Mystery Man, Colin Bateman. One of my all-time favorite authors returns with a new character who's the proprietor of a mystery bookstore in Belfast, Ireland. A neighbor of the shop, who's a private detective, has disappeared, so our hero tries to fill in for him -- primarily in an attempt to impress the girl in the shop across the street. Hilarity happens.
Something Missing, Matthew Dicks. The anti-hero as nice guy. A new college graduate can't get a job, so he takes up a life of crime. But he's business-like, so he researches potential "clients" whose living patterns he can learn, in order to visit their homes repeatedly without their knowledge, to relieve them of items they'll never miss. Thanks to our customer Jean C., who put us onto this one. (The subject of beneath-the-radar crime was handled equally well but very differently by Martin Limon in Slicky Boys some years ago.)
Memory, Donald E. Westlake. It took me a long time to realize how good this book is, because it was so unsettling to read. A man is given a well-deserved beating which leaves him with an odd kind of brain damage: amnesia which seems to follow him, erasing older memories as he gains new ones, so he can never find his way back to where he came from. A new, dark dimension in Westlake for me, a long-time fan of his writing.
The Ragtime Fool, Larry Karp. Third in a trilogy of mysteries built around the career of composer Scott Joplin. All are good, but this one contains a couple of put-downs of racism that deserve to be enshrined as classics.
The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, Sharyn McCrumb. I welcome the return of this fine writer to her "Ballad" series of novels about Appalacia in the 1800's, after several novels about, um, auto racing. (This is apparently a big interest in the eastern mountain states.) McCrumb is such a good writer that these books are interesting, too, even to someone like me who cares not a Honda Civic for auto racing. The new ballad book is set several decades earlier than the rest of the series, and features Nora Bonesteel, usually seen as an old woman, as a youth. It's like glimpsing your grandmother in her girlhood. Wonderful! Following are four books by authors who, I hope, need no introduction. Dependable entries from dependable authors.
The Gentlemen's Hour, Don Winslow
61 Hours, Lee Child
The Reversal, Michael Connelly
A Drop of the Hard Stuff, Lawrence Block
We are truly fortunate to be living in the time that these writers are at their peak.
Lastly - House Divided, Mike Lawson. The sixth Joe DeMarco. It's not really fair for me to include this, as it won't be released until July 2011, and I finished reading the advance copy scarcely more than a few minutes before the end of 2010, but it's such a wonderful book I can't leave it off my list. Quite probably there are hyper-patriots in the National Security Agency, and hyper-patriots in the FBI. And quite possibly their respective over-eagernesses could collide, with hilarious as well as potentially catastrophic results. Mike Lawson has leapt to the head of the class.
- Bill Farley
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