Scottoline's Fans Should Feel Betrayed by This One

Betrayed - Lisa Scottoline

You may think your day has been shitty, but it’s a strong bet that you’ve got nothing on Judy Carrier… let me back up a bit. Carrier, low woman on the totem pole at Rosato and Associates (all-woman law firm [hmmm: do I hear a reverse discrimination suit in the works?] in Philly) has had a helluva week. The boss dumped a stack of 70-plus civil cases on her. They’re not only boring, they offend her sensibilities. And then she gets a call from her favorite aunt announcing that the woman has breast cancer and will be going under the knife in a couple of days. And then her mother, with whom Carrier has a prickly relationship, shows up in town. And then her boyfriend Frank turns out to be a loser… 

On top of all that, Aunt Barb’s good gardening buddy, Iris, turns up dead. Carrier and her aunt are, of course, certain the circumstances of the undocumented Mexican woman’s death are suspicious, though the cops aren’t. With only hours before Aunt Barb goes all Amazon, Carrier starts snooping, as is the wont of the women of Rosato. She’s going to learn a hell of a lot more about a lot of things in the next couple of days; not least that someone has been Betrayed.

Judy Carrier, along with Bennie Rosato and Mary Dinunzio, is a set character in Philadelphia lawyer-turned-author Lisa Scottoline’s Rosato and Associates mystery series. Most of the earlier mysteries in Scottoline's series have featured either the dithering, ditsy Dinunzio or the brilliant but socially-inept Rosato¹, with Carrier usually serving merely as backup in the featured character's dumber antics or as a sort of comic relief - mainly due to her rather strange fashion sense. This time, Carrier takes the lead.

Ian McEwan Gets a Head Start on the 2015 Awards Season

The Children Act - Ian McEwan

There’s a hoary joke about a married couple who divorced when both are 54 after the husband had an affair with an 18-year-old. Once the wife had found a boy-toy of her own, she gleefully informed her ex-husband that she got the better end of the deal, mathematically speaking: after all, 18 goes into 54 a lot more times than 54 goes into 18. Ba-dump-bump.

McEwan ca. 2008 (source: wikipedia)

Such might well be the story of Fiona and Jack, childless and almost 60, when he decides he “needs his space” to take up with a coworker born well after his and Fiona’s wedding day. Their thirty-some-year marriage sundered in one acrimonious moment, Jack departs for his would-be lover’s flat and Fiona returns to her work. The scenario may be regrettably commonplace, but the actors are not: Lady Justice Fiona Maye is a judge in family court. Each day the slim, elegant juror presides over the dissolution of marital unions, the tawdry tales before her bench really not unlike her own.

Jackson Brodie Meets the Coincidence Fairy

Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson

Central Leeds

Perhaps the most irritating failing of crime writers is over-dependence on coincidence. It seems to me to be a form of laziness, lack of imagination, or both. One writer who’s made a career out of over-dependence on the muse I call the Coincidence Fairy is Robert K. Tanenbaurm in his Karp family series (at least once he’d lost ghost writer Michael Gruber); another popular author who’s sometimes suspect is Sue Grafton with her Kinsey Millhone series. And now I may have a third coincidence criminal: Kate Atkinson, at least from the plot of Started Early, Took My Dog.

Jackson Brodie, retired London cop turned reluctant PI, is backtracking an adoption thirty-five years ago in Leeds when he accidentally acquires a dog. At more or less the same time, retired Leeds cop Tracy Waterhouse (now head of security for a shopping mall) accidentally acquires a daughter. Well, actually, she buys four-year-old Courtney from a local hooker for £3000…

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).