Review: November Road

November Road by Lou Berney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If someone offered me the choice between taking a long road trip with a couple of kids or being murdered by the mob, I’d have to really think it over.

It’s November 1963, and Frank Guidry is living well in New Orleans thanks to his top position with Carlos Marcello’s mob outfit. However, one of Frank’s recent chores was leaving a car in a parking garage in Dallas very near the spot where President Kennedy would be assassinated just days later. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection especially when several other people on Carlos’ payroll start turning up dead. Frank just became a loose end, and he flees west with lethal hit man Paul Barone hot on his trail.

Meanwhile, Charlotte Roy has been trying to raise her two daughters in a small Oklahoma town which isn’t easy thanks to her drunken loser of a husband. When Charlotte has enough she takes the girls and starts heading to California, but she’s consumed by guilt and uncertain if she's done the right thing. After Frank meets Charlotte at a motel he realizes that traveling with a lady and two kids would make him a lot less conspicuous so he engineers circumstances so that they all go together. Frank is surprised when what started as a con to help him get away begins to turn into a real relationship with Charlotte and the kids. But that pesky hit man is still right behind them…

I read Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone earlier this year and enjoyed it quite a bit. Then I heard a tremendous amount of good buzz about this one before it released, and I’m pleased to report that it lives up to the hype.

In the wrong hands this concept could be just some cheesy tale about a ‘bad man’ who sees the error of his ways after becoming part of a family, but the strong character work done with Frank, Charlotte, and deadly Paul Barone is where this really shines. You thoroughly understand all of them, and despite the historical backdrop it all feels grounded and realistic with Frank and Charlotte struggling to deal with how their lives have been forever changed while Barone has to deal with a variety of setbacks as he just tries to complete his mission.

I particularly liked how Berney used the JFK assassination as the jumping off point, not the center of the story. It’s obviously the thing driving the plot, but what’s presented comes across as a believable scheme by one pissed off mobster instead of some vast shadowy tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. So we’re not dragged into some Oliver Stone style fever dream.

The work done on the settings and time is top notch, too. We get an authentic sense of the places like New Orleans, Las Vegas, crappy motels, and roadside tourist traps. It all builds the mood of what it must have been like back then. There’s nice touches of how the mob operated at the time, too.

It’s a damn fine piece of crime fiction, and I’ll be tracking down more of Berney’s work.

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Review: Fatal Blow

Fatal Blow by James L. Thane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s another brutally hot summer day in Phoenix, and homicide detective Sean Richardson has to spend it fishing a headless and armless torso out of a canal. The only good news is that it still has the feet including a toe ring, and this clue leads Sean and his partner to suspect that a missing housewife, Becky Miller, is probably the victim and her cheating husband looks awfully guilty.

In the interest of full disclosure I need to note that James Thane is a longtime friend of mine here on Goodreads so I’m not even gonna try to pretend that this is an objective review. Please take my word that if it stank I’d just quietly ignore it, but fortunately it’s pretty good so I can talk about it.

There’s two parallel stories at work in this. One is the first person narration from Richardson which mixes a straight-up realistic police procedural with some on-going developments in his personal life which has been built up over the last couple of books. The other third-person story focuses on Becky in the weeks leading up to the discovery of the body in the canal. Regular readers of crime fiction can probably guess where the story is going yet there’s a couple of good twists and turns in there, and the ending was a nice surprise.

Overall, it’s a solid piece of crime fiction that has a good page turning vibe to it, and while it’s obviously a little gory with the whole chopped up body in the canal thing it doesn’t wallow in that like some books would. It’s also got an interesting shifting tone to it. The police stuff is a straight line narrative that you might see on something like Law & Order, but the Becky plot dealing with the crime has a much messier and emotional feel to it. It’s an unusual way to play it, but I particularly enjoyed Becky’s story which had a lot of clever crime elements. There’s also some nice detail work done that makes the reader really feel the desert heat as the characters roam around the city.

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Review: The Banker’s Wife

The Banker’s Wife by Cristina Alger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Is money the root of all evil or does it make the world go round?

The answer to that is yes.

Annabel is American living in Geneva with husband Matthew whose job with a secretive Swiss bank keeps him away from her too much, but the trade off is the wealthy lifestyle they’re living. Marina is journalist engaged to Grant who comes from a very rich family, and his father is about to become a candidate for the presidency of the United States. It might seem like both these ladies won the trophy husband lottery, but Annabel is bored and lonely while Marina feels like she’s have to have to give up the job she loves to really be part of Grant’s family. Yeah, I know. Rich people problems.

However, things take a turn for both women. Annabel’s husband is killed in a small plane crash with home of his wealthy clients, and she starts questioning exactly what he was doing at the bank. While on a vacation trip to Paris, Marina does a favor for her old friend and editor by picking up a USB drive with encrypted data, but this errand leads to her ending up with information on money laundering done for international criminal types. Both Annabel and Marina quickly find out that these are not the kind of people who like you asking questions about their business.

This is a solid thriller whose biggest strength is in the idea that there’s a vast ocean of blood money being hidden and utilized by some of the world’s most powerful people. If you’ve been paying attention to current events that’s a story with the ring of authenticity to it. I mean, a rich asshole with presidential aspirations and shady international business connections isn’t much of a stretch these days, and it gives the whole book an honest hook to it.

It’s well written by airport thriller standards, and the presentation of the lives that Annabel and Marina are leading is very well done. There’s some interesting thematic stuff in that Annabel truly loves her husband is now filled with regrets about the independent lifestyle she gave up even if she is living in the lap of luxury. It fits nicely with Marina’s story since she’s on the verge of essentially making that same choice.

Unfortunately, the weaker side comes with the thriller stuff. There’s a few scenes with characters being followed and some lightweight chase scenes, but this isn’t an action story. It’s more about paranoia and dread which is fitting for a book about the money and power lurking behind world events, but I could have used more of a sense of danger to it.

And frankly it seems like a book that real world has outpaced in terms of how much trouble we’re all in. The characters here have faith that a free press and government oversight can ultimately stop and punish people who break the law like this. It doesn’t take into account that the evil rich doing this stuff are now the ones in power, and that institutions we counted on to protect us have been corrupted or neutered.

So it’s a decent read with an interesting idea and above average characterization, but it comes across as too naive a story to really accomplish what it might have just a few years ago.

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Review: Kill or be Killed, Vol. 4

Kill or be Killed, Vol. 4 by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A young man who puts on a mask and kills criminals because he thinks he’s been cursed by a demon ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Who could have seen that coming?

After Dylan has a meltdown in his personal life he’s been locked up and doped enough to keep him foggy, and it also seems like someone has taken his place on the outside as a masked vigilante killer getting headlines for murder. However, Dylan is still haunted by the idea of the demon who drove his killing spree because whether it was real or not he’s got plenty of evidence that the world is steaming pile of garbage and that maybe somebody should do something. And just because he’s locked up doesn’t mean that there’s not bad guys around he could do something about it….

If this was a Marvel or DC creations we’d go through an endless continuation of Dylan including revelation after revelation about his past and he’d probably die at some point and come back. With a story by Brubaker and Phillips we get an actual ending, and that’s part of what makes their stuff so great. With a conclusion we have consequences and themes, not just an infinite and increasingly pointless character.

I also admire how this story threads a tricky needle. It certainly isn’t a ridiculous Death Wish style fantasy about how one determined man with a gun can clean up the streets, but it’s also not a simplistic morality tale about how murder is wrong either. Dylan’s world view gets increasingly complex as he goes from a guy who thinks he’s killing to avoid his own death at the hands of demon to someone who is increasingly disgusted by a world that seems to get progressively worse by the minute thanks to the corruption of the basic systems that are supposed to protect us.

It’s a comic with a near perfect ending.

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Review: Charlesgate Confidential

Charlesgate Confidential by Scott Von Doviak
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you’re looking for murder and mayhem in temporary lodgings then the Charlesgate should be mentioned along with the Overlook and Bates Motel.

The Charlesgate was once the swankiest hotel in Boston, but by 1946 it’s become a wretched hive of scum and villainy. After a poker night for gangsters gets robbed the guy running the game wants revenge. By 1986 the Charlesgate is student housing for a local college when one of the residents begins looking into the building’s history for a series of articles in the school paper, and he gets a very juicy story from a man recently released from prison. Cut to 2014 and the Charlesgate has been renovated into high priced condos, and a murder in one of these apartment seems to be linked to paintings worth millions that were stolen back in 1946 and never recovered.

This is a very solid debut novel from Scott Von Doviak who lived in the actual Charlesgate as a student in the ‘80s. He mixes in some of its real history with the spooky stories that surrounded it along with a famous Boston museum heist (Although he’s used creative license to move that from 1990 to 1946.) to create an intriguing puzzle box of a book. We shift through the three different time frames with the narratives eventually combining into one large story. It’s very well written and has a good page turning quality to it. There’s also some nice work done to establish the tone of each time period and the characters in it.

At just under 400 pages it’s a shade too long, and while I liked the ultimate resolution and theme the ending seems a little anti-climactic. The book also suffers from a common problem when the author is a Red Sox fan in that they think that the rest of us are just as interested in reliving their tales of woe over the years as they are. Yeah, yeah. You had it tough for a long time, but since Boston has won about 417 championships in various sports including baseball in the 21st century I don’t have a lot of patience or sympathy for it anymore. (However, I will be glad to talk to about the ups and downs of being a Kansas City Royals fan.)

Overall, it was still a good piece of crime fiction, and I’d like to see more from Von Doviak. I’d call it 3.5 stars if Goodreads gave us the option, but since they don’t I’m going with 3.

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Review: Kill or be Killed, Vol. 3

Kill or be Killed, Vol. 3 by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Has a college student become a masked vigilante killer because he’s been cursed by a demon or because he’s mentally ill? Maybe a little Column A and a little Column B?

The third volume finds Dylan coping with revelations indicating that the whole demon thing might be all in his head which leads to him trying to put down the shotgun and try to get back to some kind of normal life. Which actually kinda works for a while, but it’s hard to just quit being a vigilante when you’ve got the Russian mob looking for you.

The team of Brubaker and Phillips is probably the best working in comics right now, and as always the writing and art combine to create a great story. I continue to admire how this takes the air out of the fantasy of a good-guy-with-a-gun cleaning up the streets. It’s all brutal and messy and ugly, and they manage to make Dylan sympathetic while still also seeming like a danger to himself and everyone around him. There’s a gritty realism to the way that it’s all handled that is very different then what you usually get in a story of this type.

I absolutely loved this, and I’m extremely glad I’ve got Vol. 4 on deck right now to keep reading.

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Review: Holy Ghost

Holy Ghost by John Sandford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a free copy of this from NetGalley for review.

This book asks the ultimate question: How long can a man live eating only frozen chicken pot pies?

Wheatfield, Minnesota, is a dying small town until several apparitions of the Virgin Mary in an old church are captured on video by multiple people and posted on social media. Now Wheatfield is booming thanks to an influx of visitors hoping to see the vision for themselves. However, when a sniper wounds two people outside the church at different times it puts the brakes on the new tourism trade. State investigator Virgil Flowers arrives and tries to figure out why someone would be randomly shooting folks who are just hoping to catch a glimpse of Mary. Virgil begins pulling on multiple threads involving various townsfolk, and things quickly escalate.

Can Virgil track down the sniper before he finds himself in the crosshairs? Or will he starve to death first since he can’t get a decent meal anywhere in town and has to subsist on chicken pot pies from the convenience store?

This is a pretty typical Virgil Flowers novel, and as a John Sandford fan that’s good enough for me. Once again we’ve got Virgil going to a small town to solve a mystery, and he relies on tapping into local gossip more than forensics or Sherlock Holmes style deduction to do it. There’s a lot of fun characters, and we get a welcome dose of Sandford regulars Shrake and Jenkins. Virgil also continues to see his personal life change and grow with a big event on the horizon.

The difference in this one is that it’s much more of a whodunit than most of Sandford’s other thrillers. Usually we get a lot from the villain’s perspective even if Sandford masks their identity in the writing, and the mystery usually comes from withholding a critical piece that turns out to be the way that Virgil or Lucas Davenport find the bad guy when they figure that out. This time we are completely in the dark as to who is doing the shooting and why until near the end except for one brief chapter in the middle which gives nothing away. When the answers come it’s the kind of logical and satisfying solution that I’d expect from the tight plotting that Sandford does.

The only really negative thing I can say about this is that it may have ruined pot pies for me. At least for a little while...

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