Twenty Years Later

 Twenty Years Later is the fourth Charlie Donlea novel I’ve read recently, three this month alone. Perhaps, this is his best, and it would be hard to beat The Girl Who Was Taken. I listened to this one in audiobook format which I enjoy on my daily dog walks. The story begins with a recently arrived tv host on a news program called American Events. Like 60 Minutes and Dateline, it is more like a weekly magazine approach than a nightly news segment. In the last couple years, Avery Mason has worked her way up to being a co-host with the long-time very popular male host. When he died unexpectly, Avery was thrust into the job as a temporary host while a more suitable person was sought for the permanent job. However, she killed her new role, one that she desperately wanted to have. Her ratings were hirer than the old host, and she expected to be compensated for that.

 

Avery also had some responsibility for searching for stories when she learned that the ongoing work at the 9/11 Commission result in the unexpected discovery of the new identification of a body fragment in the North Tower. Victoria Ford, on 9/11/01, had been indicted on a murder charge, and she was in the World Trade Center to talk with her attorney at his office on the 80^th floor. She tried going to the roof where she hoped to be rescued, but her attorney and the rest of his office people chose to descend in a stairway. It took the legal folks more than 40 minutes to get out of the building before it collapsed, but Victoria was never seen again. The case against her had a huge amount of physical evidence against her, and given the salacious nature of the crime, it had been a headline news items for the days before 9/11. But the case was never pursued because of the collapse of the building and the absence of the murder suspect.

 

Avery planned to pursue the story about the discovery of the newly-identified person, and the more she learned about Victoria, the more she realized she would get massive tv ratings as the 20^th anniversary of the tragedy neared. However, the reader learns that Avery has her own troublesome history that she has successfully kept hidden for years. She was constantly troubled by thoughts of the deaths of her mother and brother and the criminal past of her father. After completing college with a degree in journalism and then law school, she realized she would never get hired by a reputable law firm because of her father’s crimes, a Berny Madoff like Ponzi scheme crook. She chose to fall back on her degree in journalism and found a job as an investigative reporter on the West Coast with the LA Times. With her disguised identity, she gradually worked her way up the ladder until landing the job with American Events.

 

The plot was brilliantly unfolded, and information about the principal characters was artistically scattered into the story. I found the characters to be fascinating, and until the final pages, I certainly did not see how the author could so skillfully pull together all of the plots and subplots. This one is a good read or a good listen. I loved it.

Cold Zero

 Cold Zero is a recent book by Brad Thor and Ward Larsen, both of whom have been prolific authors. This is literally an action-packed story, filled with suspense on nearly every page, so be prepared not to put this one down until finished. The storyline is about a Chinese scientist who has a masterful program that is somehow hooked into AI, and it is able to disrupt just about anything including plane flights, missel directions, and nuclear armaments. The device, known in translated English as Sky Fire, would clearly give the owner of the device a clear advantage in any military confrontation. However, just as he is completing his development of the device, Dr. Chen Li has decided to defect to the U.S., which would not prove to be an easy task because he is being so closely guarded by his Chinese overseers.

 

The defection is being managed by a CIA person, Kasey Sheridan, and she gets help from Brett Sharpe, a former fighter pilot who has been living a civilian life. They are trying to secretly leave China,but choose a new super luxurious air service, piloted by Sharpe, thinking China wouldn’t dare bring them down. However, Li’s assistant knew enough about the program to make the plane’s two engines seize simultaneously when they were over the Artic, and it crashed onto an ice flow. A few passengers survived, but some were injured and the Artic conditions were brutal. The nearest vessel was a Russian sub, and both the U.S. and China have sent rescue and recovery planes to help which were hours away, so all of the super powers were engaged with the threat of nuclear war underlying the activity.

 

This the Brad Thor you would expect, but without Scott Harvath as the lead character. If this is your genre, you should love this book.

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.