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.

The popularity of zombies is on the rise. In fact, the fans of the walking dead may be soon encroaching on the number one spot held by vampires. I don’t know why this is happening, it’s as mysterious as the reasons for the zombies climbing from their graves to start searching for a brain buffet in all the movies (and yeah, yeah, I get that some kind of gas was released in the Living Dead movies and in Raccoon City, but come on. Really?).

Zombies moved back into horror fiction with a much more sure step than they’ve had in a long time. But now they’re launching into teen romance fiction. In a way. Generation Dead by Daniel Waters is a mixed bag, and I’m going to be all over the place while describing my reading experience for you. It just refuses to lie down and die to be reborn into a familiar zombie novel of movie tradition.

The cover of the dead cheerleader with blackened eyes seized me at once. I mean, once you get that image in your head, it’s not going to easily go away. Neither will the romantic triangle between Phoebe, Adam, and Tommy, the “differently biotic” boy Phoebe falls for.

Phoebe was one of the Goth girls at school. She enjoyed being different, and the dressed-in-black thing really worked for her. Looking like the living dead really worked for her. It even earned her the name Scarypants from Pete, the novel’s villain of sorts. Of course, the look really lost its appeal when dead kids started showing up and coming back to school. The author does an excellent job of catching a teen girl’s feelings and confusion throughout the novel. Phoebe comes to life on the pages almost at once.

Adam is the football jock and Phoebe’s next door friend. As it happens, he’s just discovering that the friendship he’s always had with Phoebe runs much deeper. That realization is stymied by his own shyness, the fact that he is a member of the Pain Crew on the football team and he shouldn’t go for Goth girls, and Phoebe’s sudden crush on Tommy Williams.

Tommy is a pioneering wonder among the zombies. He’s articulate and he writes, blogs even. He also goes out for the football team and causes all kinds of tension in the school and the city.

The story revolves around these three characters and how they sort out their lives. However, the author throws in great support characters like Margi, Phoebe’s best friend, and others.

Teens these days seem to be almost shockproof to so many changes in their lives. If the living dead did claw their way from their graves and decide to go to school instead of the brain buffet, I would be very surprised if teens didn’t act exactly as Waters portrays them in this novel. They split almost immediately into groups that supported the zombies and those that stood against. But mostly they were curious.

I could make a lot of comparisons to cultural differences being played out in the pages, of Waters building his zombies up to comment on race, religion, and economics – the usual dividers among populations, but I won’t. I don’t think he wants the book to go that deeply into global problems. I believe he just wants to talk about the teen world, get into their heads, and tell a story they’ll have a ball with wondering “what-if”?

I also have to admit that you’re going to have to push yourself to get through the first fifty pages or so. The book progresses slowly but that’s so the characters and all their complications can be set into place. Once that’s done, Waters engages fully with the story and keeps things moving.

This is a book for the teens. Some parents of teens or those who want a trip back through the teenage years will enjoy it as well, but the junior high and high school readers should eat this one up. There’s no real explanation for why the zombies came back to life, or why only American teens were affected, and I was disappointed slightly in that. But the characters are real, facing situations with genuine emotion, and I believe that the target audience is going to feel that and enjoy the read.

He still remains as DC Comics’ most radical hero. Mike Grell created The Longbow Hunters and pushed away the trick arrows for a time, getting Ollie back to his roots as a cutting-edge back street brawler, then enjoyed a long run on the strip. Chuck Dixon shortly followed Grell and even killed Ollie off long enough to give us a new Green Arrow in Connor Hawke.

Even though he’d died and gone to Heaven, Ollie come back in issues penned by Kevin (Daredevil, Clerks) Smith. Lately Judd Winnick has married him off to Black Canary and invented a whole new Speedy for this generation.

But Andy Diggle (The Losers) got the green light to pen the adventures of Oliver Queen’s Year One origin while so many longtime DC Comics heroes are getting spotlight treatment. I really enjoyed Diggle’s run on The Losers as well as some of his other forays, but I didn’t know if he was the right guy for Green Arrow. As it turns out, Diggle was just the guy to bring Ollie once more to the masses.

Diggle’s scriptwork is excellent. He moves the story along and finesses the characters and relationship through dialogue and action, and the overall effect is like watching a movie with first-person voiceovers. An added bonus in the graphic novel contains the first few pages of the actual script Diggle turned in to the editor and artist. He didn’t just put the words on the page, he actually planned on where the action would go and how it would be revealed.

In the beginning, Oliver Queen was a playboy with more money than he knew what to do with. He rambled and tried extreme sports to fill the gaps in his life, constantly trying to find his happy. Diggle does a masterful job of portraying that, and even ties in the Robin Hood touchstones of Errol Flynn and Howard Hill’s longbow at a fundraiser where Ollie really makes an idiot of himself.

Jock’s artwork is fantastic. The panels and spreads flow cinematically across the pages. Movement comes alive, tension is as tight as a bowstring, and the sweeping majesty of nature fills the senses so much I could almost smell the grass and the gunpowder. The fact that Diggle and Jock have worked together before shows. They’re a well-oiled machine attuned to turned out powerful stories.

The plot of Green Arrow: Year One is absurdly simple, but it shows off so much of what has become canon for the character. Oliver’s disenchantment of his own prosperity, the dislike of the image of so many of the rich and celebrity, the false platitudes so many hucksters and politicians spout, and his search for real meanings takes shape in these pages.

His inherent survivalist’s nature shines through in the wilderness and the human adversity he faces. Diggle also touches on Ollie’s abhorrence of drugs (which became a major plot point in the 1970s when it was revealed that Roy Harper, Green Arrow’s original sidekick Speedy who has now gone on to become Red Arrow, had a drug problem). Understanding that Ollie got addicted to opium while healing on the island actually shores up Ollie’s overreaction and disappointment in Roy at that time. There’s even a comment made after a drastic injury regarding the potential of Ollie losing his arm that plays off the way Ollie was killed – for a time.

There’s a lot to love about this graphic novel if you’re a Green Arrow fan. I had a blast reading it, then re-reading it. And it’s a great introduction to the character if you’ve never read anything about him. Despite the fact that his series seems to constantly respawn, there’s a resiliency of Oliver Queen that just won’t go away forever. He’s become an icon in the DC Comics universe, and Diggle and Jock reveal here in these pages.

I grew up on tough-guy novels like Richard Stark’s Parker, Dan J. Marlowe’s Drake, and some of the other Gold Medal books anti-heroes but I hadn’t suspected Piccirilli had until I read this novel. The Cold Spot was an unexpected surprise though one of my current noir writers (Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman, The Blonde, and Severance Package) heartily recommended the book.

The book starts out with Chase at sixteen years old. He’s already an accomplished getaway driver and mechanic. He routinely builds each car the gang uses at each job, lovingly restoring a 1960s or 1970s muscle car, then destroying it shortly thereafter. The message is really cool: Chase can only love for a short length of time; he can’t hang onto anything.

The only constant in Chase’s life is his grandfather, Jonah, and Chase is never sure that the old man won’t see him as a danger and kill him one day. Jonah is in no way a paternal figure, and I entered into a wary relationship with him myself. Jonah reminds me most of those old noir heroes I grew up with, older and colder. He’s what those guys would have turned out to be once they hit their sixties. And I have to admit that I was mesmerized every time Jonah was on the page because I was never sure what he would do.

After the killing at the first of the book, Chase separates from the gang. He realizes that his grandfather is a lot harder than he’ll ever be able to be. I followed Chase’s adventures trying to get in with another “string” at different times, until he meets the female police officer that’s going to become the love of his life. I was hooked from the moment Lila was on stage, getting the drop on Chase after a botched robbery, and cheered again when Chase upstages her and gets the drop on her.

The fact that they ended up together was no surprise, but the manner in which they did was a lot of fun and very touching. Piccirilli builds this relationship tenderly and then he punches you in the gut so skillfully that you’re hurting before you know it.

When Chase can no longer live with what’s been done, he goes looking for Jonah. Chase feels compelled to find the men responsible and kill them. I was right there with him.

However, finding Jonah is problematic too. The old man carries a lot of dangerous baggage with him: a young woman who seems just as deadly as the old man and actually wants to be free of him. Piccirilli’s hangs her attempts to seduce Chase so expertly that I just knew he was going to do it because he was hurting so much. But Chase has his own code of honor, which is one of the things I enjoy most about him.

There’s simply no way to put this book down in its final moments. Piccirilli and Chase just steamrolled over me as every twist and turn crashed down around me. There are no winners at the end of this novel – only survivors. Thankfully Chase is one of them because another novel is supposed to come out next year. I’m definitely going to pick it up.