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Win by Harlan Coben
I’ve been listening to the Myron Bolitar books as I exercise and have gotten intrigued by his partner Winthrop (Win) Horne Lockwood III. Like James Lee Burke’s Clete Purcell, Robert B. Parker’s Hawk, Dennis Lehane’s Bubba Rogowski, Walter Mosely’s Mouse, and other partners who do the gritty violence that the protagonists are too scrupulous to do. Here Win gets his own book, fleshing out his backstory with a pair of FBI cases from the 1970s: a radical bombing and the kidnapping of his cousin. Win unravels the pairs of cases and his own family history in a well-paced tale with plenty of action.
Snow by John Banville
This was a pick for my book club and turned out to be a nice introduction to the Irish author (and Booker Prize winner) John Banville. Set in the late 1950s, it’s kind of an anti-Father Brown story—a police procedural in which St. John (“Sinjin”) Strafford, investigates the murder and emasculation of a Catholic priest in an Irish mansion. Strafford is an interesting character, wry and astute, if somewhat detached, though the other characters, with the exception of the innkeeper and his wife, were subpar. Strafford’s observations and Banville’s writing kept me reading, but the plot was a bit predictable.
The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts
Adam Roberts is a new author to me. Set in techno-futuristic England, The Real-Town Murders, (Roberts’s 16th novel, who knew) starts off with a locked room – or locked trunk – murder: a body is found in a car being built on the robotic assembly-line there are no human working. The dystopian sci-fi has some nice world building (and word-building) and the world is revealed slowly but surely. The noirish hero, Alma, a free-lance sleuth, must return home every four hours to tend to her ailing lover who has been infected with a neoplastic lipid. The treatments must come exactly every four hours and involve tasks that only she can do because of the bio-engineering of the disease. There are Hitchcock allusions, a government whistleblower called Derp Throat, teleportation, and an artificial environment called The Shine. It’s an elegantly written, ingenious novel.
Broken Fields by Marci Rendon
The fourth book in the Cash Blackbear series, now published by SOHO Press. Cash Blackbear continues to grow as she finds herself taking responsibility for a young Native girl who is found hiding in the house of a murder victim. Cash goes off in search of the mother, but she is forced to leave the girl with the wife of the murdered farmer, who is now engaged in an affair with a local farm boy. Things get messy. In the meantime, there is a bank robbery and Cash’s mentor Sheriff Wheaton get s locked in the trunk off his cruiser when the robbers get the drop on him. A strong fourth novel for Marcy Rendon.
