PETER LEONARD - SWEET DREAMS (2020)

 

Synopsis/blurb ....

Kate McGraw, the lone female on the US Marshals fugitive task force, is on the trail of homicidal bank robber when she is shot by a drugged-up ex-con. While she is in the hospital recuperating, a mysterious stranger leaves a bouquet of flowers in her room. Days later Kate is discharged. Still recuperating, she sees a man in a car parked on the street watching her apartment. This is the third time she has seen him. Kate gets the license number, follows and confronts him and discovers he’s her estranged father, Frank Galvin who disappeared when she was six. Frank tells her he’s been in prison for the last eighteen years, arrested for armed robbery. Indignant, Kate asks him what he wants. He tells her he can help her catch the bank robber.

As Kate and Frank try to rekindle their relationship, Frank helps Kate and her team zero in on Ray Skinner, the dangerous sociopath who has now robbed seven banks and murdered two people. Feeling the heat of law enforcement breathing down his neck, Skinner discovers the identities of the US Marshals who are pursuing him and goes after Kate. He wants to find out what they know about him. Filled with real-life characters and pitch-perfect dialogue, Sweet Dreams will have you on the edge of your seat until the climatic final scene.

High energy, fast-paced and exciting. 

A prolific bank robber, a team of Marshalls, an ex-con, White supremacists, a judge in danger, a family re-union, cross-border flight, police cooperation, investigation, surveillance, stakeouts, boat rides, back-story and history, drugs, criminal partners, a patsy and a helluva lot more.

My kind of book. I do prefer thieves and robberies and heists and con men in my fiction to reading about murder and serial killers, so the plot of the book was one which attracted me. And it was well-executed by the author.

I liked the dynamics of the relationship between Kate, our main protagonist and Frank her ex-con father. I enjoyed seeing them re-establish a connection after some lies in their past. It was a wee bit of a stretch, Kate involving her father in the case, while shutting out the rest of her team, but I was happy to go where the author was leading and it didn't bump me out of the book. 

Decent support cast of characters..... the other cops, the villain of the piece - Skinner, his girlfriend and the lecherous judge. Leonard, like his father before him, creates excellent scenes of dialogue and confrontation with just the right amount of humour in the exchanges.  

Great story, satisfying ending. One I'll be happy to listen to again in a couple of years when I need an adrenalin boost in my reading. 

4 from 5

Peter Leonard has been enjoyed before - Voices of the Dead and Back from the Dead. The good news is, there's plenty more from him on the TBR pile.

Read - (listened to) April, 2021

Published - 2020

Page count - 320 (7 hrs 40 mins)

Source - Audible purchase

Format - Audible

ROB PIERCE - THE THINGS I LOVE WILL KILL ME YET (2016)

Synopsis/blurb ....

Escape. Lust. Revenge. Rob Pierce writes with an understanding of the darkness in the hearts of people who’ve been struck and need to strike back. From gun dealers to murders to the simply self-destructive, The Things I Love Will Kill Me Yet is filled with stories of men and women whose dreams can never take them out of their realities.

Praise for THE THINGS I LOVE WILL KILL ME YET:

“Pierce’s style is spare and hard-hitting, and The Things I Love Will Kill Me Yet delivers a knockout.” —Sam Wiebe, author of Last of the Independents

Twenty plus stories from one of  All Due Respect's top authors. Full list below ....

Thanksgiving, 1963 

Whorehouse Blues 

Ella 

The Real Thing 

Under the Bridge 

The Leaves 

Empty Kitchens 

Walkin’ the Dog 

A Small Knife or a Large Vehicle 

Killing Animals 

As Good a Cop 

The Judge 

Broken Window 

Mud People 

A Small Crew 

Hemingway Drank Shots 

Pancake Collection

Stomach Punches 

The Humanity of Dogs 

All My Exes Die in Texas 

Twine 

Dead Soldiers 

Cornered

My favourite was the opener, Thanksgiving, 1963 which was worth the price of admission on its own. A tense Texan Thanksgiving family re-union set before, during and after Kennedy's Dallas assassination. Family issues, alliances and fault lines are brought into sharp focus. An important College Football game provides a distraction, or conversely serves to focus attention on an strange time for America. Additionally, brawling and selling guns - both ticks in the boxes.

The others see us engaged with .... whores, bars, drinkers, motels, winos, homelessness, romance, pool, competitiveness, bar fights, bloodshed, dog troubles, marriage woes, revenge, burglary and consequences, mud people - a weird one, pirates and midgets, troubling following you around, love issues, war, the fight game and a lot more besides.

Not every story rocked me, but more often times than not they satisfied. Overall an enjoyable 
collection.

4 from 5   

This was my fifth encounter with Rob Pierce's work, after reading Uncle Dust, Vern in the Heat, With the Right Enemies and Tommy Shakes. Just Blood by Choice left to catch up on.

Read - April, 2021

Published - 2016

Page count - 186

Source - purchased copy

Format - Kindle

STEPHEN FRANKS - THE MILAN CONTRACT (2020)

 

Synopsis/blurb ....

'Except for the ugly brown bullet hole, the corpse could have been the image of the man in the mirror.'

Lukas Stolz, an ex-East German math's guru is shot dead outside the Hotel Napoli in Milan. But Lieutenant Conza of the Guardia di Finanza is not convinced the bullet was meant for Stolz. His investigations lead him to Nyala Abebe, a young Ethiopian emigre who may be a vital witness.

The gang behind the murder will stop at nothing to cover their tracks and Lieutenant Conza finds himself in conflict with powerful and influential adversaries.

He soon realises he's out of his depth as he seeks answers and begins to uncover the secrets behind the Milan Contract.

Very tense. Very twisty. A fantastic plot. Great writing. Interesting characters. European setting. 

What more do you want?

From the get go, this one grabbed me. A man is murdered outside a hotel. A man who looks just like him witnesses the crime and flees. Who is the target? Fortunately we have Lieutenant Conza on the case.

Our murder investigation, inevitably embraces a couple of missing person cases - the doppelganger and the young kid who fled on the moped. In Conza, we have an interesting, capable, honest detective, who with the backing of his boss manages to avoid stepping on too many toes within the various branches of the Italian police and authorities to dig for answers.

Assassination, disappearance, organised crime, black ops types, government secrets, gangsters, big business, family history, East German upbringing, split loyalties, the Stasi, betrayal, death, immigrant innocents, manipulation, coercion, control, surveillance, CCTV, tapes, flight, fugitive, a manhunt, an investigation, police corruption, police cooperation, a hitman cleaning house and tying up loose ends.

Brilliant, fascinating, complex, engrossing, compelling.

It's hard to believe this is a debut novel. I'm looking forward to what Stephen Franks serves up next.  

4.5 from 5

Read - April, 2021

Published - 2020

Page count - 322

Source - review copy from author

Format - paperback

ROBERT LITTELL - THE COMPANY (2001)

 

Synopsis/blurb .....

Robert Littell does for the CIA what Mario Puzo did for the Mafia ...

Robert Littell's The Company is an engrossing, multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic yet utterly entertaining and candid saga bringing to life, through a host of characters - historical and imagined - the nearly fifty years of this secretive and powerful organization.

In a style intelligent and ironic, Littell tells it like it was: CIA agents fighting not only 'the good fight' against foreign enemies, but sometimes the bad one as well, with the ends justifying the means as CIA-organised assassinations, covert wars, kidnappings, and topplings of legitimate governments. Behind every manoeuvre and counter-manouevre, though, one question spans the book..... Who is the mole within the CIA?

The Company - an astonishing novel that captures the life and death struggle of an entire generation of CIA operatives during a long Cold War.

A proper beast of a book. A little bit intimidating, I'm not going to lie. At close to 1300 pages and spanning the period from 1950 until the mid-90s, it was one tackled in bite-sized chunks over about four months. I really enjoyed it and more than once found myself applying the brakes to stick to my reading plan of 11 pages a day.

CIA recruitment, post-War Berlin operations, Albanian nationalists, Hungarian uprising, deep-set Soviet infiltrators, Bay of Pigs, Cuba, Kennedy, Krushchev, a papal assassination, KGB, Berlin Wall, Reagan, Gorbachev, reform, reaction, espionage, counter-espionage, inter-agency rivalries, interrogation, torture, capture, Afghanistan, family, friendship loyalty, trust, betrayal and about a gazillion other things.

It's an ambitious book and one I really enjoyed. I did find myself thinking about the author's depiction of events and found myself wondering if he had the fast track to inside information or a fertile imagination. For example the death of the first Pope John Paul after about a month in office - heart attack, natural causes or as Littell would have us believe a hit to prevent an investigation into the Vatican Bank laundering money for a foreign agency. 

Interesting, enjoyable, topical. I enjoyed the way the author used family and subsequent generations to provide some continuity in the depiction of events unfolding over decades. I do like espionage books. I like characters brimming with secrets and duplicity, where you present one face to the world while your real intentions are concealed.

4.5 from 5

This was my first outing with Robert Littell, but definitely not my last. At least his other books on the TBR pile are all a bit shorter. 

  

Read - January-April, 2021

Published - 2001

Page count - 1298

Source - purchased copy

Format - paperback 

SCOTT GRAND - SPORT (2014)

 

Synopsis/blurb ...

Hi. I’m Sport. My mother died, my dad hates me and I work for Russian mobsters. I run money collection for their bookie. But I have my best friend Gun by my side. So what could go wrong? It’s Sacramento in the 80’s.

Oh yeah. I hate the color yellow. Go Rivercats!

My second outing with author Scott Grand after his enjoyable All Due Respect debut - The Girl with the Stone Heart. This one came highly recommended and didn't disappoint.

A fast-paced one sitting read featuring tropes that are familiar to me, but which I often crave in my reading ..... criminality, delinquency, friendship, a crap family - mum dead, father - a drunk and a bully, Russians, debt collecting to pay a debt, school (sometimes), confrontation, violence, 80s Californian setting,  

My cup of tea and another author to keep an eye on.

4 from 5

Read- April, 2021

Published - 2014

Page count - 96

Source - purchased copy

Format - Kindle

WARREN READ - ONE SIMPLE THING (2021)

 

Synopsis/blurb ....

When his father leaves town, twelve-year-old Rodney Culver’s mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner—and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man’s influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time criminal world. After a simple heist goes violently wrong, Rodney becomes an unwitting fugitive, swept away from his mother to the primitive mountain sanctuary of the mysterious Lester Fanning. But with Lester’s skeptical lady friend in the way, and the town sheriff grappling with a curiously placed corpse, what once seemed like an easy plan quickly devolves into a knot of complications.

Another new-to-me author than I'm going to have to keep tabs on after this enjoyable outing.

Marital woes and desertion, seen though the eyes of a twelve year innocent, Rodney as his father leaves his mother. Sadness, bewilderment, disappointment and a lack of comprehension at the adult world. He soon starts to grow up, after getting caught up in some of his mother's boyfriend's criminal escapades.  

Further down the road, Rodney and miscreant mentor, Otis cross paths with the ruthless Lester Fanning and his current girl in tow, Nadine. Lester is a cohort of Otis' and reluctantly happy to help him until such time as he isn't. At which point, Rodney's safety is in jeopardy. Cue, the third wheel in our drama, an aging sheriff, grappling with a few personal issues ie. an awkward brother suffering the onset of early dementia and a dead body. He's a man with Lester in his sights. A collision of sorts is inevitable.

Lots going on here ..... a rural setting of Hope, Wyoming which for Rodney offers everything but; marital drama; a sort of cuckooing from Otis with Rodney a reluctant assistant to his crimes; other relationship dramas with Nadine and Lester. Nadine has probably bitten off more than she can chew with Lester, or it could be the other way around. I do like a strong female character. There's also a spotlight on dementia and the difficulties associated in looking after a headstrong and sometimes confused relative.  

Small town crimes - robbery, stolen goods, fencing mesh with bigger issues - human trafficking and death.

Lots to like here. Rural crime fiction with a splash of literary undertones.

4.5 from 5

Warren Read's earlier novel, Ash Falls sits on the pile. Go big or go home is my motto. 

Read - (listened to) April, 2021

Published - 2021

Page count - 280 (7 hrs 49 mins)

Source - Audible purchase

Format - Audible

JOHN SANFORD - MAKE MY BED IN HELL (1939)

 

Synopsis/blurb ....

Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby, bucolic town—a legacy of hatred that reaches back to the violent founding of the nation.

This literary masterpiece, back in print for the first time in over 60 years, includes a new Afterword by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography

"A first-rate story of violence and congealed hate." New Republic

"The story is electrifying." Saturday Review of Literature

"A brief, fast book, and those pages are terse. Sanford has injected the drama of spilled blood that made America." Los Angeles Times

"An unusual book with some brilliant pieces of writing, exceeding Celine and Faulkner in depravity and language." Kirkus Reviews

A depression era tale of hardship, poverty, resentment, cruelty and violence which I liked even if I didn't fully understand everything the author was trying to convey. 

In the middle of the book is a long winding poem (16 pages or so) which recounts America's bloody past. (Thanks to the afterword from Sanford scholar, Jack Mearns for a heads-up.) I suppose my lack of knowledge on early American history (I'm in the UK) might be a hindrance towards comprehension, or maybe I'm just thick. The tale told here, could be a reflection of America's violent history, but on a more personal level.

I enjoyed the story which is relayed in a non-linear fashion and which you kind of have to work at to un-pick. I read the book about a month ago and details are fading, but there is conflict at it's core.

Sex, history, jealousy, bullying, small mindedness, morality, farming, family, schooling, abuse, death, consequences. Probably a lot more besides.

I think I may have to re-read this one at some point to better understand it, which would be no major imposition. I think I was surprised by how graphic some of the details were. It seems very ahead of it's time for an eighty year old book.

A book I enjoyed, even if I'm at a loss to articulate exactly why. 

4 from 5

I have another Sanford title - The Old Man's Place to get to some time soon.

Read - April, 2021

Published - 1939 (re-issued 2021 by Brash Books)

Page count - 184

Source - review copy from publisher (thanks to Lee Goldberg)

Format - PDF read on laptop