places I’ve only been in mysteries

• Maggody, Arkansas (Joan Hesse’s Arly Hanks series)
• Lochdubh, Scotland (Hammish Macbeth series)
• Elizabethan England (Edward Marston’s theatre mysteries featuring Nicholas Bracewell)
• the Navajo reservation (Tony Hillerman)
• New Orleans (Linda Barnes’s City of the Dead)
• the morgue (Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series)
• 221b Baker Street

The Guards

Flat out, this is a great book. 

It’s not the first Jack Taylor book I’ve read, which is too bad.  It would have been a pleasure to read these in order but,  I happened upon the  Killing of the Tinkers first. And I’d read some of Bruen’s London Brant books before.  But this one is stunning.  Jack is the real deal, an incredibly interesting and real character who gets involved in riveting enigmas, yet whose character, friendships, and personal life remain the center of these books.  The dialogue is terse but friendly; characterization seems effortless and economic, but creates people you feel you know well and care about.  The idiom and geography transport you.  In all, Bruen creates as vivid a world and character as you can imagine. I’ve been to Galway, but that lovely tourist city is hardly the place of memory, pain, and darkness Jack inhabits.  When Anne Henderson, who becomes the love of his life, presents him with her problem, Jack, as always, must confront his past and his personal demons to make any headway.  As always, any progress comes at great cost.  That the violence of these stories does not seem gratuitous is probably an indication of how deeply we are involved in Jack’s world.

Ken Bruen in Wilkepedia 
the novels

Bust

It’s got to be some kind of a feat to write a novel where none of the characters are in any way sympathetic or appealing.  For me, Bust was that novel.  The main character, Max Fisher. who hires a hit man to kill his wife, was shallow, rude, gross  and despicable.  And that is even before he entertains the idea of murdering her.  Deidre, his wife, mercifully appears in the novel only briefly, yet manges to make him look good.  The object of his love, and his motivation, his secretary Angela, is more straightforward and ruthless, sort of like Bruen’s “Vixen” character.  Ultimately amoral and unpleasant, she at least thinks clearly.  Maybe she’s just Irish.  Or written by Bruen.  Her hitman boyfriend, Dillon, is pathologically creepy.  HIs wheelchair-bound nemesis and rival is almost as insane.  It’s hard to like the cops, dead or alive. It’s hard to like anyone.  Or care.

I wonder exactly how the logistics of writing a novel with another person works.  My guess is that Bruen and Jason Starr alternate chapters or points of view.  The novel has some drive and interest, but overall, it seems to me to be an exercise in writing a certain genre without a central focus or intent. It’s not that I always dislike noir, but I should have known straight from the cover (yick) that this was not my book.

new friends

It’s always fun to find a new (to you) author and character you like.  I hadn’t read any of Lisa Scottoline’s novels before, despite her prolific output, and I enjoyed Lady Killer immensely, especially for its main character Mary DiNunzio, a Philadelphia lawyer from the south side neighborhood.  A little like ’s Janet Evanovitch’s New Jersey heroine Stephanie Plum, Mary is a little more serious, and her sidekicks are a little less fun, but the writing’s top-notch and the story is great.  Who wouldn’t like the wild but good-hearted  “mean girl” client Trish  Gambone in leather and mile-high stilettos and her posse of manicurists and stylists.   The characters are wonderful, but it’s Philadelphia that’s the star of this book. I’m sure I’ll read more of Scottoline.

old friends

I thought I was all caught up on Lawrence Block.  I’d immensely enjoyed All the Flowers Are Dying when I read it shortly after it first came out in 2005. So many series seem to atrophy or to repeat themselves.  Block was still in tip-top form in that one.  It was quite a roller coaster, and several years later I recall that the scenes in the Virginia “correctional institution,” especially, were chilling, and all that stuff about capital punishment was all new information to me.  Sometime I pray that mystery authors really do their research; it seems that quite a bit of my information about prison, police procedure,  the Navajo tribe, and many parts of the world come from fictional accounts.  I remember reading  a mystery called The Mystic Policeman, situated in my neck of the woods.  It was OK, but the turns in the road, and the jurisdiction, details about the cemetery across the street from us were all wrong.  It was, well, so made up! Again, I digress . . .

Anyway, it was news to me last week when I discovered one of Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr’s novels I’d missed.  The Burglar on the Prowl  was published in 2005, and I felt like I’d neglected to send an old friend a Christmas card or something by ignoring it.  Bernie is charming.  He’s taught me most of what I know about breaking and entering.  It was great fun to get reacquainted with him and with his best friend, dog groomer Carolyn, owner of the Poodle Factory;  his friendly and somewhat bumbling police nemesis Ray Kirschmann; his bookstore; his cat; his after-work hangout, the Bum Rap; his multi-ethnic lunch routine; and his city neighborhoods and haunts.  It’s always fun to see him caught under a bed (here), or in a closet, or, generally, in the  wrong place at the wrong time.  It’s great to see him meet somebody suitable, stumble onto more than he bargained for, or get stuck in a milk chute.  He’s by far the most moral, self-effacing, and fun felon I know.  To say the plot of this Bernie adventure is involved is an understatement; its denouement, a traditional showdown in the drawing room times seven, rather tries everyone’s patience, including this reader’s.  But Bernie’s just plain fun.  Can’t wait for the next one.

Here’s Bernie in Wilkepedia and a list of the Bernie novels.