2006 October « BookHound

{October 25, 2006} Nine Lives, by Sharon Sala

I’ve known Sharon Sala for years. She’s held my babies and laughed with me and told me stories of raising her own kids. To know
Sharon is to laugh. She’s got a wicked, keen, insightful sense of humor.

What she also has is a sixth sense for stories about love and suspense. Over the years she’s become a bestselling author of romantic suspense.
Sharon tells stories with breakneck pacing, breathless suspense, crisp and crackling dialogue, and about characters you get to know almost immediately. They could be the neighbor next door. Or the person you pass on the street and always wonder about.

Sharon writes under her own name as well as Dinah McCall. Under the Sala name, she pens thrillers with a romantic subplot (I don’t call them romances, and since I also read romances I know what I’m talking about). As McCall, she offers another compelling concoction of suspense with a swirl of the paranormal.

In Nine Lives, Sharon gives us Cat Dupree, one of her most tragic and most hopeful characters. Cat lost her mother to a drunken driver at 6. At 13 a man wearing a face full of tattoos savagely murdered her father and slit Cat’s throat, leaving her for dead.

Cat survived and became a ward of the state because she didn’t have any other family. Once she finally aged out and got out of the system, she became a licensed bounty hunter, determined to live in the violent world of her father’s killer until she found him and brought him to justice.

Marcia Benton has been the one true friend to make it through foster care with Cat. The two women would do anything for each other. Marcia has always been the one who looked on the positive side, the one who thought the world would eventually be theirs.

Unfortunately, Marcia fell in love with her snake of a boss, Mark Presley. Presley is married to a fortune and is unwilling to leave it. In fact, he’ll kill to protect it. Once he finds out that Marcia is pregnant with his child, he does exactly that.

When her friend goes missing, Cat goes to the police and tells them about the affair and the pregnancy. No one there seems interested in Marcia’s disappearance.

In the meantime, Cat’s path has crossed that of Wilson McKay, another bounty hunter who’s just as obsessed and successful at his profession as Cat is. They meet and the attraction is immediate, as it so often is in romance novels. But Sharon makes life difficult for both her hero and her heroine, throwing a lot of roadblocks in their way that have to do with plot and character.

Despite Cat’s best intentions not to let him in, she ultimately has no choice but to allow Wilson to help her. He has the contacts and the ears of the police that she simply doesn’t have.

Even at 432 pages, Nine Lives is a corker, a bristling, brawling, full-throttle read that sucks a reader through the pages like a black hole. I read the novel in three sittings, surprised at how much time I lost flipping pages. I felt like I’d experienced time loss from alien abduction.

Sharon’s fans will love getting a new book by her, but if you’ve never read a Sharon Sala book before, Nine Lives is a great place to start. Be warned, however, it’s the first book of a trilogy. You won’t end up reading one book; you’ll be reading three. But you’ll be glad of it

{October 25, 2006} The Second Mouse, by Archer Mayor

Cover Image At Amazon

I just recently discovered Archer Mayor’s mystery series starring Joe Gunther, an agent working for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. I enjoy reading crime fiction that’s well constructed and fair to the reader, so when I find an author who does that I tend to hang onto them. I’m going to be hanging onto Mayor and his series hero.

The Second Mouse (from a title given to him by his daughter, whom he thanks in the book) is actually the 17^th Joe Gunther novel, so I’ve got some catching up to do. But that’s okay. I like discovering writers I hadn’t read before who have a backlog of books. That way the treasure of the find lasts much longer!

As it turns out, Mayor is an old hand at murder and mayhem. In his native state of Vermont, he also serves as a death investigator for the state medical examiner and as a volunteer fireman/EMT. I’m sure he finds plenty to write about in his every day experiences.

The latest book begins gently, but with lots of unanswered questions, which just so happens to be my favorite way for mysteries to take shape. Joe Gunther isn’t a superhero/Clint Eastwood type of cop. He’s very human. He’s also easy to get to know and is exactly the kind of guy you want on your side when life gets messy and dangerous.

Gunther arrives on the scene of Michelle Fisher’s death just looking for something to fill in some empty hours. His long-time girlfriend (of 20 years!) has lately broken up with him and he’s still trying to figure out what he should do about that.

He immediately gets crossways with the Vermont local policeman there working the unattended death (which is a death that happens when no one is watching, and one that was unexpected). The officer thinks Joe is there to “poach” his case. Joe immediately allays the man’s suspicions and even offers to back out of the case. But Joe’s asked to stay on.

As it turns out, Michelle Fisher had recently lost her husband and was getting evicted from her house by her crass father-in-law. Threatening letters from attorneys written on behalf of her father-in-law quickly bear that out. Joe isn’t satisfied with the woman’s death being purely natural, so he digs a little deeper.

In the meantime, the story moves over to Mel Martin, a local thug looking to go big. Mel, his wife Nancy, and his accomplice in crime Ellis Robbinson hijack a National Guard armory and steal two M-16s. Mel is a definite low-life and hard guy.

Mayor quickly deepens his characters, getting more into Joe’s life as he deals with his break-up and pursues his feeling that something is wrong with Michelle Fisher’s death. He asks the state medical examiner to do an autopsy but Dr. Beverly Hillstrom (a character that’s been in the series for a while) tells him she’s on a strict budget.

Going to see Hillstrom to ask for the favor more personally, Joe soon discovers that she’s being blackmailed by a petty politician with enough skeletons in the closet to outfit and orthopedic school. Joe gets sidelined taking care of the blackmailing sleazebag in a thoroughly satisfying manner, then gets Hillstrom back on the case.

As Mel Martin goes on with his scheming, his wife and partner start up an affair that threatens to explode in a particularly violent manner. Deepening those characters, the reader gets a chance to buy into them as Nancy turns out to be a woman who really needs love and Ellis is dealing with his sick mother dying of cancer.

After Hillstrom’s autopsy, Joe finds out that Michelle Fisher’s death wasn’t natural. She died of propane inhalation. The death investigation gains momentum, but it isn’t long before fate intercedes to thread that storyline in with that of Mel Martin and company. The two stories hurtle headlong to a rip-roaring conclusion.

Archer Mayor is a simple but eloquent writer. His scenes quickly advance the plot and the characters, and they’re deceptively easy to read. I found myself just cruising through the story, flipping pages long past when I should have been asleep or otherwise occupied.

People who love mysteries but haven’t given Archer Mayor and Joe Gunther a try should pick up The Second Mouse or any of the other titles. I found it easy to slip right into Gunther’s world even with this, the latest entry into the long-lived series, and having no other experience with the writer or the hero. This is solid entertainment with a definite sense of setting and way of life.

{October 6, 2006} The Wheelman, by Duane Swierczynski

Cover Image At Amazon

I’ve always loved crime novels. There’s something about the excitement of running with criminals being chased by worse criminals and by crooked cops. Donald Westlake as a series of novels under his pen name, Richard Stark, about a professional thief named Parker that are awesome, and they’ve been around for 40 years. Lee Marvin even played in a movie based on one of the books (Point Blank), and more recently Mel Gibson did the same (Payback).

While reading through Amazon’s list of suggestions after another recent purchase, I found Duane Swierczynski’s The Wheelman. You have to admit, the cover looks really cool, all stark red, white, and black. And it’s about a wheelman, a getaway driver, that made me think of both those cool Transporter movies.

So, succumbing to temptation, I ordered the book. Swierczynsky is the editor-in-chief of Philadelphia City Paper and the author of a non-fiction book, This Here’s A Stick-Up, about real bank robbers and their craft.

The novel features Lennon, a professional getaway driver, and the bank job he’s doing as part of a three-man crew. The novel opens up on them in the middle of the robbery when everything is a busted play and it looks like the devil is about to get his due. This leads to a high-speed chase which ends up with the car getting T-boned by a large van that appears out of nowhere, letting Lennon know something has gone horribly wrong.

The action picks up again as Lennon’s body is getting disposed of. Only he’s not dead and he’s not going without a fight. He manages to get free, killing his captors, and begins a grueling night trying to stay alive and get back the money from the bank job.

Only, as it turns out, one of the guys Lennon killed was the son of a violent Russian mafia boss who wants revenge for his son’s death. Lennon knows he’s been set up, but he can’t figure out who did it – except maybe his “sister” Katie. The first thing, though, is to stay alive. Then he has to find the money and get out of
Philadelphia.

The Wheelman offers an intimate look into the violent world of criminals. Swierczynski writes with grim authority and a no-hold-barred attitude that slams the reader between the eyes repeatedly. I enjoyed the short, punchy prose and compact chapters, and felt hurled to the end rather than along for the ride.

Despite the fact that the book reads quickly, it also has to be read carefully. There are many characters, many different plot strands on a collision course, and the tides change throughout the novel as Lennon allies himself first with one faction, then with another, only to get betrayed and betrayed again.

Swierczynski’s new novel, The Blonde, comes out in November and offers what looks like another blistering read.

{October 4, 2006} Snake Eyes, by Max Allan Collins

Cover Image At Amazon

I’ve been a fan of CSI in all its incarnations since the beginning. My preference is for the Vegas unit, though I love the color of
Miami. I’ve also been a lifelong fan of Max Allan Collins’ work, as readers of this review column will know.

Those two passions meet in the CSI tie-in novels published by Pocket Books, and Snake Eyes is Collins’ eighth novel in the series. He usually writes them all with co-writer Matthew V. Clemens, though Clemens’ name isn’t on the books.

In Snake Eyes, violence breaks out between two rival motorcycle gangs in
Boot Hill, Nevada. One of the gang leaders and a 20-year-old dealer are shot dead during the confusion. Knowing that his department is outmatched and that he’d better come up with some answers, Boot Hill Police Chief Jorge Lopez calls out for help. Gil Grissom, Catherine Willows, Nick Stokes, and Sara Sidle answer that call.

The crime scene is filled with complications at the beginning, and things don’t get any simpler. The motorcycle gangs are camped outside the town like barbarians at the gate, and both sides are demanding answers for the murders. The gang leader’s body – with the incriminating bullet lodged in it – disappears from the morgue.

In the meantime, Warrick Brown and Greg Sanders are holding down the fort in Vegas. They get besieged with short-lived cases in a series of whirlwind murders that become The Night That Wouldn’t End.

I especially enjoyed the plot twists and turns the book took, and the fact that it was very much like the Western movies that Grissom kept aluding to in his conversations with Lopez. Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens are good, solid and dependable writers, and that really shows in this novel.

The best compliment you can give to a Tie-In novel is that it reads entirely like an episode of the parent show that was never aired. It takes real skill to step inside someone else’s world, temporarily claim it as your own, and leave a lasting impression about something without changing anything.

Snake Eyes is a great read for fans of the show, but it’s also a nifty little murder mystery that mystery fans who haven’t seen the show would enjoy as well. And it’s just short enough to be read in a couple of sittings, a claim most books these days can’t make.