Love The Stranger by Michael Sears

We here at MRB don't read many 'socially relevant' stories. Murder and mayhem? Fine by us. Anything that reeks of identity politics? Not me. 

Having said that,  Love the Stranger is a socially conscious mystery thriller that combines real estate corruption, immigration, and grassroots activism that is Queens, NY. This is Sears' second Ted Molloy book that reflects procedural crime elements with larger social themes.

Ted Molloy, a former Manhattan lawyer turned Queens attorney, who, with his partner Lester, balance  moral obligations within the community with his business (investing in foreclosed properties).  Ted lives with a local activist, Kenzie Zielinski, whose latest campaign is “Stop the Spike” to halt a development project in Queens that threatens to displace a considerable immigrant community. 

Kenzie's regular Uber driver, Mohammend, has been getting jerked around by his immigration lawyer So she decides to confront the attorney. Upon arriving to his office, she finds the lawyer is freshly dead. And being the last person to see said lawyer, she becomes a person of interest. She, Ted and his friends struggle to find the culprit all the while facing  a dangerous smear campaign about herself brought on by corrupt developers and other tentacles of Big Real Estate.

Can't say that the storyline or the characters connected with me. While the story is briskly told, it just never really caught my interest. Guess I'm just not the socially relevant type. 

ECD

 

The Gun Man Jackson Swagger by Stephen Hunte

Full disclosure here: I'm a full fledged fan of Stephen Hunter, author of the Swagger family saga. His books  have stretched from the early 20th century into the post Depression-era, post WWII into the 50's, and from Vietnam to the present. Each book features a Swagger and their love/skill of the gun. Hunter steps further back in the Swagger gene pool into the late 1800s after the Civil war and into westward expansion. In short . . . a western.

Jackson (Jack) Swagger is an aging Civil War veteran who rides the drought-stricken desert Southwest seeking a a job - a place to matter.Yeah, he's old, but he’s still sharp and skilled. At a sprawling ranch, he he demonstrates his lethal skill with a Winchester rifle and earns a tenuous place among the gunmen of Colonel Callahan. 

He may be a hired gun, by he also has an agenda and maybe the ranch is hiding some clues. He learns that a young cowboy recently died under mysterious circumstances. As an absent father himself, Jack makes this mission personal. The more he digs around the ranch, the temporary towns that spring up around the construction of the railroad, the whorehouses, and the illegal trade of goods and arms with crooked Mexican military, he unravel a web of corruption, betrayal, and dark money that powers the ranch’s prosperity. The expected showdowns and moral deprivation are inevitable. 

Hunter is without question (at least in my eyes) one of the very best mystery writers active today. Add to his ability to weave a phrase, his understanding of the gun culture is unparalleled. What's interesting to those of us who've read every Swagger novel is that Hunter really does his research. And his research took him not just into the landscape and activities on the old west, he has written this book in such a way as it reads like it was actually written back then. No modern English here. This reads like a series of newspaper stories covering late 1800s corruption. Might take a few chapters to get in to the flow of the dialogue, but once in, in for a penny in for a pound. Be prepared for drought, the heat, the smells, the sounds, the weapons. 

The Swagger family is full of deeply human heroes who are equal parts weathered, moral, violent, but still  haunted by the cost of their gun skills. All the men are dangerous, but Hunter doesn't present them as cartoonish. That's not his style. Fans of classic shootist drama and the complex morality of the old west will find The Gun Man: Jackson Swagger wholly satisfying. Another in the long list of winners from Hunter.

Thanks to the good folks at Netgalley who provide reviewer copies in exchange for an unbiased review.

publication date: October 14, 2025 

The Wolves Are Watching by Victoria Houston

Victoria Houston’s The Wolves Are Watching continues her Lew Ferris mystery series by blending rural suspense with crime intrigue. Set in early September, in way the hell up nort' Wisconsin, the story kicks off with a high school aged member of a competitive fishing team (hey, it's northern Wisconsin, what do you expect?) who is being coerced by a stranger threatening his family—pushing him into murky waters both literally and figuratively and throw the tournament. The kid takes off into the nearby woods, sleeps under the unblinking gaze of wolves.

The story revolves primarily around Sheriff Lew (for Llewellyn)  Ferris and her deputy/ace tracker, Ray Pradt. The boy’s father seeks help plunging Ray and Lew way deeper into a world foreign to the northwoods and certainly worse than trying to get a kid to purposefully lose in a blackmail scheme. The woods are alive with illegal betting, arms dealing, and a wicked web of corruption.

If a story is set in northern Wisconsin, the author better be skilled at presenting the environment as well as the characters. The isolated woods, flickering campfires, and sense of being watched lend the story real tension. The wolves are more than wildlife. They are symbolic predators, lending weight to the very real human dangers while not being to involved in human shortcomings. Houston manages to weave crime, rural suspense, and uncanny wildlife imagery in the later fall of Wisconsin. 

Two plots are evident—illegal sports betting on one side and a mysterious disappearance of a retired couple on another—keeps the stakes high. Lew Ferris is a grounded, no-nonsense sheriff, both competent and vulnerable.

The book is fairly compact as most novels go these days. Some of the criminal threads and secondary characters seem underdeveloped and the extent of the gambling and arms dealing could've been more developed. 

Nonetheless, The Wolves Are Watching is a decent mystery, especially for fans of stories based up in the Northland. 

Thanks to the good folks at Netgalley who provide reviewer copies in exchange for an unbiased review.

publication date: February 26, 2026 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cross

 I reread a book by Ken Bruen, one of the 20 that he wrote in the Jack Taylor series, previously reviewed by me in 2009. This is a very dark series about Jack who is driven by alcoholism, either when he’s deep into the drink, or when he is spending most of his waking hours fighting against taking a drink He is haunted by that. Atypical of most of the books in this series, Jack is actually sober throughout the book as he fights off his demons while trying to solve a crime that involved the seemingly random killing of dogs in Galway, Ireland. Bruen clearly understands the agony of alcoholism, and there is something unique about his writing style. Given that I’ve read and reviewed most of his books, it’s not a surprise that I highly recommend this series, if you can tolerate the darkness.

The Black Wolf

 

Louise Penny’s 20^th book in the Armand Gamache series is titled The Black Wolf, in a sequel to the 19^th book, The Grey Wolf. I love Penny’s writing and her group of recurring characters. I’ve reread most of her books, some of them, several times. This one was a bit different. Based on the notion that climate change is continuing to worsen, leaving the U.S. short of water, and Canada with an abundance, Penny also described corruption in Canada that had infiltrated all levels of government. All of the usual Gamache characters were involved with the plot, with the unexpected addition of Gamache’s wife and children. As usual, Penny will always be worth reading. She produces one book a year and I eagerly await her next release. But this one was not my favorite. I’ll be curious to read more reviews, which I haven’t done as yet.

Guess Again

 My third Charlie Donlea book in such a short time, and I expect there will be more, was Guess Again. Ten years ago, 17-year-old Callie Jones went missing. About to start her senior year of high school, she was going to be the valedictorian, was a star athlete, and was beautiful. At an end of the summer high school party, she was missing and no trace of her was ever found.

The great rogue detective Ethan Hall was so disturbed by the case that he opted out of law enforcement, went to medical school, and at a later than normal age, became a successful ER doctor. Ten years later, Hall’s detective partner was about to retire. Although the Jones case was cold, this detective had unsuccessfully continued to look for clues, and he begged Hall to come back and have another look. It turns out that Callie’s dad was the man who was about to become the governor, and he offered Hall the chance to cancel all of his med school debts if he would take leave from the hospital to do so. In love withh is work as a doctor, Hall was reluctant to do so, but the financial incentive was one he could not pass up. Hall’s hospital administrator was not happy about Hall’s agreement to do so. The governor placed Hall back on the case as a special hire.

 

Hall did not know he was about to encounter a serial killer and the killer’s psychopathic girlfriend. That’s when the story really took off. I won’t be a spoiler, just add this book to your reading queue.

Those Empty Eyes

 Those Empty Eyes was my second Charlie Donlea murder mystery novel. He has quickly moved up to my list of favorite authors, along with Michael Connelly, Daniel Silva, Louise Penny, Robert Crais, and C.J. Box. If he had a more substantial body of work already produced, I might include Grant Rosenberg in this list, but he’s just published one three-book series about a unique character, Gideon. I raved about Donlea’s The Girl Who Was Taken, and Those Empty Eyes was the next one in audiobook form that I could get on Libby. 

The story starts with the horrendous murders of a husband, wife, and son, leaving only the 17-year-old daughter who had miraculously escaped the massacre. The killer fled and the girl emerged from her hiding spot only to find her dead family members. To protect herself in case he came back, she picked up the shotgun the killer had discarded. When the police arrived, Alexandra Quinlin was sitting on the floor with the shotgun in her lap, covered with blood, and uncontrollably sobbing.

 

The police mistakenly identified Alexandra as the killer even though the murder scene did not fully support that scenario. She had just finished her junior year of high school, and the police whisked her away to a juvenile detention facility where she spent the next two months. It was then that a pro bono attorney got her charges dismissed. But, the case of her family’s murder was never solved. Devastated by this turn of events, the lawyer and his wife took Alexandra into their home and they became her guardians, her surrogate parents. That was when the story got even more interesting.

 

The lawyer filed a wrongful arrest case against the city, and he won a multimillion dollar suit on her behalf. However, there were people in and out of the police department who did not accept this outcome and clung to the belief that she really was the murderer. She was pursued by a local reporter who began to make a career for herself based on her false belief of Alexandra’s guilt. Meanwhile, Alexandra was reeling from this series of events and she found it impossible to go back to school. Having been a beautiful girl who was both a brilliant student and athlete who was headed for a great life, she was suddenly depressed, unable to concentrate, and at a loss of her direction in life. She changed her name, moved to England, but was still unable to get her life organized. She was involved in drugs and other meaningless activities. Finally, the lawyer offered her a job to come back to the U.S. and to work for him as an investigator.

 

Alex turned out to be very good at her new direction, but after 10 years, she was assigned to a case which was rather similar to her own. That’s when this already gripping story became even more so. Enough said. I won’t be a spoiler for these good stories and great plot.

The Amalfi Secret

 

Admittedly, I found it difficult to review this book without commenting about my own strong feelings about the main content, but I’ll try to do just that. This was a Dan Brown-like novel, a murder mystery which took place in Italy and involved symbols of the Freemasonry. Although ChatGPT suggests the roots of the Freemasons dates to the medieval stonemasons’ guilds, the authors essentially trace it to the time of Christ. In essence, the book suggests that Freemasons had a long history of secretly trying to undermine and sabotage the Catholic church, all of Christianity, and the Muslim faith as well. Freemasonry was not a religion, but its members were  required to believe in a supreme being, the form of which was left to individual belief.

 

The authors Reinekings wrote that there are 33 levels of Freemasonry which members advance through, and as they advance, the members gradually learn about the true meaning of their symbols. While the masons openly supported brotherly love, charity, and truth, it was only the members at the highest ranking who knew what the symbology was really about, and their intentions were hardly charitable or noble. Secretly, the society had been supporters of both Hitler and Stalin.

 

Given the current decline of Christianity over the last many decades, it was the decision of those of highest ranking in Freemasonry to give up their centuries-old long game for a more daring big play. Their idea was to steal a nuclear weapon from the poorly secured soviet arsenal, to explode it in an American city and to blame the whole matter on the Muslims. By so doing, the masons thought they would hasten the end of all organized religions.

 

The Reinekings have produced a good storyline with a well-disguised plot. The main characters are both believable and compelling. I will leave other readers to comment further.