Stephen King Channels H. P. Lovecraft for "Revival"

Revival - Stephen King

The first time Charlie Jacobs’ shadow fell across him, Jamie Morton was just a boy of six playing “army” in the dirt. That would not be the last time, though: the shadow of Charlie Jacobs would drift back and forth across his life for the remainder of his days. In 1962, though, Jacobs was a minister with the ink barely dry on his divinity degree, just arrived at the Mortons’ church. With Charlie's pretty wife and toddler son, the Jacobs family injected a little life into what had been a moribund congregation. 

They brought life that is, until they brought death. After that death came that memorable Sunday that Charlie preached the Terrible Sermon, and then he was gone. Charlie Jacobs dropped out of sight for four decades, during which our narrator grew to be a man, and became a minor rock god, and finally wound up a junkie. The second time that the shadow of Charlie Jacobs fell on him, Jamie Morton found himself at life’s low ebb. Jacobs fixed him up though, fixed him permanently with a special form of electricity that set him on the road to recovery.

Now flirting with the double-nickel, Jamie had never thought he’d see his old minister –and later savior – again, but when he learned that Jacobs was back in the religion biz, healing the lame and curing the sick in a classic tent show, he couldn’t resist. When the shadow fell upon him one last time, Jamie Morton discovered that the now-old man had a last project on his schedule: Revival.

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.

Samantha Kofer (and John Grisham) Come to Coal Country: Gray Mountain

Gray Mountain - John Grisham

Think back to 2008… Lehman's just gone under, the Dow is falling like a rock, and those industries that control the flow of money are panicked. Samantha Kofer works for such an industry – the real estate department of the world’s largest law firm. Rather, she did work there – she’s just been “furloughed.” Informed that the firm would hold her position and pay her insurance for a year if she’d intern at a suitable charity (at no pay, of course), Samantha finds herself ripped from a cushy job in Manhattan and dropped in a legal aid clinic deep in western Virginia’s coal country. Talk about your culture shock…

Take one high-powered lawyer who hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom since passing the bar and put her in a practice one step above small claims court, and she’s either going to go insane or fall in love with her job. In Samantha’s case, it’s apparently the latter: although only slowly, she comes to the realization that the reason she practices law is not to shuffle paper for millionaires, but to make a difference for little people. Out there in coal country, there sure seem to be a lot of little people.

Samantha finds herself under the wing of another lawyer, one who fights tooth and nail against the coal companies that run the region. But the companies fight back, and it's not always just in the courts: Samantha is going to learn that the hard way.

Mountaintop coal mine (source: GreenLaw)

Virgil Flowers Goes Back to School for Deadline (John Sandford)

Deadline (A Virgil Flowers Novel) - John Sandford

Virgil Flowers got the call, just as one might expect, in the wee hours of the morning. Never mind that to reach his phone he had to crawl over the warm, willing female flesh lying in bed next to him, there was  something more important afoot: a dognapper had snatched a pair of Labrador retrievers. Hey, I can relate – that’s damned important! Bright and early the next morning, Virgil found himself addressing a group of angry dog owners in the little Mississippi River town of Trippton. The locals were pretty sure who’d been snatching local dogs, but they needed help getting them back. Virgil reluctantly agreed to help – guess he’s not a dog person…

While investigating the missing pooches, Virgil and his local contact Johnson Johnson (brother of Mercury Johnson, though not of Evinrude Johnson) stumble over a meth-cooking operation. Great: now Virgil has an excuse to be in town! But wait, even while he waits for the DEA to raid the meth lab, a couple of kids stumble over the body of a local newspaper reporter. Something doesn’t add up, though – Virgil’s getting two entirely different stories about what was going on in Clancy Conley’s life, and that discrepancy is tickling his spidey sense. 

If something is rotten in Buchanan County that Fuckin’ Flowers just stepped in it – and with all the dogs in town snatched in the middle of the night, that’s definitely not what he stepped in…