Parker's Newest Protagonists: Keeping Secrets, Finding Killers

 Wild Instinct - T. Jefferson Parker

I’ve been reading T. Jefferson Parker since the days of Little Saigon and Laguna Heat, so yes – four decades now. And although I’ve never been in California’s Orange County, I sometimes feel as if I know its landscape and people from Jeff’s descriptions – the wild Pacific coast, the tumultuous border with Mexico, the deeply-ingrained Latinx culture. His latest, Wild Instinct, introduced me to a new aspect of the region; its Native heritage. For that, I thank him.

Wild Instinct, like about half Parker’s works, is a police procedural: when the tale opens, OCSD detective Lew Gale (né Luis Gallego) is on the hunt for a mountain lion presumed to have killed local real-estate developer Bennet Tarlow III. But when the ME finds a bullet in Tarlow’s brain, the hunt turns into a murder investigation. Paired with newly-minted homicide detective Daniela Mendez, Gale burrows into the workings of OC’s richest family, three generations of Tarlows, and Bennet III’s biggest project: a five square-mile city he would call Wildcoast. The usual suspects abound: local NIMBYs, the small but vocal indigenous communities, and all those politicians with their hands outstretched.

Maybe the first Davie Richards mystery should've been the last...

Pacific Homicide - Patricia Smiley

I happen to be someone who devours mystery-thriller novels, and if you’re going to read somewhere between fifty and 100 of them a year, you tend to have fairly loose standards. I know that not every writer can be Michael Connelly; but I certainly hope that not every writer is Tim Downs, either. My most recent read, sadly, is closer to the latter: that’s why I’m assigning a mere two stars to Pacific Homicide, the first Davie Richards mystery.

Richards, the newest detective of LAPD’s Pacific Division homicide squad, is a second-generation cop. Her dad, however, was unceremoniously drummed out of the department after he shot a teenager and paralyzed him. Unfortunately for Davie, the lawyer who lost the civil case is the newly appointed head of the police oversight board.

Not that this has anything to do with Davie’s current case, which is that of the beautiful teenaged Russian blonde whose mangled body was found in the LA sewer system. The diminutive (of course) but gorgeous (likewise) redhead with a streak of rebellion (I’m seeing a pattern here) will get the job done, though. That’s regardless of her recent officer-involved shooting (duh) while saving the life of the partner with whom she was having a fling (…). Never mind the complication of her ex's sudden reassignment to Davie's division.

You see where I’m getting to, right? Pacific Homicide is so full of tropes that it’s hard not to trip over a new one every page or so. Author Patricia Smiley (back in print seven years after the fourth Tucker Sinclair mystery) definitely didn’t go out on any creative limbs for her police procedural. Even Davie’s domicile is a trope of the female detective subgenre: she lives in a converted garage behind the house of a non-threatening older man: Kinsey Milhone, anyone?

All that derivative prose makes it hard to concentrate on the mystery aspect of Pacific Homicide, but to be truthful it’s not particularly well done, either. While the villain’s identity does come as a surprise, Smiley commits the sin of not providing clues to his identity for her readers to attempt to out-detect the detective. The bad guy’s tipoff? He’s a creep… not that being a creep is actionable in real police work.

There's also an ancillary plot: the aforementioned lawyer bears a grudge against Richards because, after he lost the case against her dad, the foxy mama of the paralyzed kid didn't spread her luscious legs for him. Give us a break, Patty! the guy hasn't managed to get laid in the past fifteen years? and he thinks it's the hero's fault?

Smiley’s pumped out a couple more books in the series, but given the snore-fest I encountered in Pacific Homicide, I’m gonna give ‘em a pass. I’d suggest you do the same.

copyright © 2018 scmrak

Johnson's Subgenre Novel may only be Interesting to her Subgenre

Cold Flash - Carrie H. Johnson

The world of mystery fiction seems to be becoming more and more fragmented. Once there were mostly police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and PI mysteries; then along came a slew of new genres like cozy, romantic, profession-based, and supernatural tales. Next came the sub-genres and sub-sub genres and maybe even sub-sub-sub-genres. It seems that somewhere out there, an author has concocted a mystery with a hero(ine) exactly like the reader – no matter whether that reader is male, female, Anglo, Latino, African-American, gay, straight, vampire, alien… you get the picture. In the rush to fill every available niche, however, quality seems to have taken a back seat to quality. I hate to say it, but Carrie H. Johnson and Cold Flash are a perfect example.

Killers Beware: Waterman and Stark are on the Scene

The Girl in the Woods – Gregg Olsen

When it comes to mysteries, the people who investigate crimes for a living pretty much break down into three categories: cops (think Harry Bosch), medical examiners (Kay Scarpetta) and criminalists (Lincoln Rhyme). Those are the protagonists whose investigations are lumped together as police procedurals. Scarpetta and her fellow Quincys now have a new colleague: Birdy Waterman of Kitsap County, Washington. Birdy’s a member of the Makah, a Native American tribe local to the area. Birdy and Detective Kendall Stark make up the investigative team of Waterman and Stark, featured in Gregg Olsen’s series of the same name. The Girl in the Woods (2014) is the first of three, so far, novels in the series.

The eponymous girl’s first appearance is a bit part – the bit being one of her feet. Birdy’s investigation of the found foot is only just underway when a dirt biker comes across the remainder of the body. The girl was only sixteen, and to make matters worse, she and her mother were the only survivors of a traffic accident that killed her father and brother. As a result, Mom became a hoarder.

Meanwhile on the other side of town, a young nurse’s aide is certain that the once-handsome and –vital former naval officer next door has been murdered by his new wife. As luck would have it, Birdy quickly realizes that the gorgeous young widow and her equally gorgeous daughter (but less-gorgeous son) are hiding something. Sure enough, he’d been poisoned. Is there a “black widow” on the loose? Wonder of wonders, the two murders are revealed to be connected by a tenuous thread – they’re tangentially related to convicted murderer Brenda Nevins, the “most beautiful prisoner in America.” That means Kendall will have to interview the woman in a scene right out of “Orange Is the New Black”… and, of course, there will be the usual heart-pounding climactic showdown with the murderous villain. Of course.

Olsen’s red herrings are pretty faded (more of pink herrings) and his plot twist so hackneyed that I could see it a couple hundred pages in advance. The mechanism by which the two killings are connected is so clumsy that it’s almost laughable. Considering that Waterman is a coroner / medical examiner, there’s surprisingly little about the science of the autopsy suite (the text doesn’t even mention instars when talking about “maggots”). On the other hand, the characters – including the dead girl’s mother and the protagonists – are fairly well-crafted, although Olsen seems to lay the family drama on a little thick when it comes to Waterman.

As far as mysteries are concerned, The Girl in the Woods would only merit two stars – especially since the character of Brenda Nevins owes her very existence to Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell – but Olsen manages to drag it up to average with a fairly good sense of place and some interesting characters. In reality, though, the novel is about what you’d expect for a debut novel. The only problem with this observation is, according to the “other works by the author” list, that it’s his eighteenth.

copyright © 2016 scmrak

It's Puller vs. Puller in David Baldacci's Latest: The Escape

The Escape - David Baldacci

As Bulwer-Lytton wrote, “It was a dark and stormy night”… The power went off, and the backup generators died, but when the lights came back on there was a single prisoner missing: disgraced former Colonel Robert Puller (USAF) had simply disappeared from what may well be the most secure prison in the world. So how did a convicted traitor in solitary confinement engineer The Escape of the century? There may well be just one investigator who could figure that out and track down Robert Puller: Chief Warrant Officer John Puller, Army CID. Notice those same last names? That’s because the two are brothers.

Puller begins his investigation by learning why his elder brother was serving a life-without-parole sentence in Leavenworth to begin with. It’s espionage, for which he was convicted based on testimony from two of his erstwhile coworkers. Partnered for the nonce with a spook from some three-letter agency or other (a long-legged, tasty redhead, naturally) Chief Puller soon concludes that his big brother had been the victim of a frame job – but by whom? and why? More importantly to we readers, how high will the body count be by the time he figures out how to clear the brother’s name (you can’t call that a spoiler, since you knew when you picked up a Baldacci book how it would come out, didn’t you).

Harry Bosch, King of the Cold Cases

The Burning Room - Michael Connelly

With retirement looming just over the horizon, you could probably forgive Harry Bosch for just coasting. That would only prove that you don’t know Harry Bosch! Though there’s less than a year left before he has to leave LAPD’s cold case files unit behind for the last time, Harry hasn’t slowed down a bit. Now partnered with a young hotshot, Lucia “Lucky Lucy” Soto, Bosch has just picked up a new hot-cold case: a murder that took place ten years ago, although the victim just died this week. Lead poisoning, you know…

Long thought to be the result of a gang-style drive-by, the bullet that finally led to the death of Orlando Merced turns out to have been fired from a rifle instead. That changes everything about the way the veteran cop conducts his investigation – and sure enough, a new angle yields a new theory. Bosch and Soto decide to run with it.

But Soto has solving a different cold case in mind, one with a personal connection. Once Bosch finds out her reason, he joins the young woman in her quest. It’s a quest that will ultimately have a different resolution than either one had expected.

The Son: Jo Nesbø Skillfully Transforms Revenge to Redemption

The Son - Jo Nesbø

Sixteen-year-old Sonny Loftus came home to find his father slumped over his desk, a pistol by his hand and a pool of blood by his head. A note suggested that he had been a mole in the Oslo police department who’d been tipping off organized crime for years.

Sonny did not take it well… twelve years later, the heroin-addicted young man is in Norway’s most escape-proof prison, convicted of serial murders dating back more than a decade. He’s also become a sort of father confessor, even a healer, to his fellow inmates; one of whom bares his conscience to Sonny one day: the boy’s father wasn’t really the mole, and was forced by a crime boss to kill himself in order to protect his wife and son. Within weeks, Sonny has kicked heroin cold turkey and arranged his own escape.

Once outside the prison walls, Sonny sets about getting even – with everyone involved. Not only does the bloody path he carves though the Oslo underworld get the crime boss’s attention, the local would like very much to discuss his activities, especially a homicide cop by the name of Simon Kefas. Kefas isn’t just another wily old workhorse cop, he happens to have been the longtime partner of Loftus senior. To say he has mixed emotions about The Son of his old friend is an understatement. To say that Simon has some baggage of his own is also an understatement…

Meet Tony McLean, Edinburgh's Finest: James Oswald's Natural Causes

Natural Causes - James Oswald

As a newly-minted Detective Inspector, Tony McLean tends to get the leavings in the homicide department, a tendency made worse by a poor relationship with the department's top cop, "Dagwood." That's probably why he's been handed a case so cold it's glacial; the mummified, mutilated body of a young girl decades past its sell-by date. Edinburgh is in the middle of a crime spree, however, and Tony somehow keeps stumbling over the latest victims. They are of a type: elderly men, socially prominent and wealthy. That's the crowd his grandmother ran with in her youth. Poor Gran, in a coma after her stroke more than a year ago...

Although the grisly murder count of prominent octogenarians mounts, McLean is drawn to the mysterious young girl who died so horrible a death. There is something strangely… evil about the circumstances. Even as his caseload mounts and his calendar fills, his personal life spins out of control with the death of his grandmother - and his inheritance of her substantial estate. 

Undeterred by good fortune and his increasing unease about a crime spree that seems to spiral about him, McLean delves into the circumstances of the mystery girl's death. What he will learn could change his life…

Tribalism in 1970s Atlanta: Karin Slaughter's "Cop Town"

Cop Town - Karin Slaughter

Atlanta, Georgia, 1975: it's a city undergoing change, but not in every department. The cop shop may be the worst, awash with good ol' boys who still think the darkies should stay in their place and that a woman is only good for one thing - and that thing certainly ain't police work. As Cop Town opens, the fifth policeman in recent weeks lies bleeding to death, shot by the hand known only as The Shooter. 

Into this steaming morass steps newly-minted patrol officer Kate Murphy, a gorgeous and marvelously stacked woman with two big secrets: one, she's a widow and two, she's not Irish. She was born Kaitlyn Herschel, Dutch and - gasp - Jewish.  Murphy's new partner is the brother of the man whose patrol partner bled out on page one, and the niece of the goodest and oldest of those good old boys that run the station house. As Murphy struggles to bear up under the avalanche of harassment, she learns that even her sisters in arms won't be much help. Yet it's the novice investigator who discovers The Shooter's pattern - and it's the rookie who just might be his next victim.