Becoming Quinn by Brett Battles

I was reading a review of one of the Dave Buschi books recently posted here. One person said something like, "If you like Vince Flynn, Brad Thor . . . (add your favorite thriller author here) . . . and Brett Battles . . ." Brett Battles? Never heard of him.

So, I went to his website and learned he has a dozen of so novels published in 3 separate series. The one that caught my eye was The Quinn Series, which follows Jonathon Quinn, a professional 'cleaner' - the guy who goes in after the fact to clean up the mess so that no one knows what happened, or even if anything happened. This most recent title (a novella) is the backstory on how Quinn became Quinn.

Jake Oliver is a rookie cop in Phoenix. He and his senior are on patrol when the call goes out about a barn fire outside of town. When they get there, the barn is a total loss. While the fire department is cleaning up, Oliver wanders around and notices what appears to be kicked up dirt and a crease in the dirt that might have been made by a cable or something. The fire department finds a body in the barn with a bullet hole in his head.

Jake goes back the next day and wanders around a little more. Away from the crime scene, he notices a hotel matchbook, pockets it (a definite no-no), wonders about it and heads off for the hotel where he bluffs the hotel security into showing him the video footage from the previous day. Something about 2 guys gnaws at his gut, and a slight nod of recognition towards a third raises his eyebrows.

Some dogged detective work traces the 2 guys through the day of the fire/murder and when he thinks he has enough, he takes it to the detectives in charge only to end up getting suspended for a month, then summarily fired.

His ingenious detective work may have been lost on his superiors in the police, but not by the cleaner connected with this killing. The actual hitter had gone off plan and now they have to watch Jake to see how he puts the clues together. Jake is so good, that Durrie (the cleaner) thinks that Jake may have the right instincts for their group. So he kidnaps Jake to Colorado to see just how this rook kid beat a group of seasoned pros.

The hitter, Larsen, has pretty much had enough of this kid and decides to sanction him on his own and heads for Colorado where now we have to see just how good Jake is and whether he might really be a candidate for recruitment.

Given that there are 4 Quinn books (Jake had to change his name), it's obvious that Jake/Quinn joins up, thus the beginning of a new series. It didn't take many clicks of the Kindle to see why that reviewer I mentioned lumped Battles with other notable current crime writers. No matter what stage Jake was in, as rookie cop, rogue investigator, reluctant recruit, or deadly when necessary, I couldn't take his eyes off the screen. A short novella that can easily be read in a day or two.

Bottom line? The Quinn series is now in my crosshairs.

East Coast Don

Jack Reacher - movie review

I know it, MRB isn't about movie reviews, but when a movie comes out based on one of our power rotation authors, it's probably worth a comment. While Lee Child isn't our most reviewed author (Connelly and Crais are tied for that honor), I have read the entire Jack Reacher collection, many of which pre-date this blog.

Lots of fan-boys were having a hissy fit that Tom Cruise was playing Reacher mostly because no one  would ever confuse the stature of Cruise with that of linebacker sized Reacher. But I was willing to give it a pass to see how well the story was presented. Yes, Reacher's size is part of the character, but  is it really THE defining characteristic?

The movie is based on One Shot. Army sniper Bass finished a tour of Iraq with no shots fired, so he offs 4 or 5 bad guys on his own. The crime is covered up because the bad guys really were really bad guys. Reacher investigated, had a solid case that the brass swept under the rug. Reacher leaves Bass with a warning - step out of line in the US and Reacher, now mustered out of the army, won't have to answer to a chain of command, he would just answer to what's right.

In Pittsburgh, a sniper takes out 5 civilians with 6 shots. Clues result in a slam dunk case against Bass and of course, Reacher shows up because he saw the story on the news. Bass's attorney is just trying to avoid the death penalty and enlists Reacher's reluctant help. A few hand to hand dust-ups, some clever deductions, a car chase that deserves mention alongside of Bullitt and French Connection, some serious long range shooting, and a terrific small role by Robert Duvall uncovers who is behind the shooting, the framing of Bass, and an attempt to frame Reacher for another killing.

So, how did Hollywood do? I thought it was quite good. The 2+ hrs zipped right along and, in my mind, Cruise was just fine from the action, attitude, and general behavior. Was it perfect? Of course not. Hollywood never accurately translates a book to the screen (John Grisham was asked if he liked how Hollywood presented his first big success, The Firm. His reply? The day he sold the rights was the day it was no longer his story. So, read between Grisham's lines: Get Over It). Depending on more professional reviews and box office receipts, Cruise could cheerfully play Reacher between the Mission:Impossible gigs and the occasional oddball part he seems to do frequently. Look for the cameo by Child. Maybe he'll be in each; every Reacher book has been optioned to Hollywood so he could carve out a cameo career; think Albert Popwell and the Dirty Harry series. And maybe Reacher will  turn out to be this decade's Harry Callahan.

What was interesting was the audience. This piece I read said the demographic was overwhelmingly male (duh!) and over 50. At the Friday matinee I attended, there were maybe 3 women, one father-son team, and the rest were men easily over 50 and most were well past 50 - Child's audience.

East Coast Don

Proportionate Response by Dave Buschi

Three guys used to work for the clandestine unit of the NSA: Marks (muscle), Johnny Two-Cakes (cyber crime) and Lip (languages, hacking). When they leave the NSA, Two-cakes heads for Costa Rica and ends up consulting for the off shore gaming business. Marks and Lip start their own contract security business and despite being a modern day version of Mutt/Jeff, Laurel/Hardy, or even Abbott/Costello, these guys can handle anything from NVGs and 50 caliber sniper rifles to virus laden thumb drives and server farms.

Johnny has disappeared. Someone is now after Two-cakes' wife and Johnny has left bread crumbs for  Marks and Lip. There's a shootout at a Starbucks, Johnny's house blows up, and some clues lead to a human trafficking ring of Russians. The boys find a liar and despite 15-2 odds, they manage to get their plan to work out and rescue a bunch of kids. A clue or two leads to who is pulling their strings - the man in the white mask whose email addresses all have the number '487' in it.

Now Lip is a serious hacker and traces emails back to China and China is where they head. And what they find out is damn frightening because it sounds so possible. The China Politburo, using China Telecom, has been promoting intellectual theft from everywhere as domestic policy. Ever wonder how they have so much money? One way is that they manipulate the various stock markets to a sell off so they can buy low, then sell high when the stock returns. The profits are used to 'invest' in other countries. One of these days, "we are going to wake up and find ourselves flat broke, buck naked, jobs gone, livelihoods stolen, and wonder what the hell happened." Dang, that's going on right now!

China does have one serious problem. They've expanded and built up so much, and they've educated millions without much possibility of a real future. What's the point of new intellectual property when it's already out there, ready to be stolen? Millions of IT grads are out there unable to get a job in IT and they are pissed. So when the 'revolution' finally does start (with a little help from Marks and Lip), it won't be led by rebels with weapons, it'll be by nerds with their laptops.

This is the 2nd Buschi novel I've read. Back Door Man was about dissing the wrong man in an attempt to crash the global financial markets. This has a broad international sweep, too and Buschi tells of numerous instances how and when the Chinese managed to route something like 80% of the internet traffic (and all that DATA) for an hour into China. His details descriptions of internet traffic, hacking protocols, servers, super computers, and more, while hardly the stuff of riveting suspense, are spot on within the development of the plot. Proportionate Response speeds right along just like Back Door Man. A really quick weekend read. Bushi really can tie suspense and action with networks, back doors, StuxNet, et al. Computing and action is a deadly combination in the skilled hands of Buschi. Let's hope this is the start of a continuing series of books following Marks and Lip.

East Coast Don

p.s. an interesting side note: one of the characters in the trafficking subplot is named Jiri Dvorak. Same name as FIFA's Chief Medical Officer whom I've worked for and with for a number of years. First time I've seen the name of someone I know applied in a book. The character met a particularly gruesome demise at the hands of Marks and Lip.

Cold Wind

This is the 11^th in the 12-book series (so far) about Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett. It’s also the 11^th C. J. Box novel reviewed in this blog, reviewed by all three of us who favor fiction, so that ought to give you a clue about his standing at MRB. This is another excellent story, which in the process of unfolding the plot of a very curious crime, also furthers the character development of Joe Pickett, his wife Marybeth, their daughters, friend and outlaw Nate Romanowski, mother-in-law Missy Vankueren Longbrake Alden, Sheriff Kyle McLanahan, and other denizens of Twelve Sleep County.

Earl Alden is Missy’s fifth husband, so Earl is the next in a series of father-in-law’s for Joe Pickett. Missy, a gold digger of remarkable determination, has traded up with each marriage, finally arriving at a station of life that she had long sought, the ranch wife of the biggest ranch in all of northern Wyoming. Her fifth husband’s wealth is massive, and his murder is unexpected. Earl was out riding the range one morning to look at the massive solar turbine wind farm that he was financing on his own ranch land when he was shot in the chest. His body was discovered tied to one of the blades of a turbine spinning slowly, the centrifugal force doing ugly things to his bodily fluids. When it is discovered that he was in the process of filing for divorce from the bitch he had married, the suspicion all turned towards Missy. But, how could a small and older woman pulled off such a crime? Missy promptly hired Marcus Hand, a hotshot internationally known criminal lawyer from Jackson Hole (surely Box’s take on the very real Wyoming cowboy lawyer Gerry Spence). The stress of supporting her dysfunctional mother through a murder trial sorely tested Marybeth’s relationship with Joe.

Box successfully ties together a number of subplots including Nate’s love Alisha Whiteplume, the Chicago mob, and more. Joe Pickett maintains his unyielding ethos, like so many of the protagonists favored by the blog. This book ended with some very clever plot twists that I did not see coming. If you haven’t yet read a C. J. Box novel, even though these could be stand-alone novels, it’s best to start at the beginning with Open Season.

Storm Surge by J.D. Rhoades

Life didn’t start out too well for Kyle Mercer. His parents rushed into an ER when the mom went into labor. After he was born, a gunman bursts in and kills his parents. Hello to a life of foster homes. He learns quickly to protect himself and as fate would have it, grows up to be a contract hit man for the Chicago mob.

But he has rules: no women, no children, no civilians. Only those who ‘need killing’ meet his code.  A job ends in a quandary and Kyle has to leave Chicago for warmer climate.

Good bye Kyle Mercer, hello Max Chase – a nice guy who works for the marina at Pass Island, a luxury community off the coast of North Carolina. Sharon Brennan, a local waitress, has just had her car repossessed. Daughter Glory is one sullen teenager.

The island is evacuating in advance of a category 5 hurricane headed right for the old lighthouse. Everyone is leaving the island, except five bad guys headed in against the tide of humanity. They’ve been hired to break into a US Senator’s house and steal a notebook out of a safe. And they are doing it under the cover of the hurricane. 

Sharon and Glory have to return to the island so Sharon can get her paycheck (stupid policy as it turns out). Glory had been hanging with some friends on the beach and she left her iPod in an under construction house where they’d been smoking weed.  Problem is, that’s the house the bad guys are using as a staging area, so they snatch Glory and then take Sharon who’d been looking for Glory.

Being an island employee, Max was helping get things locked down, but follows these 2 into the house (after picking up a meat cleaver, just in case), discovers they are tied up and their guard is getting ready to have his way with them. Max separates the right side of this guy’s head from his left. To say these captives have seen a raw side of Max is an understatement.

As the storm builds, Max takes out bad guys one by one while forming an uneasy alliance with Sharon and Glory to survive both the storm and the mercenaries.

[For those not smart enough or lucky enough to live in the South, there is an old joke (sort of like those 'you might be a redneck' jokes) that says in the South, 'he needed killing' is considered a reasonable defense. Interesting to see how Rhoades takes that line and develops a plot around it. Pass Island stands in for Bald Head Island that sits at the mouth of the Cape Fear River at Wilmington, NC.]

This is PJ Rhoades first eBook only product. And it kicks some serious ass. Kyle/Max is a man with a dark past that surfaces when his code is challenged so you have to admire him a bit. Sharon and Glory are in way over their heads and have to face up to what’s happening or die miserably. Rhoades lets the reader meet each of the mercs set to burgle the Senator’s home so that we get to realize why each ‘needed killing.’ My last post (Back Door Man) was a lightening fast read. So is Storm Surge. I liked Kyle/Max, Sharon, and Glory and really wanted to see how the bad guys were going to be handled. A really satisfying, and highly plausible, tale of good guy (with skills) vs. bad guys all vs. a hurricane. I’m remembering just why I like Rhoades so much. Got one more on my Kindle and that’ll be moving up my to-read list very quickly.

East Coast Don

The Forgotten by David Baldacci

The Forgotten is David Baldacci’s second book featuring John Puller, the infallible military cop and takes up where Zero Day (previously reviewed on MRB) left off.

Puller is recovering from events of Zero Day when his father receives a concerning letter from Puller’s Aunt Betsy who lives in a small town named Paradise on the Florida panhandle.  She refers to mysterious happenings at night and people not being who they appear to be.  Puller goes to Paradise to visit his aunt and finds she is recently deceased.  She drowned in shallow water in her backyard pool but local police find no foul play.  Puller immediately finds other mysterious happenings and decides to use his professional skills to personally investigate.

Meanwhile, another man arrives in Paradise equal to Puller in physical stature.  Having illegally entered the country from Bulgaria, he does menial labor while clandestinely searching for his lost sister.  Working independently, the unlikely duo discovers a wealthy Paradise citizen may be involved in human trafficking.  Remembering his aunt’s warning that people are not who they appear to be, Puller doesn’t know who he can trust.  He even becomes suspicious of the local police.  After nosing around in unwelcome places Puller finds himself teamed up with the large Bulgarian and both are in serious danger.

I’ve commented before how hot and cold I am on Baldacci.  In The Forgotten, you can’t avoid the similarities between Baldacci’s John Puller character and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher character but in doing so Baldacci pales in comparison.  Once that judgment is assessed, all the other flaws quickly surface.  The story’s plausibility suffers, the character development seems weak and you begin to question Baldacci’s creativity.  Wasn’t Paradise, MA the setting from Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series?  Hmm…perhaps this book should be just...well…forgotten.

Back Door Man by Dave Buschi

James Kolinsky. Scholarship wrestler. Math major. A techie. Busted out of a number of failed startups. Specialist is digital security. Gets married (to a woman estranged from her oil roughneck father). Fathers two little girls. Accepts a job at CompTec. A company that backs up information in massive server farms. The biggest and best in the business. And James is at the center of its security. Not the head dog. A doer. A drone. Reliable. 10 years. Raleigh, North Carolina.

Five big shots: the COO of CompTec, a Russian mobster, a Chinese warlord, a British financier, a Zurich banker. They work up a scheme. Crash the financial networks for 24 hours, during which they transfer as much money as they can. Estimates are upwards of $60 billion each. To be successful, they need to find a patsy. A nobody who they can plant bread crumbs that will lead investigators on a trail to the patsy. A disgruntled employee whose revenge against the company is to crash the financial network. Has to have the technical savvy for the trail to be believable.

James Kolinsky.

Overnight, credit cards, ATMs, most bank computers all seize up. The only money you have is what’s in your pocket. And the public freaks all over the planet. Kolinsky is in a panic when he checks his balance online and finds that the process of draining his accounts has started. Cell phones are jammed. He has to get home, but a subordinate says the problem may have originated in their own server farm.

Ah, but his co-worker is one of ‘them’ and getting him into the server farm is a ruse. While trying to trace the problem, Kolinsky manages to trace the information flow and starts to form some suspicions.

Bad guys invade Kolinsky’s home, taking his wife and children hostage. Her father, trying to make good with his daughter, wants to make sure they are OK and drives up unannounced.

The bad guys soon learn . . . Kolinsky may be a drone, but he can get a bit of an attitude when his family is threatened. He’s seen the digital trail leading to the 5 guys driving this havoc. So he sends them a little gift; a simple virus. Then he’s off to get to his family.

Think I came across this title from Goodreads.com. A little bit of Hitchcock’s wrong man theme, a little bit of Die Hard. A whole lot of detail about cyber-crime, hackers, and digital storage. Despite how dull that might sound, Buschi makes it cook. An amazingly fast read that was consistently 4 of 5 stars on other review sites. This was a story of a single day, and what a day it was.  Kindled his next book and I can’t wait to get at it, and it's rated even higher. A very worthy diversion for those needing a diversion. Trust me.

East Coast Don

The Black Box by Michael Connelly

The Black Box is Michael Connelly’s latest police procedural featuring his beloved Harry Bosch character.  Even after 20 years, Connelly skillfully keeps the formula fresh delivering on yet another compelling thriller.

Bosch is long past retirement age for a police detective but his reputation for closing cases has landed him in the Open Unsolved Unit of the LAPD working under the Deferred Retirement Option Plan with a 5 year contract.  His current cold case dates back to 1992 during the LA Rodney King riots when a Danish reporter, Anneke Jespersen is found dead in an alley by a National Guardsman.  Coincidently, Harry and his partner were called to investigate at the time of the murder but were pulled off the case before any serious police work could take place.  Bosch did retrieve a 9 mm shell casing at the crime scene. The case is dubbed ‘Snow White’ and LA politics prevent any seemingly undue priority on solving the murder of a white girl during a racial riot.

Twenty years later these political concerns are still alive and well but Bosch’s tenacity and personal sense of right and wrong never allows politics to interfere with getting his man.  Bosch’s latest intradepartmental rival is his ambitious boss, Lieutenant O’Toole—aka ‘O’Fool’ and ‘The Tool’ by those under his command.  Bosch reopens the ‘Snow White’ case and heads to San Quentin to interview a witness now serving time.  The witness, a gang member, connects the shell casing from the 'Snow White' crime scene to later gang related murders and that ultimately leads to the discovery of the murder weapon.  After the interview, Bosch has time to kill before his return flight and he asks to visit with his girl friend’s son also an inmate at San Quentin.  O’Toole learns of the unauthorized visit and calls in PSD (modern version of internal affairs) to investigate Bosch for his personal use of city resources. ‘O’Fool’ tells him, "You are the worst kind of police officer, Bosch. You are arrogant, a bully, and you think the laws and regulations don't apply to you."  Bosch views the PSD investigation as an annoyance keeping him from devoting full time to his case just as momentum is building.

 

The 'Snow White' investigation becomes white hot when Bosch traces the murder weapon back to the first Gulf War and he finds the National Guard unit deployed in 1992 to the LA riots also served in Kuwait at the same time Anneke Jespersen was reporting there.  Bosch takes a week’s leave, asks his girl friend, Hannah to stay in his home with his teenage daughter, Maddie, and heads to Modesto, home of the 1992 National Guard unit…unassisted…no backup…adrenaline starting to pump.

The Black Box is vintage Connelly and classic Harry Bosch.  Bosch is as stubborn and relentless as he was in the beginning.  His total disregard for authority and hyper-focus on solving the case have you cheering him on and quickly flipping pages…disappointed only because it has to end.

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie

Yes, that Hugh Laurie, aka Dr. Gregory House.

Retired Scots Guard Thomas Lang is bouncing around bodyguard gigs. In Amsterdam, he is approached by a stranger to kill Alexander Wolff, an American businessman working in London (turns out the mark is the guy who approached him, checking to see if Lang is a good man). Lang decides to warn Wolff, but meets and bests a merc, and starts an affair in his mind with Sarah, the mark’s daughter.

Lang learns that Wolff is under investigation for drug running (false), but also for what he knows about a super secret attack helicopter specific for terrorist attacks. But it’s too expensive, so the Dutch middleman cooks up a terrorist attack in Casablanca (and gets Lang to infiltrate the group) to display the copter’s capabilities for all the world to see on CNN.

A whole bunch of subplots to confuse the reader, make that ‘layer’ the plot, are woven in. Honestly, once I got halfway through, it was a struggle to finish. But, hey, it was written by House, right? It bore the hallmarks of the TV show where House would go off on long, seemingly unrelated harangues with subordinates and colleagues only to actually have a point.  Brit humor, er, humour. So I’m guessing that the House character wasn’t constructed entirely by the writers/producers; Laurie fashioned the banter for both the show and the book similarly. OK to start the book, but it got old quickly. Never really got a rapport with any character and the plot reveals were obtuse and so widely spaced that it was hard to keep the changing plot straight. Supposedly, a screenplay has been prepared, but I’m not getting in line.

East Coast Don

Vienna Secrets

This is my third Frank Tallis book, the best of those that I’ve read, so it won’t be the last. Once again, Dr. Max Liebermann and Detective Inspector Oskar Rheindardt are at work in the first decade of 20^th century Vienna. Max, a psychiatrist, treats patients and Oskar solves crimes. Sometimes, they work together on particularly baffling cases. The first couple books gave the background character development for this one, and in Vienna Secrets, Tallis spent less time on the two men’s relationships with each other, and more time on the plot. It was a much more complex story about religious tensions in Vienna during this pre WWI era when the Hapsburgs were still a ruling force in Europe. There are a series of grizzly murders in which men’s heads are literally being ripped off their heads. Can you imagine the force it would take to do that? Those events revive ancient Jewish lore about the Golem, a supernatural character that defends the Jewish ghetto, but in the lore, it is a character that eventually got out of control and could not just be harnessed for the good of the Jews. Psychoanalytic thought has an important place in the understanding of the crimes that are being committed and of the people involved.

With regard to the growing religious tensions in Vienna, When the Rebbe Barash was asked to explain his teachings to Dr. Lieberman, he said, “When something is broken, it must be repaired. This is our task: tikkun, the mending of vessels, the healing of the cosmos. When you ask yourselves ‘What is the purpose of human existence?’ you now have an answer: tikkun. What is the purpose of the sky, the earth, the stars, and the moon? You now have an answer: tikkun. It is the purpose of the holy books, the purpose of scripture, the purpose of prayer. The achievement of tikkun is the only means of redemption. It brinks perfection back to God and so the universe, to humanity, and to the people of Israel.” The Rebbe said, in professing his radical views, the tikkun could only be achieved by “the unselfish pursuit of religious perfection…. No man is exempt. Without total participation, the tikkun will not succeed, and wickedness with remain in the world.” At the same time Judaic thought was radicalizing, the Christians, under the direction of Mayor Karl Luegar, were beginning the process of removing Jews from all important academic and professional positions in the city.

This was an excellent historical novel. Start with an early Tallis book and work your way forward in time. After three books, Tallis has climbed into my power rotation.

Fatal Lies

This is the second Frank Tallis book that I’ve reviewed, and I liked this one as much as the first. This series of books about Max Liebermann takes place in 1902-1910 Vienna. Lieberman is a psychiatrist with a full-time practice, who occasionally consults with the police on difficult cases. His buddy on the police force is Inspector Rheinhardt whose life is made difficult by his bumbling boss, Manfred Brugel, the police commissioner, who micro-mismanages various crimes and the administration of the Viennese police force. Rheinhardt and Liebermann have a wonderful friendship that extends well beyond their professional relationship. Liebermann plays the piano and Rheinhardt is a baritone, so they practice classical pieces together and Tallis weaves musical themes into the story lines. In addition to the unique setting of early 1900s Vienna and the musical themes, Tallis use of vocabulary is wonderful – far better than what we usually see in crime novels.

In this novel, Tallis mixes two main story lines with a number of subplots that help better identify the main characters. Rheinhardt is called to investigate the death of a student at a Viennese high school military academy. It appears that the student died of natural causes, but the inspector’s intuition suggests otherwise. At the same time, Rheinhardt’s fellow inspector, one of equal rank who always gets the better assignments and is treated as if he is Rheinhardt’s superior, is given a mysterious assignment which keeps interfering with Rheinhardt’s investigation into the death at the academy. In the midst of those stories, Liebermann grows angry with his unrequited love, Amelia Lyngate, and he becomes involved with a femme fatale. That’s enough – this is good writing, good plot creation, and good character development. While reading this book, you’ll learn more about societal forces that were at work in Austria. I’ve already gotten the next Liebermann book, so let that stand as my recommendation.