Desert Star by Michael Connelly
Desert Star (Little Brown) the latest from Michael Connelly, is one of his best ever and also the best to feature our old friend and former LAPD detective Harry Bosch in tandem with his protégé Detective Renee Ballard.
When last we saw Ballard, she was saying goodbye to the LAPD to work alongside Bosch as a private investigator. A change of heart leads her back to the department’s prestigious Robbery-Homicide Division, specializing in cold cases that happened to be Bosch’s last detail as a cop. He’s currently on the trail of the case of an entire family’s murder that has long haunted him, while Ballard takes on the politically-charged, decades-old murder of a 16-year-old girl. Both cases feature killers who have long evaded justice, which makes watching Ballard and Bosch close in on them all the more fun.
Desert Star reads like a primer for everything great crime fiction is supposed to be. Connelly lends a modern sensibility to old-fashioned, gritty crime noir in crafting a masterpiece of form and function.
(Check out BookTrib’s review here.)
All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham
Stacy Willingham follows up last year’s stunning A Flicker in the Dark with the dark and haunting All the Dangerous Things (Minotaur), which centers on the ultimate nightmare.
The nightmare in question afflicts young mother Isabella Drake whose toddler son Mason has been missing for a year, stolen from his crib while Isabella and her husband were sleeping in the next room. That was the last good night’s sleep she had; actually, she’s barely slept at all since, adding to the mind-numbing paranoia that begins to skew the reality she no longer trusts. Fresh memories from her own childhood further plague her sensibility, to the point that Isabella begins to fear she’s losing grasp of her sanity, even as she draws closer to the truth from that awful night.
This is a mind-bending psychological thriller of the highest order. Willingham speaks the same literary language as the likes of Sandra Brown, Lisa Gardner and Lisa Scottoline and is heading down a path toward the same greatness they achieved.
The Devil’s Ransom by Brad Taylor
Brad Taylor’s thrillers featuring Pike Logan and his TaskForce team have gotten better with each entry, and The Devil’s Ransom (Morrow) is no exception.
The latest installment of the series hits on not one, but two hot-button issues: the deteriorating state of Afghanistan and Russia’s thirst to be a superpower again. The former is featured when Logan and his stalwart team set out to extract a crucial US asset, even as the Taliban is sweeping across the countryside on his trail. The latter comes into play when TaskForce is hit at all levels with the mother of all ransomware attacks. Russia is determined to wipe their greatest adversaries off the technological map, but TaskForce is equally determined to respond in kind.
The power of Taylor’s writing lies in its subtlety. While virtually as muscular as comparable tales from the likes of Vince Flynn (Kyle Mills now) and Brad Thor, Taylor adds a cerebral element more reminiscent of the likes of John le Carre and Graham Greene to the mix. Not to be missed.
The Bullet Garden by Stephen Hunter
Stephen Hunter didn’t invent the action thriller, but he might as well have in his Bob Lee Swagger novels. For my money, though, Hunter may well have topped himself when he brought Bob’s dad Earl Swagger into the mix, and it’s Earl who dominates The Bullet Garden (Atria).
The Allied cadre, led by General Dwight Eisenhower himself, needs a gunman to counter a strategic operation undertaken by the vaunted and heinous German SS — specifically, a sniper capable of making an ultra-long-range shot. That describes Earl Swagger to a T. True to his heroic nature, Earl takes on a mission behind enemy lines that’s fraught with risk from deadly bad guys and hapless good ones. As always, though, Earl is up to the task.
World War II has become a resurgent trope for thriller writers, but Hunter serves up a fresh and original take. Besides, anytime a book carries the name “Swagger” associated with it, all thriller fans should take notice. Hunter remains the best pure high-octane action writer of this generation. Simply stated, nobody does this kind of tale better.
The Devil You Know by P.J. Tracy
Spearheaded by the aforementioned Michael Connelly, there’s a burgeoning generation of noirish Los Angeles crime writers. And P. J. Tracy continues her rise to the head of the pack in The Devil You Know (Minotaur).
This time out, stalwart LAPD detective Margaret Nolan finds herself in a case rooted in the Hollywood decadence of lore when popular actor Evan Hobbes turns up buried under a mountain of Malibu rubble after a landslide. The day before a video threatening Hobbes’ career had leaked, leading Nolan to conclude a connection between the two. But was his death suicide? Murder? And who leaked the video? The answers to those questions plunge Nolan into a dark maelstrom that exposes Hollywood’s sordid underbelly, as the Dream Factory turns into a nightmare.
“The Devil You Know’ reads like a mystery-crime version of Billy Wilder’s classic film “Sunset Boulevard.” As always, Nolan is ready for her closeup and Tracy shines again in crafting the darkness that envelops her.
Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper
This must be the month for not only crime noir in general, but also LA crime noir in particular. So what better way to conclude this column than with Jordan Harper’s exquisitely fashioned Everybody Knows (Mulholland Books).
Mae Pruitt is a classic Hollywood character, a publicist devoted to getting all the good stuff out while keeping all the bad stuff about her clients in. She a go-to figure in the Town for crisis management, making it ever so appropriate that she’s forced to manage her own when her boss is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. That turns Mae into a reluctant sleuth charged with finding the truth behind his murder, a quest that takes her deep into the sordid underbelly of Hollywood along (metaphorically) dark streets occupied by dreary denizens roiled by moral depravity
In that sense, Everybody Knows plays like a post-modern version of “The Sweet Smell of Success,” the seminal treatise on PR flaks. But the journey Harper takes Mae on best resembles Nathaniel West’s “The Day of the Locust” as channeled through Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” with a descent down the mean streets of Hollywood replacing the Congo River. This is crime writing at its level best, a tour de force that doubles as the best Hollywood novel in recent memory.
