d thought was dead but who’d been sent to the Caribbean by the Soviet KGB as part of a blackmail operation against American political figures. It falls to Cassidy to protect Castro, while he simultaneously assesses just how far he can trust his former lover. Drawing on the steamy history of the early 1960s, and revealing its intricacies through multiple viewpoints, Taylor delivers an exceptional, perfectly paced tale that captures the drama and fear of a period when superpowers stood toe to toe … but it was ultimately left to the “little people” to make sure the entire world didn’t come unglued as a consequence. Readers should be pleased to learn that, by the end of this novel, Taylor ties up all of his plot’s loose ends, but leaves enough room for another entry in this lush, riveting series about the America of an earlier, but no less violent, time.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part I: Kevin Burton Smith

Kevin Burton Smith is the Montreal-born founder and editor of the almost 20-year-old 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 lives in Southern California’s High Desert region, where he’s working on a non-fiction book about married detective couples with his wife, mystery author D.L. Browne (aka Diana Killian and Josh Lanyon).

• The Driver, by Hart Hanson (Dutton):
As if he’s living in some fever-dream Sixth Sense, former Special Forces sergeant-turned-Los Angeles limousine driver Michael Skelling sees dead people, and has learned to heed their warnings. So when the ghost of a Chechen jihadist he killed in Yemen a decade ago pops up, alerting Michael to impending danger while he’s waiting for his passenger, Bismarck Avila, a millionaire hip-hop/skateboard asshole, to emerge from yet another trendy L.A. hotspot, Michael doesn’t hesitate, but springs into action. He is just in time to stop two “sk8r boi” gunmen from blowing away Bismarck, who then decides he wants Michael to be his personal driver. Or else. Yeah, I know—it sounds like the typical pulp-fiction meet-cute setup you’ve seen a zillion times. Avila even has a drop dead gorgeous trophy girlfriend to whom Michael is instantly attracted. And sure enough, Michael soon finds himself up to his neck in “shitloads of trouble and desperation.” But this violent and suitably grim book—a first novel from the creator of the TV series Bones and The Finder—rises above expectations over and over again, thanks to colorful storytelling and Michael’s surprisingly affable and darkly humorous narration. But mostly it’s the unexpected heart he displays that sets this one apart from the prefab set-up. Seems Michael brought back more than a cockeyed sixth sense from Afghanistan—he also brought back friends. His small limo service (just three cars) employs a messed-up hat trick of extremely loyal misfits: Tinkertoy, his mechanic, a pin-up girl for skittery paranoia; Ripple, a ticked-off, barely 19 double-amputee dispatcher; and Lucky, a chatterbox Afghan translator Michael smuggled into the United States. It’s this bracing loyalty between the four war-ravaged comrades that is The Driver’s saving grace, rooting the overused ex-vet trope in some much-needed humanity, and making me want to see them all again. Given the copious amounts of writing mojo, hard-boiled grit, and even harder-boiled heart Hanson serves up in these pages, you can deal me in for whatever he writes next.

• The Ghosts of Galway, by Ken Bruen (Mysterious Press):
Irishman Bruen is arguably crime fiction’s greatest and most distinctive stylist since Raymond Chandler. The books in his long-running series featuring cheerfully profane, woebegone private investigator Jack Taylor are instantly recognizable, marked by Bruen’s ballsy, lyrical prose: a sort of staccato stream-of-consciousness free fall that soars. Bruen doesn’t so much craft sentences as throw groups of words at the page in a tumble of lists, dialogue, snippets of exposition, digressions, dream fragments, and snatches of poetry and song lyrics that somehow always hit their mark. Only Jack’s black humor, fueled by a brooding swirl of sadness, regret, and profuse quantities of whiskey, holds it all miraculously together. Bruen’s books aren’t long, but they cut deep. You don’t so much read them as feel them. And now Taylor, down but never quite out, is back. In the series’ 13th outing, The Ghosts of Galway, we find him having just survived terminal cancer (a fucked-up diagnosis) and a suicide attempt (also fucked). Desperate, he’s working nighttime security at a factory owned by a wealthy Ukrainian with the unlikely name of Alexander Knox-Keaton, who throws Jack an under-the-table bone: the assignment to find The Red Book, a notorious work of heresy, allegedly written around A.D. 800, and currently in the possession of Frank Miller, a fugitive priest hiding out from the Vatican in the western Ireland city of Galway. It’s an offer Bruen’s P.I. can’t refuse; however, things are rarely simple in Jack’s world. Sure, he’s no fan of the clergy, but he is an ace manhunter, and he soon tracks down Miller. Not long afterward, though, the holy man turns up dead, with pages of a book jammed down his throat. Then the remains of slaughtered animals start to appear in the Galway streets—courtesy, apparently, of an ultraconservative religious group. Jack’s former friend on the Guards, Sergeant Ridge (a “real cold cunt”), warns him off the developing case, while his charming but deadly goth pal Em (a “punk psycho storm of murderous intent”) seems to be involved somehow. Before long the ghosts of Jack’s personal dead begin to appear, though Jack isn’t quite sure whether they’re authentic or manifestations born of too much Jameson. Bruen is in top form with Ghosts, and as expected, everything his man Taylor touches turns to shite. Still, the P.I. faces it all with such a dogged humanity and Everyman defiance (and the conclusion is so cathartic), that you can’t help but cheer for the miserable old bastard.

• Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper):
Traditional British mysteries? Meh. Sure, I can enjoy an occasional cuppa, but only if there’s absolutely nothing else to drink in the house. So it’s embarrassing to admit that Anthony Horowitz’s decidedly non-hard-boiled Magpie Murders may be my favorite crime-fic read of 2017. It’s certainly the most fun. Partly it’s because of the sheer cheekiness of this mystery-within-a-mystery; and partly it’s Horowitz’s clever insider-skewering of the British Industrial Crime Fiction Complex. Horowitz is an ideal candidate to deliver such a skewering. He rose through the trenches, composing children’s books (The Falcon’s Malteser), young adult novels (the Alex Rider series), and finally adult thrillers (including works featuring such English icons as Sherlock Holmes and James Bond), while also working steadily in television on everything from Robin Hood to Agatha Christie, before going on to write for such beloved (and PBS-approved) TV fare as Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War. So when Horowitz pens a yarn set in the industry itself, it’s time to pay attention. Pining for the Golden Age? Rest assured that Horowitz “writes them the way they used to.” Well, sort of. He’s not afraid to shakes things up. Call it Murder on the Disorient Express. We are told in this novel that author Alan Conway’s long-running series featuring Poirot-like sleuth Atticus Pünd is so successful that, despite her personal dislike for him, editor Susan Ryeland keeps her trap shut. The truth is, his stories are all that’s keeping her employer, tiny Cloverleaf Books, afloat. But Susan’s not the only one bored with Pünd—so is Conway, who’s been threatening to bump off Pünd for years. But this time he means it. Much to Susan’s dismay, the final chapters of Conway’s latest, just-delivered manuscript are missing. And the author has jumped from the tower of his stately country estate. Or was he pushed? As Susan searches for the final pages, this reluctant amateur sleuth finds herself caught up in the very sort of mystery the obnoxious Conway himself might have penned, complete with a slew of suspects (a gay lover, an ex-wife, an unpleasant neighbor, a wronged student, an abandoned son, an unscrupulous TV producer, etc.) and a manuscript full of word games, anagrams, hidden codes, secret messages, and shout-outs that suggest Conway may have been having a bit of fun with all of them. As does Horowitz. I mean, Agatha Christie’s real-life grandson even drops by. How meta can you get?

• Roughneck, by Jeff Lemire (Gallery 13):
Canadian comic artist and writer Jeff Lemire (Old Man Logan, All-New Hawkeye, Extraordinary X-Men, etc.) brings it all back home with this one-off graphic novel about former pro hockey player Derek Ouelette, who’s a long way from his glory days as a celebrated “enforcer.” Now he’s eking out what remains of his time in a dead-end town in northern Ontario, getting pissed, and pissing off the few friends he has left. Then his estranged sister, Beth, shows up, fleeing an abusive boyfriend, hoping to reconnect with her big brother. And suddenly the unpleasant son of a bitch is off the bench and back in the game. Old family wounds are revealed, and new ones are inflicted, and it’s all set against the backdrop of a cold, barren, snow-filled wilderness that is as unforgiving as life itself. Lemire, who’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers, taps into something universal and recognizable here, picking at the familial wounds that never heal. He’s at the top of his game in not only words but art, capturing a stark, hostile world of hurt that draws the reader in—bleak in its deliberate minimalism, with Lemire employing a scratchy, raw-edged drawing style and using a palette of mostly drab, watery shades of gray (color being reserved, mostly, for flashbacks). It’s all as rough and raw and non-pretty as the lives this author-artist depicts, but like Derek in his big-league days, he gets the job done. The story here doesn’t so much unfold as unravel, in slow-burn detail—nothing seems to happen for entire pages, only to be punctuated by sudden explosions of brutality, both physical and emotional. The hardcore lives of people caught up in endless cycles of alcohol and substance abuse, violence and pain they can’t even understand, is as wrenching as almost any crime fiction I’ve read this year, but Lemire is just a primo storyteller, burrowing into his characters with a sensitivity and empathy that slams you hard against the boards. Call it gloves-off, bench-clearing noir, tempered by a true love of the game.

Last but not least, one choice from the crime non-fiction shelves ...

• Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted, edited by Laura Caldwell and Leslie Klinger (Liverwright/W.W. Norton):
Anyone who writes or reads crime fiction—no, scratch that, anyone who claims to give a damn about crime and punishment (which, one would hope, includes everyone) should read this book. In a year when the very idea of truth has been polluted and perverted, twisted beyond recognition, and the very concept of doing the right thing (or even what the right thing is) has been publicly crapped on by those in power, this work is a fierce reminder that justice can not only be blind, but vicious, petty, and stupid as well. As if we need another reminder. You think everyone in jail belongs there? Think again. This book is crammed with example after example of innocent men and women sent to prison for not days or weeks, but years and even decades, only to ultimately be released, due to the biggest motherfucking technicality of them all: they were innocent and should never have been there in the first place. Blame it on systemic corruption, racism, incompetence, cowardice, ambition, politics, dishonesty—blame it on whatever you want—but nobody, from “average” citizens and “helpful witnesses” to the police, lawyers, judges, and politicians, gets away unscathed. Each chapter in Anatomy of Innocence follows a different victim of injustice, focusing on a different aspect of what went wrong, from arrest to (eventual) release and beyond. And every story is penned by one of this genre’s finest storytellers, including Sara Paretsky, Lee Child, Laurie R. King, S.J. Rozan, Brad Parks, Jan Burke, Gary Phillips, Jamie Freveletti, Michael Harvey, and Sarah Weinman. There’s even a never-before-published essay by the late playwright Arthur Miller. Axes are well ground here, and considerable literary weight is brought to bear. Each tale tears off another little piece of your heart; each story of wrongful accusation is another nail in the coffin of smug complacency and naïve belief that The System always works. There may be better books released in this scorched-earth year of partisan “truths” and rampant lies, but there won’t be a more important one.