BLOOD WORK
By Michael Connelly
Little Brown, $23.95
As we are introduced to retired FBI agent Terrell McCaleb, he is recovering from a heart-transplant operation and preparing to sail into the sunset on his fishing boat, which is berthed in a Los Angeles marina. McCaleb, who specialized in tracking down serial killers, knows how fortunate he is to be alive and has been warned repeatedly by his doctor not to overexert himself.
He had every intention of obeying the orders, but is reluctantly lured back into the business of solving crimes when confronted by Graciela Rivers, the sister of the woman–a victim of a seemingly random shooting–whose heart is now beating in his chest. Rivers convinces McCaleb that he is obliged to pay off this rather substantial debt by finding the gunman, who has managed to elude police. The cops are just as reluctant to accept the former agent’s help as he is to step up to the plate for the donor’s sister, but their negative attitudes only encourage him to keep slogging ahead in his investigation.
By now, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to find out that McCaleb’s prey turns out to be a brilliant sociopath–Aren’t they all?–or that the murder was anything but random. The good news is that Michael Connelly has taken this rather unlikely scenario and crafted it into a richly detailed and totally absorbing thriller.
Connelly, a former police reporter, suddenly has become one of the most anticipated authors working in crime fiction. Like his previous six novels, including “The Poet” and “Trunk Music,” “Blood Work” is distinguished by its finely etched characters (Clint Eastwood already is lined up to play McCaleb in the film version), relentless pacing and spot-on depictions of the diversity of life in today’s L.A.
Be prepared to read this one straight through. It’s that good.
MANGROVE SQUEEZE
By Laurence Shames
Hyperion, $22.95
Despite its small size, the island of Key West is responsible for a rather large amount of literary mayhem, murder and mystery. This is Laurence Shames’ sixth novel set in the Conch Republic, and he keeps finding new ways to engage his company of resident eccentrics (Bert the Shirt and his frail chihuahua return here), while also putting unsuspecting new arrivals directly in harm’s way.
In “Mangrove Squeeze,” the escapees from colder climes include the lovely Suki Sperakis, who’s trying to support herself by selling newspaper ads; beleaguered Aaron Katz, a former Wall Street wheeler-dealer who has bought a rundown guesthouse; and a band of Russian mobsters whose T-shirt shops are a front for a lucrative smuggling operation. Their paths collide, along with those of two shabby locals who call an abandoned Oscar Mayer wiener wagon home, when Sperakis discovers and then reveals her intentions to blow the whistle on the Russians’ stolen-uranium scheme.
Fans of Shames’ earlier character-driven novels (“Sunburn,” “Florida Straits”) will enjoy his familiar blend of the comic and the criminal.
PIGEON PIE
By Robert Campbell
Mysterious Press/Warner, $22
The latest addition to Robert Campbell’s Jimmy Flannery series finds the personable Chicago precinct captain and sewer inspector on the verge of making the move from his 27th Ward stronghold to the 11th, where he’s virtually assured of being named alderman when the incumbent vacates his seat. He’s being championed by Leo Lundatos, a former congressman not dissimilar from Dan Rostenkowski, who is cooling his heels in prison while his attractive and ambitious wife minds the store.
Flannery’s as virtuous a politician as one is likely to find in Chicago–and a proven crimefighter to boot–so it doesn’t take him long to smell a rat. To make matters worse, he has also managed to rile up a group of right-wing book burners, who aren’t thrilled with Flannery’s circle of liberal friends and allies, which includes a lesbian alderwoman, his socialist aunt and a transsexual ex-cop.
Campbell (a Californian, and it sometimes shows) has a lot of fun with Chicago’s working-class vernacular, and he sets much of the action in familiar Democratic Party hangouts. The trouble here is that nothing particularly felonious happens until two-thirds of the way through this rather thin volume. And when it does, the culprits are pretty well telegraphed.
Still, fans of the series are likely to want to keep up with Flannery’s exploits, and they won’t be terribly disappointed.
AN UNFORTUNATE PRAIRIE OCCURRENCE
By Jamie Harrison
Hyperion, $22.95
By all outward appearances, the fictional town of Blue Deer–with its quirky citizenry, down-home charm and pleasant rural setting–would seem to be Montana’s version of Mayberry. But, unlike Sheriff Andy Taylor, who only had to contend with the occasional flim-flam man, Blue Deer’s chief law enforcer has his hands full with murders old and new.
In the third installment of Jamie Harrison’s well-imagined and intelligently written series, Sheriff Jules Clement is forced to use his forensic and archeological training after a partial skeleton is unearthed on a river island once owned by his uncle. Almost simultaneous to this discovery comes the decision by a convicted murderer to reveal where he has buried a woman missing for 20 years, the apparent suicide of an elderly rancher and a string of vicious rapes. Clement’s concurrent investigations manage to pick a few old scabs and upset many of the town’s most respected citizens, most of whom are related to each other by birth or marriage.
Although Harrison is a clever storyteller, she seems a bit too enamored of her own characters, some of whom are more irritating than anything else. Consequently, “Occurrence” too often gets bogged down in tiresome family feuds and ancient gossip. We admire Clement and care about what happens in Blue Deer, but we end up wishing a few of the residents, like bothersome neighbors anywhere, would just shut up and disappear.
WHEN LAST SEEN ALIVE
By Gar Anthony Haywood
Putnam, $22.95
The Million Man March probably will inspire several works of fiction in the coming years. Let’s hope some of them, at least, are as compelling as this fine novel, in which the business card of Gar Anthony Haywood’s estimable Aaron Gunner is found among the possessions of a shady character last seen alive at the march. The P.I. tells police he can’t remember handing the card to the man, but that doesn’t stop the man’s worried sister from traveling to Los Angeles to hire Gunner to solve the mystery. It takes a while before Gunner picks up the scent of the missing man–who turns out to be a disgraced former reporter–but when he does, his investigation stirs up a razor-toting thug, a shadowy extremist group and the FBI. So he knows he’s on to something.
Gunner is one of the most consistently interesting hard-boiled detectives in the genre, and Haywood’s plotting gets better with each new effort. Like Walter Mosley, he makes South-Central L.A. come alive, and its inhabitants–good and evil–people we want to spend more time getting to know.
IN BRIEF: Anyone who shares the twin passions of trout fishing and mystery reading should find plenty to like in Thom Elkjer’s Hook, Line and Murder (Write Way, $21.95), in which a San Francisco art dealer dies mysteriously while staying in a hotel along the rugged northern California coastline. A journalist and first-time fly fisherman, who’s in town researching an article for an outdoors magazine, disputes the local sheriff’s conclusion that the death was accidental, and the chase is on. Although, like many first efforts, the novel doesn’t always ring true (the reporter, in particular, doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny), Elkjer mines enough good material from his knowledge of angling and the remote setting to produce a pretty decent whodunit.
Willetta L. Heising’s Detecting Men: A Reader’s Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Men (Purple Moon, $29.95) is a companion volume to the author’s “Detecting Women 2,” which provided an enyclopedic overview of the genre’s many authors and series. In “Detecting Men” alone, some 812 series and 618 authors are cataloged according to setting, character, mystery type, title and date of publication. It also provides information on award winners and author pseudonyms.
