Light My Fire

Clean Burn
by Karen Sandler
Published by Exhibit A
Available Aug. 27

3 out of 5 burning stars.


(I received an ARC of this from NetGalley.)

Janelle Watkins sure is a HOT mess!

Get it?  Because this book is called Clean BURN and it has about fire and arson?

Oh, never mind.  I don’t know why I even bother trying to entertain you people.

Anyhow, Janelle used to be a cop in San Francisco who had a knack for finding abducted children, but a freak injury ended her career and left her with a bad leg.  She also has personal issues like being haunted by visions of a boy she failed to save and an unhealthy fascination with fire that includes a habit of burning herself with matches for funsies.

Janelle now works as a private investigator who gimps around handing cases involving cheating spouses, and she wants nothing to do with missing kids until a personal plea leads her back to her old hometown of Greenville where her former partner and lover Ken is now the sheriff.  Being in Greenville triggers a lot of unpleasant memories of her childhood as well as the awkwardness of dealing with Ken.  At first Janelle just wants to leave as soon as possible, but a series of fires and several missing kids draw her into an investigation that has her working with Ken again.

Since this is a crime novel featuring a damaged main character, it’s going to work or fail depending on how much you sympathize with Janelle.  Overall, I found her pretty compelling.  She’s messed up, but she doesn’t wallow in self-pity and generally she’s still trying to do something worthwhile even though her own life is a disaster.

However, giving Janelle the quadruple whammy of being an abused kid, having an old case that haunts her, dealing with a painful physical injury and an unhealthy obsession with fire was a little over the top.  Her level of self-loathing and insistence that something is wrong with her seemed a bit much at times considering that the worst thing she does is burn herself with matches, but self-hatred often doesn’t need a logical reason so this didn’t hurt the book much.

The rest of the story is a pretty standard thriller, but it’s competently done.  The crazy character Mama makes for a decent enough villain, and the kids in jeopardy angle adds tension to it.

The plot contained a few elements that had me nitpicking.  Despite being a small town with a near constant string of arsons and a missing kid, Ken seems to be able to just deal with all of this via a few radio calls and able to knock off work or chauffer Janelle around whenever he feels like it when it seems like a county sheriff would be living at the office and crime scenes.

There was also an odd scene where Ken takes Janelle to a dance that is being done to raise money for the funeral expenses of a kid who drowned in a river.  I’ve seen small town fund raising for tragedies that have included pancake breakfasts, auctions, bake sales and just donation cans placed around local businesses.  However, I’ve never heard of a having a dance where the people going into drink and party drop a couple of bucks on the parents of a dead kid sitting at a table by the door.  Maybe someone would do a concert of some kind to raise money, but the idea of having a full-on dance in front of the parents who just lost their son the day before seemed insane to me.

Aside from the minor gripes, this was a solid thriller with a main character I’d be interested in reading more about.

Fear the Tooth Fairy

Red Dragon
Thomas Harris

4 out 5 stars.

When it comes to Hannibal Lecter, I’m like one of those music hipster douche bags that everyone hates because I’ll snootily declare that I  knew about him long before most people did and that he’s sucked ever since he got really famous.

I’d read this years before the book of The Silence of the Lambs came out and led to the excellent film adaptation that skyrocketed Hannibal to the top of pop culture villains. Hell, I’m so Hannibal-hip that I’d caught Brian Cox playing him in Michael Mann’s adaptation Manhunter, and I didn’t just see it on VHS like all the other late-comers, I actually saw it in the theater.  Twice!  (I’m pretty sure this is the literary equivalent of claiming to have seen a band in a bar with eleven other people long before their first record deal.)

So after Thomas Harris and Hollywood ran the character into the ground after the second movie, it’s been years of shaking my head and saying, “Man, nothing’s been the same since Anthony Hopkins gave his Oscar acceptance speech.”

Since I felt like Harris was just cashing in and had pretty much ruined Hannibal in the process, I hadn’t felt the urge to revisit Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs in some time.  I was more than skeptical about the NBC prequel TV series Hannibal, but great reviews and the involvement of Bryan Fuller got me to check it out.  Not only has it been  incredibly good and returned Hannibal Lecter to his creepy best, it’s clever use of events referenced as back-story in Red Dragon had me digging out my copy to refresh my memory.  Even better, the show has given me a new appreciation for an old favorite and reminded me what I found compelling about it to begin with.

Will Graham was a profiler for the FBI until he was badly injured while identifying a certain gourmet serial killer whose name conveniently rhymes with ‘cannibal’ which certainly made life easier for the people writing tabloid headlines.  Will has retired to a happy new life with a wife and stepson in Florida until his old boss Jack Crawford comes calling and asks for help.  There’s a brutal new killer dubbed the Tooth Fairy by the cops due to his habit of biting his victims.  He’s killed two families after breaking into their homes and seems to be on schedule to do it again at the next full moon.

Will is reluctant to come back not just because he’s already been gutted once by a madman, but he also fears that trying to think like a mass murderer isn’t the best thing for his mental health.  It turns out that his concerns are justified after a tabloid journalist essentially paints a target on his back for the Tooth Fairy.  Even worse, Will has to confront the man who nearly killed him and being confined to a cell doesn’t mean that Dr. Lecter can’t still do some serious damage.

Even as someone who was on the Hannibal bandwagon for a quarter of a century, it’s shocking to re-read this and realize how small of a part he actually plays in the story.  Yes, he’s terrifying and his presence hangs over Will like a dark cloud, but he’s still a supporting player.  Francis Dolarhyde (a/k/a The Red Dragon a/k/a The Tooth Fairy) may not have Hannibal’s culinary skills, he’s one damn scary and slightly tragic villain, and Will Graham makes for a damaged but compelling hero in the story.

I think one of the things I love best is just how much time is spent on how Will thinks.  As a man with extremely high levels of empathy and a vivid imagination, Will’s ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes is a gift and a curse.  Thinking like deranged killers has left him questioning if he might not be one of them, and it spills over all his emotions like a toxic oil spill.

By understanding their madness, Will can find the logic in their thinking, and it’s following that internal logic that allows Will to find the evidence they need. The breakthrough Will eventually makes is one of my all-time favorite examples of pure detection in the genre.  It was in front of the reader the entire time, but it’s such an elegant solution that fits together so perfectly that Harris doesn’t have to engage in obscuring it with red herrings.

As a thriller that led to countless imitators and even the eventual collapse of the franchise due to it’s own success, it’s been often imitated but rarely equaled.

Check out my review of the new Hannibal TV series at Shelf Inflicted.

The Drinking Detective

Nick's Trip
by George Pelecanos
Back Bay Books


Nick Stefanos walked away from his job as head of advertising for an electronics retailer to become a private investigator. At least that was the plan, but with the detective business being slow, Nick is also working as a bartender in a dive that lets him regularly indulge in his main hobby of binge drinking.

You might think that getting hired by his old friend Billy to track down his missing wife would get Nick to put a cork in the jug, but you’d be wrong.  Billy was doing business with a small-time gangster that Nick has a family association with through his late grandfather.   When not drinking, smoking cigarettes or listening to music. Nick tries to find Billy’s wife as well as poke into the murder of a newspaper reporter who was a friend of his.

Nick is a character that I recognize pretty well since he’s essentially me in my early 20s.  Minus the private detective thing.  Probably a lot of us could recognize ourselves in him during that time where we realize that we’re about to wave goodbye to our younger selves and don’t have a clear idea of what we’re supposed to do next.  The difference is that Nick is in his 30s and should have grown out of this by now.  He sentimentalizes his younger days of running wild through DC like a much older man and clings to the memories of things like a drunken road trip with Billy as if they were the only good things he’d ever experience.

In the previous book A Firing Offense, it seemed that Nick walking away from a job he didn’t like to take up the private detective game was a guy having the guts to change his life.  However, events here make that decision murkier.  Nick doesn’t do much to make his new detective business work other than put an ad in the Yellow Pages, and when he tries to get a job at big agency, he walks out when he finds it’s full of guys in suits.  You know, adults who have to stay sober and do their jobs all day.  So his leaving his old job to be a detective now kind of seems like a kid running off to be a cowboy or join the circus.

Even if Nick’s occasional boozy irresponsibility and aging bad boy act sometimes make you want to slap him in the back of the head and tell him to grow the hell up, he’s still a good guy that you root for to get his act together and solve the case.

Also posted at Goodreads.

Guns And Babies Are Recession-Proof

The Lost Ones
by Ace Atkins

Putnam Adult

In Tibbehah County, Mississippi, a newly elected sheriff tries to track down a couple who were abusing and neglecting a pack of infants before selling them on the black market, and there’s a Mexican drug gang in the area looking to do a bulk gun deal.

And yet some people think that country life is boring.

This terrific follow-up to Ace Atkins' The Ranger finds Quinn Colson retired from the Army and trying to adjust to life as a lawman.  If he wasn’t busy enough dealing with baby sellers and illegal arms deals, his ne’er -do-well sister has breezed back into his life with a heart full of Jesus, and there’s a red-headed female ATF agent who has gotten his attention in ways that go beyond the call of duty.

If this was just a straight-ahead action thriller, that’s a pretty good set-up right there.  But what moves this up a notch and gets it an Edgar Award nomination for best novel is the way that Atkins has created a believable cast of characters in a small town setting and uses the connections between them and Quinn to give the story some depth.

Quinn’s relationship with his sister Caddy, including a dark secret the two share, adds some history.  Childhood buddy and gun dealer Donnie Avery is a fellow veteran who wants to live life to the fullest after getting blown up overseas, and he‘s willing to do a huge arms deal to impress a beautiful Mexican woman.  Donnie reminds Quinn of his hell-raising past and what he could have become.  

Then there’s a fight with the corrupt local politician Johnny Stagg to save the county some money and maybe help out another old friend and veteran in the process. The high school sweetheart who once broke his heart is married to someone else and pregnant, but there’s some unfinished business between the two that Quinn doesn’t fully understand.  His mother has been raising his nephew during his sister’s frequent absences, and Quinn tries to be a father figure and limit the damage done to the kid  by Caddy’s infrequent appearances.  His chief deputy is one tough lady, and their relationship is another one that could get extremely complicated if Quinn isn’t careful.

It’s the details of a crowded life of a guy who returned to the small town he meant to leave forever and has begun to enjoy the things he once tried to escape that set this apart from others in the genre.  Add in some wild criminal plots and an ex-Ranger sheriff who is still getting used to the idea of driving up to a trailer and serving a search warrant rather than sniping everyone there from the trees, and you get one great rural crime novel.

Also posted at Goodreads.