Pierce’s Picks Archives

Pierce’s Picks: “The Confessions of Al Capone”

Loren D. Estleman, Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Jun 112013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Confessions of Al Capone, by Loren D. Estleman (Forge):
One can’t help but admire Loren D. Estleman’s authorial versatility. For the last 33 years--beginning with 1980’s Motor City Blue--he’s been writing up the adventures of unreconstructed Detroit gumshoe Amos Walker (last seen in Burning Midnight). But the now 60-year-old writer has also turned out smaller successions of books about hit man Peter Macklin, Old West marshal Page Murdock, and “film detective” Valentino (Alive!), and he’s concocted historical novels

around real-life figures such as “hanging judges” Isaac Parker (The Branch and the Scaffold) and Roy Bean (Roy & Lillie: A Love Story). The Confessions of Al Capone adds to this last category of his storytelling.

Set in 1944, this new yarn introduces Peter Vasco, an FBI “drone” who’s typically “assigned to proofread non-classified instructions to Special Agents in Charge and the odd innocuous press release for errors of spelling and grammar.” One day, though, Vasco is summoned to Director J. Edgar Hoover’s office. He fears that Hoover is going to dismiss him for some incidental slip-up; instead, the director wants young Vasco--posing as a Catholic priest--to infiltrate the guarded inner circle around mob boss Al Capone, who has recently been released after a seven-year prison stint (part of it spent at Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay) brought on by his 1931 conviction on federal charges of tax evasion. Capone has returned to his estate in Palm Beach, Florida; however, he’s suffering from syphilis, only irregularly lucid, and prone to spontaneous rants. It’s up to Vasco to gain the declining gangster’s trust and elicit from him as much information as he can about Capone’s confederates before “Scarface” kicks the bucket (which he will do in 1947 at age 48).

Running more than 400 pages in length, this is a big book for Estleman, and one that displays his narrative-writing skills and comprehension of U.S. criminal history most effectively. Its chapters shift back and forth between third-person action and the first-person recollections of Capone himself. Along the way, Estleman provides readers with sharp portrayals of the mobster’s underappreciated wife, Mae, top Capone henchman Frank Nitti, and other members of the so-called Chicago Outfit. One gets the impression that Estleman invested more than mere time in this novel, that he had a genuine connection with the era and people about which he writes. As he told an interviewer recently, his biggest challenge was in capturing Capone’s voice. That, he said, “was the very kernel of the idea of what I wanted to do. ... [Capone] had a fascinating cadence of speech. He loved to tell a story; he loved to talk about himself; he loved publicity. ... I wanted that version of Capone to come through.” It’s only one critic’s opinion, of course, but from what I’ve read of this book so far, I think he succeeded in that task, and more.

* * *

Also new and worth tracking down is The Rules of Wolfe (Mysterious Press), by James Carlos Blake. It rolls out the increasingly tense tale of Eddie Gato Wolfe, a too-impulsive member of a Texas gun-running family, who signs on to work security for a Sonoran drug cartel--only to fall hard for a cinnamon-skinned beauty he should never have touched, and with whom he soon flees, pursued by a pack of killers. A great chase thriller. ... And Brits should look for The Resistance Man (Quercus UK), the sixth entry in Martin Walker’s heralded series about small-town French police chief Bruno Courrèges. Here we find the food-and-wine-loving Bruno investigating a cache of old bank notes and dealing with burglaries, one of which concludes in murder.

Pierce’s Picks: “Black Country”

Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

May 202013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Black Country, by Alex Grecian (Putnam):
I was fond enough of Midwestern novelist Alex Grecian’s premiere Murder Squad tale, The Yard, that I chose it as one of the top crime novels of 2012. Naturally, my expectations of its sequel were high. Although The Black Country

lacks some of the attractions of its predecessor, it still secures Grecian standing as somebody whose work is well worth following.

This sophomore outing for Inspector Walter Day of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad opens in the spring of 1890. Day and his rather eccentric associate, Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith, have been dispatched to the beleaguered coal-mining village of Blackhampton, in the British Midlands, from which three members of the Price family have gone missing. Concerns about their fate have only been heightened by a child’s recent discovery--in a tree’s upper branches, of all places--of an eyeball. As if these factors didn’t make the case weird enough, a seeming plague has struck the town, the foundations of houses and other buildings there have been undermined by aged mine shafts, and a gruesomely disfigured stranger appears to be lurking in the vicinity. Being a superstitious lot, Blackhampton residents take these turns with some equanimity; but Day and Hammersmith want answers and aren’t willing to leave villagers with any secrets unexcavated. As the village is slowly swallowed by the earth, Hammersmith is struck down by the advancing plague and a long-festering vengeance threatens to trim Blackhampton’s population still further.

The Yard made excellent use of its London backdrop and the displeasure Victorian-era Londonders exhibited toward Scotland Yard, which had failed to protect them from Jack the Ripper, the city’s deadly scourge of 1888. The rural setting of The Black Country proves less captivating (and reminds me overmuch of Charles Todd’s better-known Inspector Ian Rutledge novels). And though Day’s colleague, progressive pathologist Dr. Bernard Kingsley, eventually rolls into Blackhampton to aid in sorting out the mysteries at hand (together with his dim but endearing assistant, Henry Mayhew), the absence of other Scotland Yarders and the police-procedural atmosphere they helped impart to The Yard is keenly felt in these pages. I hope that by their third adventure, Grecian’s gang of colorful historical crime-solvers will have found their way back among the belching smokestacks and ribald underworld corners of the British capital.

* * *

New in stores as well is Reed Farrel Coleman’s Onion Street (Tyrus), which winds back the clock for series protagonist Moe Prager. We see him here in 1967, when he was still a college student, feeling lost in his own life and struggling to figure out who beat his girlfriend and left her to die in Brooklyn. ... Meanwhile, the celebrated Charles McCarry offers us The Shanghai Factor (The Mysterious Press), about an American spy in Shanghai, whose recent, heated affair with a young woman may leave him vulnerable as he tries to discern the secrets of China’s seemingly impregnable new intelligence agency.

Pierce’s Picks: “Little Green”

Pierce’s Picks, Walter Mosley Comments Off

May 132013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Little Green, by Walter Mosley (Doubleday):
At the conclusion of Mosley’s 10th Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith (2007), we found his Los Angeles private eye drunk, depressed at the loss of his longtime girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and wheeling his automobile over a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Malibu, California. “The back of my car hit something hard,” Easy told readers, “a boulder no doubt. Something clenched down on my left foot

and pain lanced up my leg. I ignored this, though, realizing that in a few seconds, I’d be dead.” It was hardly unreasonable to think that Mosley had thereby delivered his final Rawlins outing.

Six years later, though, Easy is back, if not in great condition--the plummet from that precipice had thrown him free, but it took most of a day for his old buddy, the ever-armed-and-dangerous Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, to locate him and get him medical attention. After spending two months in bed in a semi-coma, the detective finally reawakens to the world of 1967 ... only to have Mouse ask that he take on a new assignment: locating Evander “Little Green” Noon, a man of 19 or 20 (“but he’s immature for his age”) who disappeared after calling his mother to tell her that he’d met some girl on the Sunset Strip.

A lesser, perhaps smarter man might have said no way, that he needed considerably more bed rest before tackling anything so difficult. But Easy has never been one to fail a friend, and so, bucked up by a “voodoo elixir” supplied by “Southern witch” Mama Jo, he sets off in a bright red 1965 Plymouth Barracuda to bring Evander home--and in the meantime, protect the young man from folks who would rather he ceased breathing immediately. All of this, despite risks to his own life. (“It’s always been my opinion,” Easy tells us at one point, “that if a man’s going to be a fool he should go all the way.”) As the case unfolds, Rawlins will rub elbows (and more intimate body parts) with free-spirited hippie chicks, run afoul of gun-wielding thugs, do his best to hide a small fortune in tainted cash, and try to figure out why Evander’s mother hates Mouse so, despite the lengths Mouse is willing to go to rescue her oldest child. There’s a secondary plot here, too, which has Easy helping another longtime pal, Jackson Blue, squeeze out from under a blackmail threat.

Walter Mosley may have taken a half-dozen-year break from his man Easy, but in the course of it he lost none of his sure footing with this series. Little Green ranks as one of the finest Rawlins novels to date, and that’s no small compliment. These pages are filled with the author’s typically incisive characterizations and careful attention to historical detail. (You can almost smell the patchouli oil and pot smoke so beloved by America’s sexually liberated generation.) While this tale is certainly a mystery, challenging “research and delivery” man Rawlins to sort out why Evander vanished and remains in danger, it also boasts strong social commentary. Easy is always sensitive to the unfairness and insults any black resident of the United States experienced during the mid-20th-century; yet he senses things might be changing a little, that in the age of Martin Luther King Jr. and the African-American civil-rights movement, blacks may see more acceptance and evenhandedness in their future. For a guy who recently died, such revelations can be powerful incentives to go on living.

* * *

Also worth looking for at your local bookshop: Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland (Putnam), the second of Ace Atkins’ remarkably successful efforts--following last year’s Lullaby--to extend Parker’s best-selling Spenser series. This time out, the Boston P.I. and his sometime sidekick, Zebulon “Z” Sixkill, rush to the aid of gym owner Henry Cimoli, who faces mounting pressure and threats from a commercial developer intent on purchasing his condominium at Revere Beach, once the site of an oceanfront amusement park and dog-racing track. ... Complex 90 (Titan), by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, in which take-no-shit shamus Mike Hammer (last spotted in 2012’s Lady, Go Die!) precipitates an international incident by, first, traveling with a conservative politician on a fact-finding mission to the Soviet capital, Moscow, and then being arrested for murder. ... Steve Ulfelder’s Shotgun Lullaby (Minotaur), which finds his redemption-craving series protagonist, Conway Sax, trying to help a recovering substance abuser named Gus Biletnikov stay sober--and also stay alive, amid what look like pretty clear threats to the life of Gus, someone who reminds Sax a bit too much of his estranged son. ... And Original Skin (Blue Rider Press), David Mark’s second novel featuring Yorkshire Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy. The Scottish-born McAvoy--previously seen in The Dark Winter--and his fellow members of the Serious and Organized Crime Unit start by probing the apparent suicide of a “swinger,” only to have that lead them to the trail of a killer linked to the local erotic sex scene and powerful politicians who would think nothing of breaking a too-curious copper.

READ MORE: “Call It Noir If You Want to: Talking to Walter Mosley About His New Book, Little Green,” by Jeannette Cooperman (St. Louis magazine); “Resisting Little Boxes: The Soul of Walter Mosley,” by Amy Goldschlager (Kirkus Reviews); “America’s Blackest Jewish Writer,” by Harold Heft (Tablet).

Pierce’s Picks: “Good People”

Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Apr 192013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Good People, by Ewart Hutton (Minotaur):
Scottish-born author and radio playwright Hutton has already moved on to publicizing his second novel, Dead People, in Great Britain. But that book’s predecessor, Good People--the opening number in a series about Welsh Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi, released in the UK last year--has only just now become available in the States. It finds Capaldi paying a

heavy price for having screwed up an investigation: He’s transferred from his country’s capital, Cardiff, to “the big bit in the middle [of Wales] that God gave to the sheep.” It’s supposed to be a quiet posting, one that should give Capaldi time to rehabilitate his reputation. But this copper, who now calls a desolate trailer home, cannot seem to stay out of trouble. He dives into the irregular case of a minibus that went missing one Saturday night, filled with sports fans, after leaving a rugby match. The minibus is subsequently found abandoned, with no evidence of its six former male passengers. It doesn’t take long, though, for those men to surface, after spending a night in a backwoods shack. Well, at least most of them are heard from; one remains at large. His erstwhile compatriots claim that he went off with a woman hitchhiker (actually, a prostitute) they’d collected at a service station. For the locals, this explanation seems satisfactory. However, Capaldi is unconvinced, and digs further into the mystery, upsetting his superiors. The more pushback he receives, the more Capaldi wants to know what really happened--an effort that pulls back the covers on some rural skeletons nobody really wanted revealed. This is an atmospherically rich and sometimes amusing yarn, and if it’s not a perfect book, it’s still a promising start to Hutton’s series.

Pierce’s Picks: “A Man Without Breath”

Philip Kerr, Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Apr 102013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

A Man Without Breath, by Philip Kerr (Marian Wood/Putnam):
Back at the beginning of February, I lost a fine friend, 79-year-old Seattle neurologist Robert H. Colfelt. I hadn’t known Bob for long, only six or seven years, but he and I shared an interest in politics and American history, and most of all a passion for crime fiction. Bob was a voracious reader of Ian Rankin’s John Rebus novels, Martin Walker’s Bruno Courrèges mysteries,

and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander thrillers, and was so taken with Dan Fesperman, that he accidentally bought three copies of Fesperman’s The Double Game before he finally got around to reading one.

What brings my friend Bob strongly to my mind this week is the U.S. release of Philip Kerr’s ninth Bernie Gunther story, A Man Without Breath. Despite his fairly omnivorous interest in historical non-fiction, Bob had only limited curiosity about historical crime fiction. However, he did appreciate stories set in and around World War II, which meant he liked the works of J. Robert Janes, Alan Furst, Jonathan Rabb, Rennie Airth ... and of course Kerr, whose books about gritty, randy former Berlin cop Gunther do such a fine job of exploring the social and psychological hardships of the mid-20th century.

In A Man Without Breath, the year is 1943. Gunther has been assigned to the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau and dispatched to Smolensk, an ancient walled city southwest of Moscow, where it’s said deceased Polish officers are interred in a mass grave site. Not so much time has passed since Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad, and the Nazi propaganda machine is hungry for good news to share, as well as ways to turn worldwide opinion against Josef Stalin’s USSR. Gunther’s job is to make sure that any atrocities committed in Smolensk are firmly pinned on the Soviets. However, this experience-hardened sleuth finds something more worrisome there than a field of frozen corpses: a killer who’s infiltrated the ranks of the German military, and is prepared to sacrifice Adolf Hitler’s soldiers one by one.

Over the two decades now that he’s been penning this series, Kerr has become a master at portraying the intricacies of the Second World War, both martial and moral. His characters are invariably nuanced, and his story pacing gripping. I was looking forward to putting a copy of A Man Without Breath in Bob Colfelt’s hands and watching his smile stretch to its extremes as he contemplated the hours of joy this new yarn offered. Unfortunately, I cannot do that now. But if my friend’s spirit lurks anywhere nearby, I’m sure it will be looking over my shoulder as I enjoy Kerr’s story myself.

* * *

Also for the historical-fiction enthusiast is One for Our Baby (Mysterious Press/Open Road Media), John Sandrolini’s debut novel. The first-person narrator in these pages is Joe Buonomo, a World War II flying ace who landed uncomfortably in California after the shooting ended. There he fell in love with a starlet-wannabe named Helen, but eventually lost her. Now it’s six years later, 1960, and Buonomo is working an air-freight enterprise. He also does the occasional duty for singer Frank Sinatra, including drop-offs and pick-ups of women who’ve caught the crooner’s roving eye. Taking on one such assignment, though, Buonomo discovers that his passenger is none other than the lovely Helen. Within a short period, the two realize that their mutual affections haven’t died. But the next day, Helen disappears. Not surprisingly, the besotted Buonomo wants to find what has happened--even if getting her back means butting heads with mobsters and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s backers, and maybe saving her only to lose her again to Sinatra.

Pierce’s Picks: “Alive!”

Loren D. Estleman, Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Apr 032013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Alive!, by Loren D. Estleman (Forge):
Michigan resident Loren D. Estleman is certainly best known for having produced 22 novels--thus far, anyway--about Detroit gumshoe Amos Walker (Burning Midnight, 2012). Prolific writer that he is, he has also penned a succession of tales focusing on hit man Peter Macklin and a seven-book series of thrillers rooted in the Motor City’s

criminal history. Oh, and of course he’s concocted a generous number of Westerns. And standalones too, such as the forthcoming The Confessions of Al Capone.

In the late 1990s, Estleman introduced yet another protagonist, a young Los Angeles “film detective” by the name of Valentino--no relation to the silent-film performer of that same name--who serves as an archivist for UCLA’s Film Preservation Department and lives in a historic but rundown movie theater that he is slowly (and expensively) restoring. Valentino, whose initial investigations were related in short stories published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, specializes in digging up valuable vintage films, but along the way he becomes involved in mysteries of a more violent variety. For instance, Alive! (his third book-length romp, after 2009’s Alone) finds him being contacted by an alcoholic old friend, who is murdered shortly after Valentino refuses to get involved with him again. Regretful, Valentino sets off to figure out who terminated his former pal’s life, and why. That leads him to what may be notorious, long-lost film footage of Dracula portrayer Bela Lugosi auditioning for the starring role in the 1931 horror-movie classic, Frankenstein (a part that eventually went to Boris Karloff). As it turns out, though, Valentino isn’t alone in wanting to get his mitts on that missing screen test; others are equally interested--and considerably more ready to kill to acquire the reels.

Estleman is a veteran film enthusiast, so he brings an abundance of knowledge about Hollywood history and trivia to this sometimes humorous series. Readers who enjoyed the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s collection of Tinsel Town mysteries featuring Toby Peters, or who reveled in Jonathan Gash’s stories about antiques “divvie” Lovejoy, should find much to like in these Valentino yarns.

* * *

Also new and worth looking over is Murder by the Book (Sphere), the 18th installment in Susanna Gregory’s popular series about 14th-century English physician-sleuth Matthew Bartholomew. In these pages we find tempers flaring at the colleges of the University of Cambridge over plans to create a democratizing Common Library. After a corpse is discovered in the library’s garden, and then more murders take place in the adjacent town (supposedly committed by smugglers), it falls to Bartholomew to end the bloodshed and

restore peaceful co-existence between Cambridge and its growing institutions of learning. ... The plot of Gregory Gibson’s caperish debut novel, The Old Turk’s Load (Mysterious Press), builds around a $5 million shipment of high-grade heroin that vanishes amid Newark, New Jersey’s 1967 riots. Between these covers you’ll find an entertaining cast of eccentrics that includes a crime boss in rather desperate need of anger management, a Manhattan developer of dubious honesty, and a private eye who’s much in the market for some redemption. In addition to delivering a memorable final showdown, Gibson makes excellent use of his tale’s quirky historical setting. ... Finally, in Criminal Enterprise (Putnam), Owen Laukkanen brings back his justice-seeking duo, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Kirk Stevens and FBI agent Carla Windermere, who were last seen in The Professionals. Here, the pair seek to bring down Carter Tomlin, a formerly successful executive who, after being laid off as a consequence of the Bush recession, turns to robbing banks in order to keep up his living standards. As he did in The Professionals, Laukkanen executes this work of suspense largely from the viewpoint of the “bad guy,” in this case Tomlin, stirring readers to sympathize with his plight. He’s less successful at making Stevens and Windermere compelling.

Pierce’s Picks: “The Scent of Death”

Andrew Taylor, Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Feb 282013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Scent of Death, by Andrew Taylor (HarperCollins UK):
British fictionist Taylor has been making rival authors jealous ever since he won the John Creasey Memorial Award from the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) for Caroline Minuscule, his 1982 debut work. Since then he’s gone on to create several broadly commended series, among them the Lydmouth stories and the Roth Trilogy, but in recent years has concentrated on standalone historical works with a distinctly criminal bent. The American Boy (2003;

retitled An Unpardonable Crime in the States) built a gothic-seasoned mystery around a young Edgar Allan Poe, while Bleeding Heart Square (2008) was a concoction of intrigue focused on a manipulative London landlord who may have been implicated in a woman’s disappearance. It was in the wake of Bleeding Heart Square’s publication that Taylor received the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for his lifetime achievement in crime writing. The Scent of Death, being released this week in the UK, transports readers back to still-tiny New York City in the midst of the American Revolution. Edward Savill, a “coming man” with the British government’s colonial department, lands at Manhattan Island in 1778 with the assignment to analyze claims on property made by British loyalists rudely displaced by the independence movement. Right away, however, Savill finds himself mixed up with death--not simply the discovery of a corpse afloat in the East River, but the slaying of another man in a particularly squalid district known as Canvas Town. The authorities don’t evince much interest in these wrongdoings; they have enough worrying them, what with spies and refugees streaming into town, and suspicious fires threatening every stick of local architecture. “Justice,” in some cases, means little more than hanging a convenient black man. Yet even as Savill tries to carry out his assigned duties--distracted frequently by questions involving his hosts, the generally respected but odd Wintour clan--he becomes embroiled in a murder inquiry, the results of which could be as consequential as any threats posed by rebellious colonists. Taylor’s plot is intricate and absorbing, but it’s the quality of his prose and the depth of his characterizations that will most likely win you over.

* * *

Also new and worth your noticing this week: Stephan Talty’s Black Irish (Ballantine), about a Harvard-educated young police detective, Absalom “Abbie” Kearney, whose return to her native Buffalo, New York, leaves her scrambling for answers after the sadistic murder of a man in a church basement--an offense that threatens to expose long-held secrets within her own family; and Angel’s Gate (Scribner), P.G. Sturges’ third wryly humorous novel about “vigilante-for-hire” Dick Henry. His search here for a missing woman leads Henry--aka the Shortcut Man--into the circle of an aging but randy Hollywood mogul, and soon draws him as well into a historical puzzle involving a death on a boat and a screenplay of uncertain authorship.

Pierce’s Picks: “The Boyfriend”

Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Feb 222013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Boyfriend, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press):
Southern California writer Thomas Perry hit it big right off the bat, his 1983 suspenser, The Butcher’s Boy, winning an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Since then, he’s produced a variety of standalone thrillers, as well as seven entries in a series featuring Native American “guide”/troubleshooter Jane Whitefield (most recently last year’s Poison Flower).

The Boyfriend reintroduces protagonist Jack Till (Silence), who retired from the Los Angeles Police Department as a homicide detective after almost two dozen years and now earns a living as a private investigator, content to take on unremarkable cases that allow him time enough to help care for Holly, his 28-year-old daughter with Down syndrome. However, Till has recently taken on a more difficult assignment, to solve the slaying of high-end “professional escort” Catherine Hamilton. The cops have pretty much exhausted their interest in that murder, designating it a simple shooting in the course of a robbery. But Catherine’s parents want to know more. Till’s own digging around the details of Catherine’s demise soon reveals a disturbing pattern: she’s one in a string of female escorts, all with strawberry blond hair but residing in different towns, who’ve been killed in their homes with the same sort of gun. For Till to get to the bottom of it all, he’ll have to become intimately acquainted with the clandestine depths of the online escort business, and figure out some way to curtail the predations of a murderer unusually adept at getting close to women who are, by professional necessity, self-protective in the extreme.

* * *

Also new this week is Birthdays for the Dead (Harper), which finds Scottish author Stuart MacBride putting aside his usual series protagonist, Aberdeen Detective Sergeant Logan McRae (Shatter the Bones), to take up the dark tale of Ash Henderson. This detective constable’s only daughter, Rebecca, vanished five years ago at age 13, evidently one in a string of girls taken by “The Birthday Boy,” a kidnapper/murderer who’s notorious for sending the parents of his victims homemade birthday cards that show their beloved offspring being tortured. (I did say this was a dark tale, didn’t I?) The thing is, though, Henderson isn’t publicizing his daughter’s fate; he tells everyone she ran away from home, because if others--including his new partner, a “mentally unstable psychologist” named Alice McDonald--knew the truth, he’d almost surely be booted from the Birthday Boy case, and he doesn’t want out until he’s had the chance to take vengeance on his daughter’s killer. This can be a difficult read at times, but MacBride is a skilled storyteller who can keep you flipping pages even though you fear what might happen next.

READ MORE: “Leggin’ It,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).

Pierce’s Picks: “A Treacherous Likeness”

Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Feb 142013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

A Treacherous Likeness, by Lynn Shepherd (Corsair UK):
In her follow-up to last year’s The Solitary House, author Lynn Shepherd draws us back to the mid-19th century and into the company of private sleuth Charles Maddox, the great-nephew of the detective she employed in her debut novel, 2010’s Murder at Mansfield Park (a tribute to the work

of Jane Austen). In A Treacherous Likeness, Maddox--having accepted an assignment from the surviving, disagreeable son of British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary (the author of Frankenstein)--discovers himself caught up in a vicious quarrel over the long-dead writer’s legacy. His search through previously concealed papers also raises serious questions about the demise, in 1816, of Shelley’s original spouse, Harriet, whom the writer had abandoned two years before she was found--drowned and pregnant--in London’s Hyde Park. Could Harriet’s “suicide” have been something far more disturbing than that? And might Maddox’s great-uncle have had a hand in covering up the real circumstances of Harriet’s death? Shepherd does a fine job of blending facts and informed supposition into an atmospherically rich whole. This same novel, retitled A Fatal Likeness, has been set for release in the States come August.

* * *

Also new and worth locating: Lawrence Block’s Hit Me (Mulholland), which finds series assassin-for-hire John P. Keller leaving his family and what he’d hoped would be a new life in New Orleans, renovating houses, in order to take on several more lucrative--and colorful--kill jobs in New York, the West Indies, and Wyoming; and Gordon McAlpine’s unusual Hammett Unwritten (Seventh Street Books), in which Dashiell Hammett struggles through a years-long writer’s block that thrusts him back into the company of the “real” characters who inspired the story of The Maltese Falcon.

Pierce’s Picks: “The Golden Calf”

Pierce’s Picks Comments Off

Feb 082013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Golden Calf, by Helene Tursten; translated by
Laura A. Wideburg (Soho Crime):
Most readers outside of Scandinavia probably didn’t encounter the character of Swedish cop Irene Huss until 2003, when Helene Tursten’s first novel in the series, Detective Inspector Huss (originally Den krossade tanghästen),

was published in an English translation. Since that time, four other Huss police procedurals have been rendered into English, with another half dozen still awaiting that treatment. The Golden Calf, published in 2004 as Guldkalven, finds Huss (a mother and jujitsu expert when she isn’t tracking down malefactors) probing the slaying, near the town of Göteborg, of a prosperous restaurateur named Kjell Ceder. His wife, Sanna, discovered the body, and it isn’t long before Huss and her Violent Crimes Unit partner, Tommy Persson, start to figure this for a crime of passion, with the notably pale and peculiarly hostile Sanna to blame. After all, the Ceder marriage was hardly ideal; the paternity of their newborn son was even in doubt. But when two more people are found murdered in the same execution-style manner, the detectives must revise their theories. It turns out that one of the latter victims had once been a business partner with Sanna, and it isn’t long before the detectives learn that a third partner in
that venture has been missing for years. Rather than being a killer, could Sanna Kaegler-Ceder actually be the next target?

* * *

Also new and worth checking out: Holy Smoke, by Frederick Ramsay (Poisoned Pen Press), set in Jerusalem in 29 A.D., where the high-ranking rabbi Gamaliel and his physician assistant, Loukas (an ancient Holmes-and-Watston-type pairing), investigate the appearance of a badly burned corpse in a temple’s inner sanctum; and Bear Is Broken (Mysterious Press), Lachlan Smith’s debut legal thriller about a couple of criminal defense attorney brothers in San Francisco, the elder of whom is shot in the head before delivering his closing argument in a case. The other brother then tries to ferret out who’s behind this crime--only to learn more than he expected about his wounded sibling and their much-troubled family past.

Older Entries