Ethan is just back from Iraq after spending months rehabbing from serious injuries, and he’s not sure where he stands in the world. One of the first things he wants to do is find his biological father, a man that didn’t even know he existed until Ethan is introduced to him.

In the meantime, Connie crosses paths with Ethan after she picks him up hitchhiking, which he isn’t supposed to do in that area. Instead of warning him and sending him on his way, she senses something about him and gives him a ride into town. They talk and he immediately intrigues her.

Almost immediately, a man tries to pick up Connie’s young daughter from school. The man even knew her name. The suspicion in town falls on Ethan because he’s the newest arrival there, but that quickly gets set aside.

Ethan deals with his father and doesn’t know what to do next. He’s willing to let some time pass till he gets it all figured out. The sheriff, however, knows that Ethan is a good man and that his recent arrival will actually help out with the search for the man that tried to abduct Sophie Halloran. He hires Ethan and sets him up as a “friend” to Connie who’s visiting from out of town.

Connie’s mother and daughter take to Ethan at once, and Connie doesn’t blame them, but she knows that the soldier is just passing through. She doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, but she acknowledges that Ethan is a good man for the role of protector.

Rachel Lee is a solid writer in any kind of fiction. She’s also done several thrillers. Her prose is precise, punchy, and pared-down. She only says what she needs to say, making each scene work, then going on to the next one.

I read this book in two sittings, which makes it a perfect read in my mind. The characters are engaging and the stakes are immediately understandable. Her dialogue is good as well, and the characters are decisive and accepting of their lot in life, making them the kind of people I’d love to meet and hear more about. This is the way romantic suspense should be written. Rachel Lee is skilled enough to make it all look effortless.

I love the whole premise behind Hawaiian Dick, the ongoing 1950s private eye comics set in Hawaii. The noir feel of the storytelling and characters is dead-on. The ex-pat main character, Byrd, is well-drawn and has a lot of emotional baggage he’s carrying that only gets opened up in this first graphic novel.

Byrd of Paradise gathers the first three issues of the comics written by B. Clay Moore and drawn by Steven Griffin. The story immediately seized a lot of attention when it first came out because of the mixture of old and new.

Moore has a great grasp of the story and noir must run in his veins. The set-up for the story and the execution hits all the cornerstones of the venue, and Byrd’s backstory comes as a natural progression of the case he’s on. Moore’s development of the story “reads” like a movie. He stays off the page and out of panels unless narration or dialogue is really needed. Action tells this story as well as anything, and readers often forget how much a good writer can do with a few panels of delineated action. Moore has a fantastic grasp of the concept.

As good as Moore’s story is, though, Griffin’s art emphasizes everything about it. Griffin’s use of color – bright and vibrant, then dark and moody – sets the tone for the scenes, the characters, and the atmosphere. Through color alone, Griffin could have brought home every emotion that he needed to in order to convey the story.

However, he doesn’t stop there. He gives us well imagined characters and body posture. Byrd just wouldn’t have been the cocky, worldly private eye without the five o’clock shadow and Hawaiian shirt. Mo wouldn’t have been the homicide cop without the immense stature, the clean-shaven appearance, and the immaculate black suit.

The artwork is loose and tight as needed. Sometimes panels only feature characters in action. Then there are other times that the background is developed in depth. All of it looks painted, with lots of contrast and rounded shapes that flow naturally to the eye. After you read the graphic novel, don’t be surprised to find yourself leafing back through the pages just to see the artwork again.

The story is pedestrian by all outward appearances. Byrd gets handed a case to find a car, but he’s getting paid more for the recovery than the car is worth. Immediately suspicious, Byrd confronts the man hiring him and finds out the car has a cargo that belongs to drug kingpin, Bishop Masaki. This is the kind of story a noir fan would expect to find laid at the feet of Marlowe, Spade, or Hammer. Moore throws in an extra wrinkle by including Hawaiian voodoo and zombies. The horror aspect never overshadows the private eye story, though. Rather, it complements it and gives the reader a little extra zest that gives the appearance of being something brand new.

I love this story. I’ve read it a few times now and enjoy it each time. It’s simple and structure, and delivers everything I’d want in a noir adventure. Plus the zombie creep factor and a few twists and turns I didn’t see coming. The 1950s feel makes a big difference too, like our heroes are just a little more exposed than they would be in the present day and age.

The graphic novel contains about 50 pages of extras, including sketches, notes, and script. Hawaiian Dick: Byrd of Paradise is a great entertainment and behind-the-scenes bargain. The property has also been licensed for movie development and you can see how a film would flow from these pages. This is a crackerjack read.

Brubaker and Phillips put stories together whenever they can, then run them as mini-series before they’re eventually gathered into graphic novels. I love the stories because they’re hard hitting noir tales about tough guys, violence, and constant danger. There’s not a superhero among them, and very few innocents.

Lawless is the second collection, and it’s a barbed-wire punch to the throat. Sleek and deadly as a bullet, the story of Tracy Lawless’s quest for revenge after his brother ends up dead rockets along to a climatic finish that belongs on the big screen.

Brubaker’s narrative, echoed by Phillips’s art, is interesting in this arc. Instead of simply breaking the story out from start to finish, Brubaker reveals everything in episodic chunks. He starts with an action, like killing a man on a rooftop and disposing of his body in a Dumpster in the alley, then circles back around to tell readers who the man was and why Tracy killed him.

Looking back through the graphic novel, I noticed how deliberate the reveals were. Brubaker dropped pebbles of plot into the pond of his story, then chased the ripples out for the readers till everything came together. The method is very effective, like getting a bite-size chunk of a mystery that allows you a look at only one piece of a larger puzzle.

Tracy’s background isn’t delivered in a large info dump either. Nor is everything completely explained. I still want to know what happened to Tracy and Ricky’s father, and even what happened to Ricky that put him into a life of crime. That’s because the character feel so real on the pages. Even though I didn’t get every answer, Brubaker and Phillips provide enough that I knew Tracy Lawless and the kind of guy he was. He’s the same kind of guy who’s adventures I enjoyed in the pages of the Gold Medal novels I read while growing up. Evidently Brubaker haunted the same aisles in similar bookshops.

Ricky Lawless was a wheelman for a gang. He drove the getaway car. But after a heist goes bad, Ricky ends up shot to death. Tracy is a soldier, a man with a harsh past that has no problem killing people he thinks needs to be killed. The problem is, he’s not sure who killed Ricky, but he knows once he finds out he’s going to kill whoever it was. In the meantime, he has to infiltrate the gang, help break out one of the members from prison, and stay out of the clutches of a mysterious group of killers that have somehow gotten onto his tail.

The art in the book complements the story, providing mood and atmosphere. Phillips’s style and take on grungy metropolitan areas and action is fantastic. The layout of the scenes, the exposition of the surroundings and the snap-focus on characters, show just how easily the story could be rendered to cinema.

The language and story are harsh, so Lawless might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But fans of noir are going to feel right at home in these pages.

Robert B. Parker’s sophomore effort into YA fiction delivers more action and better pacing than his first. The Boxer And The Spy is also set in today’s world rather than the 1940s as Edenville Owls was. As an older reader who’s been reading Parker’s books since the 1970s, the earlier time period was no problem for me, but I wondered how many actual YA readers really understood everything that was going on after World War II.

As in his first novel, Parker develops a mystery for his young protagonist, Terry Novak, that spills out of the adult world. Parker spends a lot of time getting the young heroes acquainted with the adult world, though I believe that today’s kids are a lot more acclimated to that world than Parker’s characters. Still, Terry Novak is a kid I would have loved to know back when I was a freshman in high school, and I bet there are prospective readers out there who would feel the same way. He’s got honor, vision, and a sense of himself that are characteristic of Parker’s heroes and heroines.

The mystery wraps around the death of Jason Green. Terry knew Jason as a friend, and the relationship takes on special meaning when Parker reveals the tie that bound them. While everyone else seems content to believe Jason committed suicide, Terry just doesn’t buy it. He (the boxer) enlists the aid of his best gal pal, Abby (the spy), and they set about trying to figure out what really happened.

The relationship between Terry and Abby takes on as much weight as the mystery. This isn’t surprising to those of use that know Parker the way we do, but I believe the actual YA crowd might like the interaction between the two, though a few of them might wonder about how naïve the two are. Today’s kids, while not always callous, definitely have an idea of how the real world works in many ways.

Parker’s trademark clipped prose and rapid-fire dialogue provides plenty of muscle and drives the story along at a good clip. The scenes are powerful and evocative, without being too demanding. The level the books are written on would serve teachers needing something with an easier reading mechanics while maintaining a high interest. Educations dealing with high-risk students should definitely look into Parker’s YA efforts. The short chapters make reading just one more page way too irresistible. Librarians and reading specialists should take note of Parker’s YA books for that aspect alone.

I really enjoyed the boxing angle of the story too. Any longtime reader of Parker’s works will know that his private eye, Spenser, has a history of being a boxer. The love that Parker obviously holds for the sport is immediately apparent during his accounts of Terry’s workouts and talks with George, the black boxer that trains him. However, I would have liked to know more about what brought Terry into the ring and what his mom thought about him boxing. I know the adults are supposed to stay pretty much off screen in a YA book, but this one really cried out for most exposure of Terry and his family life.

Figuring out who the villain is and what’s actually going on was relatively easy. The fun part was watching what Terry and Abby were going to do to get to the bottom of the whole mess. I watched how their minds worked as they narrowed toward instated the back, and that made me remember by own childhood. Parker serves up nostalgia for the adults and excitement for the YA readers.

The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford stands as one of the most striking pieces of fiction I’ve read so far this year. It’s a coming-of-age novel and a statement on dysfunctional families that partially masks itself as a creepy mystery story. It starts out with a face in the window, a prowler in the neighborhood. The time is the 1960s and the location is Long Island, during a kinder, more gentler time when a family’s secrets and failings were kept religiously guarded behind closed doors.

I was blown away by the atmosphere and eye for detail Ford packs into his writing. This was my first book by this author, and I was immediately impressed. He possesses the keen vision of Stephen King and doesn’t flinch when it comes to exploring personal issues. I got the feeling that a lot of what’s in these pages is biographical, and if it isn’t, I’d be willing to bet Ford knew a family like this.

Almost. Ford presents a normal abnormal family, then leavens the whole mix with a hint of the supernatural. There’s a ghost and the strange powers little sister Mary has, and the eerie presence of Mr. White, a diabolical villain.

But when Ford paints the picture of the family so realistically, most readers are going to get sucked right into his world and forgive the author all of his transgressions. I swallowed the supernatural bits without hesitation because the family were exactly like people I’d grown up with. The father is a workaholic holding down three jobs to get the family by, and so he barely spends any time with his wife or kids. The mother is an alcoholic, and though I would have desperately loved to know why she was, sometimes you just have to accept that there’s no answer. The grandparents, Nan and Pop, are on hand to help out, but they’re limited.

The narrator, who never named himself, has an older brother named Jim who’s daring and audacious, and everything a younger brother could ever dream of being. Mary is the little sister and as odd as they come, while possessing a matriarchal power that both boy are in awe of and seek to protect. As all-knowing as Mary is (and she smokes cigarettes too, which is weird but fits in well with the character), she’s also an innocent.

I sat enthralled as I turned the pages, captivated first by the mystery and the threat, then by the narrator’s school projects (especially his impromptu clay moon on a stick!), his ongoing battle with a teacher, and his views of the family and how they worked for and against each other.

One of the most original things about the novel is Botch Town, a microcosm created by Jim. It’s a replication of the neighborhood where they live. As they sort through the mystery of the prowler, they move the individual figures around to simulate the movements of their neighbors. Unfortunately some turn up missing. Mary has the mysterious power of knowing where they are – even when they’re dead.

The threat of Mr. White grows on every page. The kids hunt him through the neighborhood, but he quickly figures out who they are as well and the chase swaps ends. Ford does a lot with the narrator’s daily travails as well, putting him in just as much peril from bullies as the prowler/murderer.

I enjoyed this book immensely, but I wanted to know more about some of the characters. I suppose that happens when they appear so real on the page, so I don’t want to take anything away from the writing. Ford’s other books include award-winning fantasy and Edgar-winning mysteries. He’s definitely a writer I’m going to read more from.

The Shadow Year is an excellent novel that doesn’t fit within the restraints of conventional fiction. The book marches to the beat of its own drummer, and the cadence will rivet most readers to the pages either through the elegance of the imperfect past or the chilling menace of a killer on the loose with children in harm’s way.

 Jordan Dane hits a solid homerun with her debut novel, No One Heard Her Scream. The book is marked as romantic suspense, but the accent is on suspense, with clearly defined characters, a taut plot, and forensic and police terminology that will satisfy the armchair crime scene investigators looking for a new buzz.

The novel’s pacing is frantic, the prose pared down and swift, the love scenes torrid, and the bad guys as creepy and evil as anyone would ever want. I had a good time blazing through this book. It offers a lot of excitement and twists, as well as the San Antonio background that I’d recently visited. The scenes along the historic riverwalk really jumped out at me.

I liked Detective Rebecca “Becca” Montgomery right out of the blocks. She’s cut from the same larger-than-life cloth that a lot of action/suspense heroes are cut from, but she wears it well. I liked the fact that she was tough, independent, and good in a fight, though that isn’t what most romance heroines are noted for. However, more and more young women in our world are getting that way – including familiarity with the martial arts – and I think Becca presents a good role model in several respects.

Dane grabs our attention immediately in the beginning with the short action piece, then segues smoothly into Becca’s story. Still reeling with the guilt and pain from her younger sister’s disappearance months ago, Becca is pulled off Dani’s investigation and placed on a cold case assignment. Along the way she’s hauled into an investigation involving the body of a young woman that was bricked up in a recently burned-down movie theater.

While at the theater crime scene, Becca crosses paths with Diego Galvan, who quickly proves he’s more than he seems. Diego is a strong lead that easily holds his own with Becca, and he’s a man hiding a lot of secrets.

Real life has to be squashed almost into sound bytes in a novel to keep the pacing up, and Dane masters that art easily. Her strength lies in the plotting, which has enough twists and turns to keep most readers guessing or second-guessing which path she’s going to take.

With the meteoric pacing of Becca’s investigation, the budding relationship with Diego sometimes gets overshadowed, but I found myself accepting the fact that the author would handle it. My main attention focused on Becca’s pursuit of the bad guys and who everyone really was. The headlong storyline made it almost impossible to let the relationship breathe, but I think it’ll be satisfying to romance fans.

However, the suspense, action, and detailed police knowledge should have fans of Tami Hoag and Lisa Jackson picking up Dane’s books as well.

Dane scored a great deal with her publisher. Over the next three months, three of her novels will be released. No One Left To Tell comes out next, followed by No One Lives Forever. Although they sound like a series, all of them feature different heroines and heroes.

Pick up Jordan Dane’s novels even if you don’t have time to read them now. They’re perfect beach books, though you may be more tense lying in the sun and lawn chair than you’d planned on being!

I’ve been a fan of Robert B. Parker’s novels since 1978, which might be part of the problem with his latest offering Stranger in Paradise. I love the author’s writing style, his usual commentary on society and the individual, and his one-liners. All of those are present in the latest book, but in some ways too many of the same plots are revisited in this one.This is the seventh Jesse Stone novel. Stone is a former Los Angeles policeman turned drunk turned small town Paradise, Massachusetts police chief. He’s also struggling through working out a relationship with his ex-wife Jennifer, which has been one of the on-going subplots of the series. That particular subplot has gotten a little irritating at times because it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but constantly looms over every book.

The book had a lot of potential. Wilson Cromartie, a villain from an earlier book, puts in an appearance to tell Jesse he’s going to be around town for a while. Ten years ago, Crow – the name he’s called throughout the book – was part of an armed robbery gang. At the end of that, Crow chose not to harm the women hostages the gang had but managed to escape with ten million dollars.

This time around, Crow is in town working on a case, looking for the daughter of a big-time Mafia guy in Florida. I really enjoyed the way Crow and Jesse got a feel for each other and acknowledged how dangerous the other could be. When it comes to pared-down prose and tough guys, nobody delivers the goods the way Parker does.

As it turns out, Amber Francisco is a fourteen-year old mess being raised by her white trash mother. I didn’t quite see how the mother went from living the high lifestyle in Florida to living a life barely getting by in Paradise, but I went with it. In addition to living the poor lifestyle, Amber has also hooked up with a young, violent Latino gang in the area.

Parker plays fast and loose with the plotting. Several things are going on throughout the novel. The past encounter with Crow threads throughout, but I’m not quite sure I’m willing to buy everything Parker promotes this time. One of the things that most jarred me was the attraction to Crow by one of the former hostages from that armed robbery ten years ago. Parker sets Crow up to be this sexual fantasy figure for that woman and they have a “one-time deal” encounter.

Not only that, but Crow’s sexual magnetism wins over the one character in this series that I thought would never stray outside her marriage. Parker has explored the nature of sex and attraction throughout this series, and I’ve gone along with it. But, to me, this encounter really cheapened what I thought was a fantastically solid character. This decision really bothered me, which is a good thing on one level because it shows how realistically the author has created his characters.

But the sexual theme seems to hit a high note in Stranger in Paradise. Especially the topic of cheating and how people didn’t have to feel guilty about it. That jarred. Usually Parker ties his explorations of the subject to the plot, but this time I don’t think that existing criteria was met.

Furthermore, when Crow makes the decision to save Amber and free her from her father rather than kidnap her and take her back home as he’s been hired to do, the book started resonating themes from earlier Parker books. In Early Autumn, Parker’s iconic private eye hero Spenser chooses to rescue a young boy from parents that only use him as a pawn in their on-going battle. In Ceremony, Spenser rescues young April Kyle from parents that don’t care about her by moving her from street hooker to high class call girl. The story with Amber smacks of both those books but doesn’t dig into the plot as deeply as either of those did.

Truthfully, Crow echoed Parker’s earlier creation of Spenser’s friend, Hawk. Both of those characters have the same animal magnetism, skewed senses of honor, and no remorse over killing people or doing what they want to do in spite of the law.

Stranger in Paradise is a fun romp. I sat down and read it straight through. I always save Parker books till a day on the weekend so I can read them without interruption. In that respect, the book was fantastic as always. I love the repartee and the familiar characters. But with all the build-up regarding Amber Francisco, I don’t know whether to expect her return in future novels in the Jesse Stone series, or never hear from her again. And I don’t honestly know which I’d prefer.Parker is my favorite author, though, and I look forward to subsequent books in this series as well as others. He’s still delivering straight-forward tales of crime, detective, and tough guys. It’s a combination I just can’t stay away from.

No one makes me laugh the way Stephanie Plum does. She would have fit right in with my family, and I have to admit that we have to be related somewhere down the genetic road. Then again, maybe it’s just Janet Evanovich’s skill as an author to expose all the wackos inside the family unit that makes me want to claim kinship.

Despite the fact that this is the 16th book in the series (13 number books and 3 between-the-numbers books), and despite the fact that I can see which direction Evanovich and her characters are probably going to go, the author maintains the same kind of magic that family stories do. No matter how many times you’ve heard them, you’re ready to hear them again. They’re always funny and always enjoyable, and there’s always something human and endearing about them.

And in this one, how can you not love a midget that thinks he’s a leprechaun who’s stolen Mafia money just to get an operation for an ex-racehorse he can talk to? Or Grandma Mazur’s foray into the wild and wooly environs of Atlantic City’s gambling casinos?

Plum Lucky is a road trip for Stephanie and company that is truly of mythological proportions – especially with Lula trying out for the role of a supermodel. Diesel, a regular accompaniment of the between-the-numbers adventures, is back for another mad gallop to the finish line, and he’s just as mysterious as ever.

Stephanie’s long-suffering mother, sandwiched between the impossible generations of her daughter and her mother, calls Stephanie for help. Grandma Mazur is missing in action and Stephanie has to find her. Following Grandma Mazur’s backtrail, Stephanie finds out about the duffel bag her grandma got into a fight over with a man dressed as a leprechaun. After Diesel puts in an unexpected appearance, Stephanie finds out that the leprechaun is a known thief named Snuggy, an ex-jockey that claims he can talk to animals.

The adventure quickly turns into a riot. Even though I was expecting – and anticipating – a log of the zingers and one-liners, I still found myself laughing outloud. There’s no way a Stephanie Plum adventure comes close to being in the real world, but if it did this is exactly the way it would play out.

Things quickly go from bad to worse when Stephanie finds her grandma. Short of kidnapping Grandma Mazur, there’s no way she can bring her home. Until Snuggy shows up again and explains that he only stole the money to pay for an operation on Doug, the ex-racehorse he’s befriended. The problem is, the mobster Snuggy took the money from is holding Doug hostage and threatens to kill him if the money isn’t returned. Grandma Mazur buys into the attempt to save Doug, but things get worse when the mobster kidnaps her as well.

To make matters even worse, the mobster is Delvina, a guy who’s crossed Stephanie’s path before and has plenty of reason to hate her. Things are going to get even worse – and more hilarious – as this adventure winds out. You know that when you go into the final battle with Lula packing a rocket launcher that things have seriously exceeded rational limits.

I had a great time with Plum Lucky. The between-the-numbers books are intended as fun romps to tide fans over during the holidays before they get the beach read book in the summer. But now my appetite has been whetted for Fearless Fourteen.