Thread of Hope

Jeff Shelby is another one of those prolific best-selling authors who has never been reviewed in this blog. He has written multiple series of crime/mystery novels. I stumbled into this very good book while I was on a trip in Southern Baja and found myself reading about my hometown area in and around San Diego.

Joe Tyler is the protagonist in this five-novel series, the first being Thread of Hope. This book opens as Joe is returning to his home for the first time in seven years. He grew up and went to high school in Coronado, an idyllic island community near downtown San Diego which is dominated by a military base. It used to be that mostly military families lived there, but it has evolved into a community of the very wealthy and it is a highly desirable place to live.

Joe is coming back because his best lifetime friend is in trouble. He has been accused of beating and raping an 18-year-old high school girl, Meredith Jordan, and then he was attacked and beaten by unknown assailants. Chuck Winslow lies in a hospital bed, unconscious, and it is not clear that he will survive this assault. Although Joe has been out of contact for eight years, he is very sure Chuck could not have done the things of which he is accused. As the story progresses we learn that Joe has fled the island in pursuit of his own daughter, Elizabeth, who had been kidnapped at the age of eight, right out of his front yard when he had taken his eyes off her for only a couple minutes. She disappeared without a trace. Joe had been working as a cop in Coronado, his dream job. He had been happy in his marriage and in love with his circumstances, and then his life was torn apart.

Over the course of the book, the reader learns that Joe left his job and spent a couple years doing nothing but searching for his daughter, but those years of grief were also spent in substance abuse. That was when his marriage came undone. As he emerged from his fearful depression and hopelessness, he realized that even if he had not been able to find Elizabeth, he had learned a lot about how to find people. He specialized in tracking down teenagers who disappeared from home, and he was damn good at it, having helped numerous families to reunite. It was only Chuck that could have pulled Joe back to Coronado where his painful memories were most vivid. With his police contacts in San Diego and with his own detective skills, he launched into figuring out what happened to Chuck.

At the outset of this book, I was not convinced it would be a good read. At first, it seemed a bit formulaic – just another crime story. But, it turns out that Shelby has written a story about a very compelling character in Joe Tyler. Joe’s struggle with his own losses was not melodramatic – it felt quite real. Shelby introduced a surrounding cast of characters that beautifully supported his story, and I knew I was hooked when I immediately downloaded the second book in this series, Thread of Suspicion. As suggested by the title of this first Joe Tyler book, there is some hope that Elizabeth might be alive, and as the first book ends, Joe gets a new clue that he has to follow. We at menreadingbooks.com have another excellent author with a large body of work to enjoy and write about.

Dead Lions

Dickie Bow had been out the spy game for a long time, but he wanted back in. He had never been an important spy, never one trusted with an important task, but he was a lifelong “street walker,” someone who knew how to tale someone without being seen, someone who could blend into the background without raising suspicion. And, he was the one guy who had actually seen a legendary spy, Alexander Popov. But was Popov even real? But Dickie didn’t always stay hidden, and that’s why his body was found on a bus. His cell phone had an unsent one-work text, “cicadas.” That was enough to interest some people at MI5, and some of the tasks that needed to be done to investigate what Dickie was after were assigned to the Slow Horses.

Dead Lions is the second book in a 5 book series, Slough House. All of the characters in the Slough House are spies who screwed up, who blew an assignment. Because it is not so easy to fire a spy, MI5 chose to give them the most boring of assignments as a way of inducing a voluntary retirement. None of the slow horses had ever gotten to return to Regent’s Park where the real MI5 brain trust worked, and like Dickie, they all wanted back in the game they had trained for.

Cicadas, insects that stay buried for 17 years before emerging to activity, was a clue that somewhere in England lived a Russian sleeper cell which was being activated 21 years after the Berlin Wall came down.

The cast of characters that author Mick Herron introduced in the first book, Slow Horses, are as intesting as the characters of Louise Penny or even Daniel Silva – and that is remarkably high praise. The primary protagonist is Jackson Lamb, who unlike penny’s Armand Gamache or Silva’s Gabriel Allon, is not refined or likeable. Really, he is a most disgusting creature with vile and extreme habits. But is at the top of the Slough House for a reason, and he knew Dickie Bow from their days together in Berlin during the height of the Cold War. Along with Lamb are the slow horses about whom we learned more, River Cartright, Roderick Ho, Min Marper, Louisa Guy, Catherine Standish. Herron introduces a couple new ones, Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander, which allows him to kill off one of the others. 

The character development, main plot, and subplots all are fantastic. Herron has written 11 novels, and I’ve now reviewed two of them. I’ve already downloaded the third and fourth books of the Slough House series. We at MRB have a new author to get excited about. These books get my very strong recommendation.

 

Revolver

Revolver, by Duane Swierczynski is a story about three generations of cops in Philadelphia, starting with Stan Walczak who was murdered in the line of duty, although at the time of his death, he was also drinking at a bar during his shift. He was killed in 1965 along with his partner, George Wildey. At Stan’s funeral, his 9-year-old son, Jimmy vowed to find the person who had done this and bring him to justice, one way or another.

Thirty years later, 1995, Jimmy was Homicide Detective Jim Waczak, and he took the second of his three kids, teenager Cary, to the bar where the murder happened, Jim’s annual tradition to honor his father. He confided in Cary that he was pretty sure he knew who the killer was, a junkie, Terrill Lee Stanton, but there was never enough proof to hang this murder on him. Never mind, because Stanton was in prison anyhow on a different murder charge. Then in 1995, Jim is assigned a new murder investigation when 25-year-old Kelly Ann Farrace is found raped and murdered. She was a magazine writer who was assigned to publish a story about 30 promising Philadelphia residents who were all under the age of 30. What was the tie in to the current political climate in town? The mayoral election was about to happen, and the murder occurred in the part of town that was supposed to be safe. Why was Sonia Kaminski, linked to the mayor, pressing Jim to solve the case so quickly? It was another case that went officially unsolved.

By 2015, Jim was retired Captain Jim. His oldest, Stas was on the police force, but he was chronically depressed, an alcoholic, and his career was going nowhere. The youngest of Captain Jim’s three kids, Audrey, was in her second year of college in Houston where she was studying police forensics (although she was on the edge of flunking out of her program). She didn’t talk to anyone in the family, had even changed her last name to distance herself from her abusive father and dysfunctional family. But Audrey had been called home for a ceremony honoring the 50^th anniversary of her grandfather’s death. This very dysfunctional Walczak family was back together. What could go wrong?

Audrey decided that the one way she could save her college career was to do a special project in which she brought new forensic science to the scene of her grandfather’s death, and then solve the murder. Her parents, long since divorced, and her brothers did not want her to do that, but always the stubborn one, she bulled ahead with her project. She figured out that there had to have been two shooters, not just one, and with that info, the Walczak family totally unraveled. Audrey figured it all out – a convoluted and dark history unfolded, and you’ll have to read the book to learn the details. The mysteries involved lots of family connections, too many family secrets for this reader.

This was a book that was recommended by an NPR reviewer, Nancy Pearl. Her website offers a wealth of information. While this book does not get a strong recommendation from me, assuming you like dark stories, it was entertaining and I plan to continue to consult Pearl's website.

Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin

Retirement doesn’t sit well with John Rebus.  It serves as a reminder of how poorly he’s lived his personal life to support his professional career as a detective in Edinburgh’s police department.  But his career is over and he is left to sit in his drab, dated apartment with regrets for the family that left him, the alcohol and cigarettes in which he overindulged and the cases he left unsolved.  Dr. Deborah Quant, the local forensic pathologist has taken an interest in Rebus and his health, most recently a shadow on his chest x-ray and his uncontrollable cough.  It is at dinner with Deborah at the Caledonian Hotel that Rebus remembers an unsolved cold case, the murder of Marie Turquand forty years earlier in this very hotel.  Marie was married to a successful local businessman but was a bit of a groupie for a rock and roll band who were staying at the Caledonian.  She was found strangled in her bed in the room she had taken for the night.

Rebus asks his former protégé, DI Siobhan Clarke to supply the cold case files and dives right in.  He interviews ex-cop Robert Chatham who had originally investigated the Turquand murder years back.  Chatham turns up dead the next day.  DI Malcolm Fox is assigned to Chatham’s murder investigation.  Clarke is busy with her own investigation of the assault of local crime boss, Darryl Christie who had taken over for Big Ger Cafferty, Rebus’ longtime nemesis.  Rebus becomes suspicious after the three investigators share information from their current cases.  Could they all be connected?  With no official standing, Rebus inserts himself into solving the most notorious crimes in Edinburgh.


Rankin can’t let go of his most prevalent protagonist, John Rebus.  His fans won’t let him.  Rankin remains true to the timeline for mandatory retirement in the UK police force and resurrects Rebus to the job in retirement.  With little character development necessary, this being the twenty first John Rebus novel, Rankin delves into a complex plot that leaves us guessing all the while enjoying the tenacity and audacity that is John Rebus.  Another good read.  Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

Funeral in Berlin

Len Deighton is one of the greatest cold war spy novelists of this era, and Funeral in Berlin, was his third novel, written in 1964 about a story that occurred a year earlier. This is a classic espionage novel about an unnamed British agent. The stories involves a complex interaction of double and triple agents. Anticipating a trip to Germany in the near future, I came to this book as the result of an attempt to find mysteries that used Berlin as a venue. I got to the 22% of the story and did not finish the book since I found it dated and trite, but it must have been a major hit in its time.

The Berlin Stories

In anticipation of traveling to Germany in a couple months, I was on a quest to read some books that took place there, and The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood popped up as having been rated by Time Magazine as among the top 100 books of the 20^th century. The book is actually two novellas, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. The books are given credit for the subsequent stage and film versions known as Cabaret. Both books were written in 1945, the first taking place in 1930 and the second in 1933. Of course, that was the era when Hitler was just coming to power.

Isherwood based the stories on his life in Berlin, having taken extensive notes while living there in the 1930s, then compiling them into these books after WWII. In Berlin, life among the moneyed class was extravagant and shallow. While Mr. Norris was a clever and interesting character, he was more of sensational and curious personality than anything else. Given the sensational aspects of the book and plot, I thought this book might be an example of early gay literature. However, I found the whole thing to be rather dated and stale considering more current literature. The story is interesting from a historical angle, especially the struggle between the forces of Hitler and the communists which were competing with each other for the sympathies of the voting public, although that was not a major plot in this story.

Goodbye to Berlin was mostly a study of a series of characters, none of which I found particularly compelling. Best known from Cabaret was Sally Bowles, the character played by Liza Minelli. Shallow, sensational, sexy, bold. I was left without any appreciation for the story itself, and I abandoned the book at that point. Perhaps the novellas should be seen in a historical context, but I can’t recommend these works for casual and enjoyable reading.