Thursday 30 July 2015

BILL PRONZINI - LABYRINTH (1980)


Synopsis/blurb…..

Nameless is called in by his friend, police lieutenant Eberhardt, when a dead woman's purse contains Nameless's business card. Nameless has never met her, and cannot make a connection. Next, Nameless is hired to track and protect a disturbed man, Martin Talbot, who may be harmed by the husband of a woman who died when Talbot's car collided with theirs after Talbot fell asleep at the wheel.

Labyrinth is the 6th episode in the Nameless series and the first one I’ve read since 2013.

Nameless is involved in a couple of cases here; one of which he is getting paid for – to keep an eye on his employer’s brother and the other which involves a dead woman – unknown to him – but who was found shot dead and carrying his business card.

Martin Talbot was involved in a road traffic accident, which resulted in the death of Victor Carding’s wife. Carding has threatened Talbot and Talbot - a moral and principled man and suffering from guilt and PTSD over the accident feels he should be punished and that his own death would be just. Rich sister, Laura Nichols wishes to avoid such an occurrence, as much for the damage to the family name in the well-to-do community as for any sense of sibling loyalty. She engages Nameless to protect him.

Nameless - broke again, takes the case, despite his initial dislike of Mrs Nichols and her rather sniffy attitude to “common people.” What is it about certain rich people that they are imbued with a sense of entitlement?

Nameless follows Talbot to Carding’s house and one of the pair winds up dead. During the course of subsequent enquiries he discovers that Carding’s son, who was working up the coast has gone missing. Somewhat spookily, the son is also the boyfriend of Christine Webster – Webster being our dead woman, who we encounter at the start of our book.

Do we have a mystery with a series of unlikely coincidences with our two cases connected by common personalities, but separated by motive? Yes, but not really as Pronzini makes you believe in the tale with his plotting skills and well-reasoned narrative.      

A trip up the coast, some gentle questioning, a bit of head-scratching, a bit of suspicion, some more digging, a few dots connected, a bit of late night burglary and an involuntary midnight swim in the Pacific. We get some answers.

It’s difficult to articulate just what it is I like so much about these mysteries.

A sense of place; certainly - with the ones enjoyed thus far, set mainly in and around San Francisco and the surrounding coastal areas. The mysteries themselves, with Nameless usually solving the puzzle, often times in collaboration or with the involvement of the police are only a fraction of the whole. There’s not an over-reliance on action to drive the book forward, sometimes our pace can be somewhat sedate, but that works.

I think the standout feature of the books is the main man himself. Nameless is single – not through choice and has few friends – mainly police officers that we meet during the course of his adventures. He has had health issues – Labyrinth finds him off the cigarettes for 18 months, after being diagnosed with a lesion on the lung in our previous encounter. There’s an inherent decency about him that makes him endearing. Stoic, lonely, aging, mortal……. I can’t help but wish him good health and happiness as I continue to work my way through this series.

5 from 5

Roll on August when I will be reading the seventh in the series – 1981’s Hoodwink.


I bought my copy second hand in the past 3 years or so. Sadly it’s not the signed copy depicted – that’s a web image I found. It is the same edition and I’m not the first person to enjoy it either. My copy – much read in a previous life - entertained members of the East Cleveland Public Library back in the 80s. The note on the inside flap of the book – published 1980 – describes Pronzini as a “veteran mystery writer.” Thirty five years on, the author’s creative juices are still flowing strong – Vixen the 40th instalment in the series was published earlier this year.




Friday 24 July 2015

CHELSEA CAIN - HEARTSICK (2007)


Synopsis/blurb…..

He thinks he sees a flash of emotion in her eyes. Sympathy? Then it's gone. 'Whatever you think this is going to be like,' she whispers, 'it's going to be worse.' When beautiful serial killer Gretchen Lowell captured her last victim, the man in charge of hunting her down, she quickly established who was really in control of the investigation. So why, after ten days of horrifying physical and mental torture, did she release Detective Archie Sheridan from the brink of death and hand herself in? Two years on, Archie remains driven by a terrifying obsession that was born during his time alone with Gretchen. One thing is clear Archie does not believe he was ever truly freed. Now Archie returns to lead the search for a new killer, whose recent attacks on teenage girls have left the city of Portland reeling. Shadowed by vulnerable young reporter Susan Ward, Archie knows that only one person can help him climb into the mind of this psychopath. But can Archie finally manage to confront the demons of his past without being consumed by them?

Another new author to me, another book my wife read and enjoyed, possibly a bit more than I did. Verdict good not great.

We have a series of abductions and murders of schoolgirls in Portland which sees Archie Sheridan called back to duty from sick leave. Archie is still recovering both physically and mentally from the aftermath of his previous case, which saw him captured and tortured by Gretchen Lowell – a serial killer, before she inexplicably saves his life and turns herself in. Sheridan is a walking pill-popping mobile pharmacy – shake him and I’m sure you would hear him rattle, such is the quantity of medication he is consuming. Our main man bears more mental scars than physical. The Gretchen case ruined him and his marriage and still casts a large shadow over him, particularly as he feels compelled to visit his nemesis every Sunday in prison, where she toys and plays with him before giving up the location of the body of another of her 200 nameless victims.

Cain cuts backwards and forwards with the narrative, presenting our current case and flashing back to episodes when Gretchen was torturing Archie. We discover more about what happened during the 10 days he was held prisoner. At times the descriptions of her physical torture is fairly graphic and explicit.

Cutting to our present day case, Archie and his team struggle to make much progress. The dead girls all look the same physically, but are from different schools in the area. The team worked the Gretchen case together previously and are a tight-knit bunch, all concerned and caring for Archie though he is somewhat aloof from them – no doubt a consequence of the trauma he endured and still suffers nightmares over.

Archie (for reasons I can’t remember) invites a young female journalist to observe and profile him offering her access to his estranged family, the team and Gretchen – assuming she agrees. Susan Ward becomes an integral part of our investigation.

Our investigative team, do eventually get a jump-start on the case and after the odd red herring and a bit of unlikely coincidence (or master manipulation from the evil genius behind bars) we get rolling again.        

Interesting setting – Portland, I can’t recall reading anything from that area previously. Interesting characters – Archie obviously, Gretchen less so for me, though I did like the dynamic between the two. Something which will obviously be explored in our next series book – Sweetheart.

Enjoyable without ever catching fire. I would be ambivalent about reading more from her, if in fact my wife hadn’t read and enjoyed a couple more in the series herself and they weren’t already waiting for me.

Probably a 3.5 out of 5, so I’ll go a 4 then.

Chelsea Cain has her website here.      
  

Acquired second hand last year I believe – probably charity shop purchase.  

Wednesday 22 July 2015

JOHN LANTIGUA - HEAT LIGHTNING (1987)


Synopsis/blurb…..

MEET DAVID CRUZ…..

He’s a Chicano homicide detective and he knows San Francisco’s barrio like the back of his calloused palm. His latest case: the execution-style murder of an illegal Latina girl.
It is August. And it is sweltering. Gloria Soto’s corpse lies sprawled on the steaming sidewalk. A bullet has pierced her brain. Her thumbs are tied behind her back. Scrawled in the dirt next to her is the figure of a bull. None of it makes any sense, and Cruz hates the case already.

That was before he met the dead girl’s family, her lovers, her enemies…. And the terrifying past that trailed her all the way from the war zones of El Salvador. David Cruz will be caught in a dangerous net of vengeance, passion and betrayal – a world as dangerous as the jungles of Central America and as explosive as …. HEAT LIGHTNING

“GRIPPING…SUSPENSEFUL….MOVING. A fine book by a fine writer” - Denis Johnson, author of Angels and Fiskadoro

“Cruz, in his flawed humanness, is a perfect hero for the 1980’s,” – Library Journal

A 1987 read for Rich and his Past Offence’s Crime of the Century  meme. Seeing as this month I chose the year I ought to have had a read that knocks it out of the park. HEAT LIGHTNING though was good, maybe borderline great but not a knock-out punch of a book.

So we have a murder mystery set against a back-drop of 80’s Central American politics-civil war-strife with the murder of a Latina girl among San Francisco’s exiled Salvadoran community.

Chief investigator for Gloria Soto’s murder is David Cruz. Cruz, a Hispanic cop works alone from choice usually, as opposed to any racial separation from his colleagues due to his ethnicity. Cruz is as alone in his personal life as he is in his professional. Separated from his wife over his immersion in his job and a lack of ability to express any emotions or empathy or love towards family or friends. His outlook has been poisoned by his job.

Quickly he finds himself immersed in a community riven by bitterness and mistrust, not only of him and what his police badge represents but each other. Everyone he talks to lies to him as a matter of course.

Left wing guerrillas, right-wing death squads, police corruption, illegals, people smuggling, civil war, land grabs, disenfranchisement, suspicion, fear, massacres, uprisings, family feuds, lies, secrets, illicit romances, money, mental instability, nightmares, death.

Cruz follows his nose, hitting up on witnesses and interested players, once, twice and even three times, catching them in small untruths and deceits as he slowly unpicks the tangled web. It was interesting seeing both POVs from a bitter conflict.

Decent setting, I do like San Francisco based books, but wasn’t aware of a burgeoning Salvadoran community there. (I can't recall mention of the legendary San Francisco fog TBH.)  I can recall the period fairly well – Reagan and Contras and Oliver North and Nicaragua and the Sandanistas and El Salvador – probably more relevant back around the time it was written than today. (Who knows – is history repeating itself?) El Salvador’s Civil War was ended by the signing of a peace agreement in Mexico in 1992.

Enjoyable for the history element of a nasty period in recent Central American affairs. Interesting main character. Decent resolution.

Heat Lightning was nominated for an Edgar back in the day.

4 from 5.

I have another John Lantigua book on the shelves (in the tubs) – BURN SEASON (1989) – similar themes probably -  A veteran of Nicaragua's civil war opens a Costa Rican nightclub, determined to stay out of Nicaragua's deadly politics, but the war catches up with him when a spy is blown up outside the club

John Lantigua has his website here – he has written a few more books – including 4 in his Willie Cuesta series. Cuesta is a Cuban-American PI.


I bought my copy of this one over 10 years ago, from I can’t remember where. 

Tuesday 21 July 2015

2 BY JOE GORES

Joe Gores is one of those authors that sits in the tubs of the library, without having yet been enjoyed. His first book – A Time of Predators was published in 1969 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

He had 9 other standalone novels published as well as several collections of short stories, plus the DKA Files series of books.











Dan Kearny and Associates is a 7 book series, comprising novels and a story collection featuring a car repossession agency. It has been described as being a PI version of Ed McBain’s 87th Street police procedurals.

Joe Gores died in 2011 at the age of 79.


There's a nice piece on him at The Thrilling Detective website.








Stakeout on Page Street and other DKA files

Kirkus Reviews

This collection of the complete shorter works (1967–89) featuring San Francisco's Daniel Kearny Agency, repo men (and women) extraordinaire, demonstrates convincingly how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, Gores's unusually detailed introduction and headnotes root both the twelve individual stories and the private-eye procedural genre they invented so firmly in the realities of his own work in skip-tracing and auto repossession that the first two tales seem barely fictionalized at all. But by the third story, with its briskly evoked carnival setting and its unexpected sympathy for the fleeing embezzler, Gores has hit his stride. Subsequent adventures of the DKA are all over the map. The perps range from a vengeful gypsy to a Dominican nun, the vehicles the agency's assigned to recover from a fire engine to a hearse, the moods from the trancelike calm of"Beyond the Shadow" (a puzzle story that pays off in a particularly handsome surprise) to the rollicking gaiety of"The O'Bannon Blarney File." Yet each one contrives to mingle vivid backgrounds, authentic procedural detail, the cleverness of the Kearny regulars-maverick Larry Ballard, ex-boxer Bart Heslip, eternally sozzled Patrick O'Bannon, brainy Giselle Marc-and soap-opera outtakes from the saga that's continued from Dead Skip (1972) through Contract Null and Void (1996), with another installment due later this year. Best of all, the DKA files remind you that one reason detective stories are so much fun to read is because detective work itself can be so much fun to do.
 
Cons, Scams and Grifts

In San Francisco, Dan Kearny Associates raids a classic car dealership, while in Los Angeles, a dying Gypsy fingers a Gypsy princess for his murder. In Hong Kong, a rare treasure is stolen by oil tycoon Victor Hess, and in Rome, Willem Van de Post plots with a powerful ally to get it back. The intrigue continues when the Gypsies hire DKA to find their princess, and a German baron contracts the firm to test defenses at Hess' mountain fortress. No one is who they seem to be, but they all have one thing in common. They're all scamming their way to Rome, where a spectacular con is about to explode with deadly finality.


Monday 20 July 2015

LOGGING THE LIBRARY - PART FORTY-ONE

Here we go again, another week and another tub of 50 from the room at the top!

Tub 41 - wake up, time to go!

Brad Smith x 2, Christopher J. Yates, Ruth Rendell, Mick Herron, 

Canadian crime

Liking the look of this one from 2014 I think

Canadian crime MK2


Chuck Palahniuk, Charlie McDowell, Gar Anthony Haywood, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza x 2,

Crime down Brazil way

Ditto above

US favourite I've been neglecting too long

Enjoyed by my son - my turn now I've nicked it from him.

Linwood Barclay, Charlie Stella, Barbara Dowd, Lou Berney, Jess Walter,

Gutshot Straight rocked!

New York fave!

Non-fiction 

Rex Stout, Hilda Lawrence, Harlan Coben, William Sutcliffe, William Marshall,

40's book - but a more modern edition

Hong Kong crime!

Nero Wolfe - new-to-me!

Arthur Upfield, Helen MacInnes x 2, Martin Cruz Smith, Walter Walker,

Espionage!

Bonaparte down under!

A book title that positively doesn't trip off the tongue!

M.C. Beaton, Wallace Stroby, Harlan Coben x 2, Hugh C. Rae,

60's crime - Scottish author.

US crime!

Hamish Macbeth!

Patrick Quinlan, Greg Rucka, Louis L'amour x 2, Helen MacInnes,

Just call it MacInnes week!

Western - or crime with hats as Rich calls it!

Atticus Kodiak series book!

Harlan Coben, George Pelecanos, Aldous Huxley, Ferdinand von Schirach, Zoran Drvenkar,

German author enjoyed by my wife!

Big-time favourite author of mine!

Tess Gerritsen, John Godey, Mark Watson,

UK author who also does stand-up comedy!

I enjoyed the re-make - I still need to see the Walter Matthau version!

Marc Davis, Helen MacInnes, Carter Brown,

Carter Brown - prolific Aussie author!

US author!

Michael Connelly, J.J. Connolly, Nick Taussig,

UK film-maker author!

Layer Cake sequel!

Harry Bosch book I believe!

No cover - a stolen book? Don't think so - I'm sure it's just a paperback with a detached cover that will turn up!



Taggart - but not the Scottish detective!

Scottish espionage queen!


Tub 41 put to bed for now!
Highlights......Yates' book looks good, Jess Walter rarely disappoints, Michael Connelly ditto, Brad Smith - a Canadian author yet to be enjoyed, Lou Berney, Charlie Stella, Gar Anthony Haywood and George Pelecanos - all old favourites.

Stout, Upfield, MacInnes and Carter Brown can they live up to their lofty reputations?

Lowlights..... not a dud in sight!

FULL LIST OF 50...........

AUTHOR TITLE YEAR SERIES
BARCLAY LINWOOD TRUST YOUR EYES 2012
BEATON M. C. DEATH OF A GOSSIP 1985 HM1
BERNEY LOU WHIPLASH RIVER 2012 S2
BROWN CARTER BLONDE ON A BROOMSTICK 1972 RH14
COBEN HARLAN GONE FOR GOOD 2002
COBEN HARLAN THE INNOCENT 2004
COBEN HARLAN JUST ONE LOOK 2004
COBEN HARLAN MIRACLE CURE 1991
CONNELLY MICHAEL THE BLACK BOX 2012 HB18
CONNOLLY J. J. VIVA LA MADNESS 2011 LC2
DAVIS MARC DIRTY MONEY 1992
DOWD MAUREEN BUSHWORLD: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK 2004
DRVENKAR ZORAN SORRY 2011
GARCIA-ROZA LUIZ ALFREDO ALONE IN THE CROWD 2009 IE7
GARCIA-ROZA LUIZ ALFREDO PURSUIT 2006 IE5
GERRITSEN TESS LAST TO DIE 2012 JR+MI10
GODEY JOHN THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 1972
HAYWOOD GAR ANTHONY ASSUME NOTHING 2011
HERRON MICK DEAD LIONS 2013
HUXLEY ALDOUS BRAVE NEW WORLD 1932
KETCHUM JACK OFF SEASON 1981 O1
L'AMOUR LOUIS TAGGART 1959
L'AMOUR LOUIS THE TALL STRANGER 1969
LAWRENCE HILDA BLOOD UPON THE SNOW 1944 ME1
MACINNES HELEN CLOAK OF DARKNESS 1982 RR3
MACINNES HELEN REST AND BE THANKFUL 1949
MACINNES HELEN DECISION AT DELPHI 1960
MACINNES HELEN THE DOUBLE IMAGE 1965
MARSHALL WILLIAM THIN AIR 1977 YS5
McDOWELL CHARLES DEAR GIRLS ABOVE ME 2013
PALAHNIUK CHUCK FIGHT CLUB 1996
PELECANOS GEORGE WHAT IT WAS 2012 DS+TQ4
QUINLAN PATRICK THE HIT 2009
RAE HUGH C. NIGHT PILLOW 1967
RENDELL RUTH PORTOBELLO 2008
RUCKA GREG PATRIOT ACTS 2007 AK6
SMITH BRAD ONE-EYED JACKS 2000
SMITH BRAD BUSTED FLUSH 2005
SMITH MARTIN CRUZ STALIN'S GHOST 2007 AR6
STELLA CHARLIE ROUGH RIDERS 2012 EW2
STOUT REX OVER MY DEAD BODY 1939 NW7
STROBY WALLACE THE BARBED-WIRE KISS 2003 HRM1
SUTCLIFFE WILLIAM ARE YOU EXPERIENCED ? 1997
TAUSSIG NICK THE DISTINGUISHED ASSASSIN 2013
UPFIELD ARTHUR DEATH OF A SWAGMAN 1946 IB9
VON SCHIRACH FERDINAND THE COLLINI CASE 2012
WALKER WALTER THE IMMEDIATE PROSPECT OF BEING HANGED 1989
WALTER JESS THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS 2009
WATSON MARK THE KNOT 2012
YATES CHRISTOPHER J. BLACK CHALK 2013