Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman

Gus Murphy is a retired Suffolk County cop who is grieving the loss of his son.  The seemingly healthy teenager keels over on the basketball court and never regains consciousness.  The tragedy changes Gus’s life.  Wallowing is self-pity, he abandons his wife and teenage daughter.  He takes a job at a run-down hotel driving the shuttle bus to the train station on the graveyard shift and lives in a shabby room at the hotel.  His life is reduced to a small circle of shadowy acquaintances and everything about him is sad, soulless, and meaningless.

Then one day ex-con Tommy Delcamino comes to Gus and asks for help.  Tommy’s son, TJ had been murdered four months earlier but the police are not making progress solving the crime.  Seems Gus was the only cop Tommy had ever trusted.  Gus has lost all interest in detective work but his compassion causes him to ask around on Tommy’s behalf.  Gus’s former cop buddies warn him to stay out of it and Gus begins to suspect the Suffolk County police chief is involved.  He also learns TJ had a drug habit and had gotten involved in dealing to support his addiction.  TJ’s best friend leads Gus to the underworld of Long Island and again he is warned to stay away.  But when Gus finds Tommy murdered, he is compelled to find the truth.  As Gus presses forward, the body count grows as do the attempts on his own life.  But in the sorrowful life Gus leads, death threats do not intimidate him.  Death may actually be an improvement to his life at his current depth of grief and despair.

I first came to know Reed Farrel Coleman’s work when he took over the Jesse Stone series from Robert B. Parker’s estate.  Coleman is a seasoned story teller and his strength is in character development… usually development of sad characters.  In Where It Hurts, he tells the story from inside his protagonist, Gus Murphy’s head.  And the story is as dark and brooding as his lead character.  Yet I can’t help but root for Gus… as miserable as he is, he’s a good man at heart and deserves better.  Since Where It Hurts is the first in a series, there is hope for Gus and I look forward to what happens to him next.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced look in exchange for an honest review.   

Try Not to Breathe

Try Not to Breathe is the first novel by Holly Seddon. It’s a crime story, but it’s not one that I finished. I got to page 50 and decided to give it up. I think the demographic that Seddon is writing for is late adolescents or maybe young adults, but not a “veteran senior reader” like myself. As far as I got, the plot seemed interesting, but I could not buy into the characters that she was developing. It’s an age thing. The book just felt too young for me.

The Nightingale

The Nightingale is a World War II novel about two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac, who are confronted with the Nazi invasion of France. The book actually starts in 1995 with an elderly woman who knows she is dying of cancer, and at the insistence of her son, she is preparing to move out of her house on the Oregon Coast into a retirement setting. As she goes through her attic in preparation for the move, she comes across an old trunk with relics from the war, especially an identity tag for Juliette Gervais, a name she has not thought about for a long time. Her son looks at the tag and asks who that might be. Just then, an invitation comes in the mail for a reunion of a group of people in France. The woman who speaks the story in the first person, whose identity is not revealed until the end, decides that it is time to tell her son, Julien, her story for the first time, something she has never breathed to him before. He really has no idea who his mother is.

The two sisters take a very different approach to the war. Vianne is married and when her husband is told to report to the French army, she decides she will just try to survive and protect their daughter. Isabelle, who is only 17 years old, is rebellious, impetuous, and willing to take big risks. She finds a way to join the resistance movement from the start of the war, and anyone caught by the Nazis in the act of helping the resistance is immediately shot. The author skillfully tells the stories of the two sisters as they struggle in their own ways. The author captured the ugliness of war along with the beauty of the effort to survive.

I nearly put this one down at about the 30% mark because the action was developing slowly and I have an aversion to holocaust books. But, this not just a holocaust book. And my daughter who recommended it, said she fought her way through the first third before she became captivated by it. The decision to stay with it was well worth the effort. This is a story about family and love under the worst of circumstances. The Nightingale gets my strong recommendation.

Unwanted by Kristiana Ohlsson

On an early summer day, the train from Gothenburg to Stockholm stops in Flemingsberg, the last stop before the end of the run. The stop is delayed a few minutes due to a switching problem. Sara Sebastiansson and 6yo daughter Lilian are headed home after a weekend in Sara’s hometown. Lilian has just fallen asleep and Sara needs to phone that they are running late. Cell reception on the train is poor so she steps on the platform just outside the window where Lilian is curled up. A distraught woman with a sick dog grabs Sara to help her . . . and the train starts to pull away. Sara quickly tells the train people what has happened and a call is made to a conductor to watch over the child. Sara grabs a taxi. A ruckus in the next car pulls the conductor away for just a minute as the train pulls into the Stockholm station. When he returns to where Lilian was sleeping, she is gone. The only thing left is her shoes.

The police are called in. Routine missing child case. She’ll turn up. Wandered off lost. Then is a report that the girl was carried out by a tall man. The assumption is that she was taken by her father (Sara and Gabriel are separated). That’s typical. It's usually a family member in a huff over something.

The Stockholm police unit that catches the case is headed by Alex Recht and supported by detective Peder Rydh, unit assistant Ellen Lund, and Fredrika Bergman, a civilian assigned to the unit. Apparently Sweden puts civilians in the police; cops tend to get tunnel vision and the civilian has proven to be a good resource.

The next day, a courier service delivers a box to Sara’s home. It contains Lilian’s hair and clothes. The direction of the case changes rapidly. Around midnight the next day, on the lawn outside the Umea Hospital’s ER, Lilian’s body is found, naked, with the word ‘Unwanted’ written on her forehead.

Within a couple days, a lost child has become murder.

Another child is abducted. An infant, right out of its baby carriage. This child turns up dead in the bathtub in the home of the child’s grandparents. Again, the word 'unwanted' is written on its forehead.

The police are running in circles trying to find information about Sara and her family, about her missing husband Gabriel and his family, about the other child’s parents and grandparents, about any connections with Flemingsberg, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Umea. Extra help is called in to take all the phone calls coming from the public. Who is behind all this? What are the motives? Why have these particular children been targeted? How does the killer know these children? Are more abductions coming?

Were you one of those people who faithfully carried around Steig Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and then The Girl Who Played With Fire and then (were disappointed with) The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest? Or are you a fan of Jo Nesbo or of Thomas Enger? If so, you MUST add Kristian Ohlsson to your list of must-reads.

Translating Scandinavian mysteries has become its own cottage industry and for good reason. I reviewed her 4^th book here just recently, the exceptional Hostage. Appropriately hooked, I started with this, her first effort.

And here is what’s either surprising or impressive. Ohlsson (who works in security for the EU) writes with a maturity of style, plot, and character development that is entirely atypical for first-time novelists, at least to me. Yes, the backstories of each of the police team are carefully presented. Ohlsson, however, continually brings up critical pieces from the background and current issues with which each investigator has to cope and allows those distinctly individual biases to potentially impact how each approach the case.

The story is paced rather slowly at the outset of the investigation, picks up dramatically with an anonymous call, then shifts into overdrive after a brief consultation with an American profiler in town doing a guest lecture at a university. Ohlsson then sends the reader on a sprint in a direction only considered by Fredrika.

And here’s something I learned when I started reading this book. A publicist for Atria Books (within the Simon and Schuster conglomerate) seems to like what were do here at MRB and has been nice enough to send us some books for us to review. He’s turned us on the William Kent Krueger and Thomas Enger to mention a couple notables. Shortly after getting Unwanted from the library, a pre-release copy of a book from a new author (OverWatch by Matthew Betley – next up in my pile) arrived. The note said Betley was ‘discovered’ by an Emily Bestler. The note casually mentioned that Bestler brought Vince Flynn and Brad Thor into the Atria/Simon and Schuster stable of authors. Tent Pole authors for sure both of whom are in my power rotation. And guess what? Kristiana Ohlsson is one of hers, too.

So I googled ‘Emily Bestler’ and find that she, too, has her own imprint under the Simon and Schuster umbrella. My point here is that if you are looking for new authors (and aren’t we all?), you might go to Emily Bestler Books website and check out authors in her catalog. Based on Thor, Flynn, Ohlsson, et al., I’m betting you will find more winners there.

Next up are Silenced and The Disappeared, the next two in Ohlsson's Fredrika Bergman series. Reviews should be posted not too far into the coming weeks.

East Coast Don

Death Without Company

Men Reading Books has already reviewed seven of the 12 books in this Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson, but somehow we missed the second one, Death Without Company. This is compelling drama about excellent characters. In this story, there has been death by poisoning of an old woman who lives in the same retirement home as Absaroka County's former sheriff, Lucian Connally. He's the one who reports this death as a murder and insists on an investigation. But, it turns out Lucian was once married to this woman, at least for a few hours, and he was withholding a lot of information about her from the current sheriff, Walk Longmire. Then, more deaths follow.

In addition to a gripping plot in which Johnson reveals just the right amount of information at the right time, what makes this special is the character development and ethnic information about various Indian tribes, the Basques, and the Caucasians, all of whom inhabit the area. It’s a story about land, mineral rights, family, greed, and human relationships. Johnson uses his usual cast of characters, Walt, his daughter Cady, best buddy Henry Standing Bear, Deputy Vic Moretti, Deputy Ferg, Lucian, and Ruby. If you like murder mysteries set in the west, this series is as good as it gets.