Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Ways of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake

The Ways of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake (Mysterious Press, 2017) is the fourth book by Blake about the Wolfe crime family whose business interests lie on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. Axel Prince Wolfe, his father’s planned heir to the family law firm, decides to join his high school friend and a stranger in the theft of three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of bearer bonds. Already married with a small daughter, he is planning to drop out of college and focus on the family’s criminal enterprises, despite the family rule that everyone must obtain an undergraduate degree before joining the company. [The Rules of Wolfe (Mysterious Press, 2013) goes into this requirement in more detail. I raved about this book in a post to DorothyL while attending the 2016 Left Coast Crime convention and still refer readers to it at every opportunity.] They successfully acquire the bonds but the getaway goes sideways, and his partners abandon him to save themselves. He refuses to give up the names of his cohorts to reduce his prison term, and he is sentenced to an onerous 30 years.

His relatives turn their backs on him, and he becomes fixated on the daughter who won’t visit him or write him. After 20 years in confinement he joins a young Mexican inmate with hidden ties to a cartel in planning a jail break, and they escape during a driving thunderstorm, leaving several bodies in their wake. After they manage to cross the river into Mexico, Axel is invited to join the cartel and helps them in an ambush of a rival gang. He desperately wants to see his now-grown daughter though, and off he goes.

Blake is an exceptional writer of fast-moving crime dramas. His grim descriptions of border desert crossings are meticulous in their hair-raising detail, and his depictions of shootouts and other action scenes are intense and pulse-pounding. While he’s received a good deal of recognition from critics, he is still not widely known among the thriller and mystery reading community, which is truly unfortunate for everyone.

Publishers Weekly starred review.

·         Hardcover: 304 pages

·         Publisher: Mysterious Press (September 5, 2017)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0802125778

·         ISBN-13: 978-0802125774

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Pest Control by Bill Fitzhugh

Hardback

Pest Control by Bill Fitzhugh (Avon Books, 1996) has been on my to-read stack for awhile and it finally made it to the top. A commentary on life in New York City, it is also a laugh out loud funny book. Bob Dillon is obsessed with finding the perfect natural pest control method. His goal in life is to own a pest control company that does not use poison and to drive around in a van with a large fiberglass insect on top. To that end, he raises insects that are known to kill other insects and tries to cross-breed them into more perfect killing machines.

In the meantime, however, his wife has lost her job in the savings and loan debacle and he needs to generate some cash. One beer-drinking night he and a buddy create a flyer outlining his exterminating skills and send it with a snapshot to a carefully worded ad they don’t realize has been placed by an international coordinator of hitmen and assassins. The coordinator has been offered a large amount of money to make someone disappear and none of the usual candidates is available or qualified. The coordinator is convinced the photo is that of a hardened killer. (His assistant, on the other hand, recognizes a drunk when he sees one.) He flies to New York from Switzerland and tracks Bob down, who is stunned when he realizes he’s being asked to kill a human. He declines to take the job but when the unwanted person dies a few days later in a traffic accident, the coordinator is convinced Bob was only playing hard to get and sends him a large envelope of cash. The cash would have solved all of Bob’s problems but his sketchy landlord takes the envelope and forgets about it.

Paperback/eBook Cover

Bob’s reputation as an assassin is instantly made, and the CIA attempts to capture this new talent for the Agency’s own. They are awed by Bob’s ability to create deep cover as a middle-class nonentity. In the meantime, the established killers are peeved by the unwanted competition and travel to New York to remove Bob. This comedy of errors goes on and on, only getting more twisted by the page. My favorite bit was Bob leading one of the hitmen through a string of Italian restaurants, where the local thugs resent the interruption of their lunch and take the killer out.

The supporting characters are great. The hitman considered best in the world is depressed and tired of his job but has a gambling habit that consumes all of the substantial money he earns. The hitman coordinator’s assistant is an avid student of couture. Bob’s patient wife is torn between her need for financial security and her love for flaky Bob.

Anyone with a phobia about insects should not read this book, as the descriptions of the bugs and some of their more objectionable behaviors are graphic. I generally don’t care about creepy-crawlies and I found reading some of the details a little unnerving. Otherwise, highly recommended.

·         Hardcover: 312 pages

·         Publisher: Avon Books; 1st edition (December 1, 1996)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0380973480

·         ISBN-13: 978-0380973484

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Broken Ice by Matt Goldman

Broken Ice by Matt Goldman (Forge Books, 2018) is the second book about Nils Shapiro, a former police officer who has joined forces with former police colleague Anders Ellegaard to establish a private detective agency in Minneapolis. Anders brings business sense and marketing know-how to the partnership, and Nils contributes investigative skills and acute intuition. They are both fully realized characters; of the two, I liked Anders more. He is at a loss sometimes as to the moral ambiguity of the situations to which their work leads him. Nils, on the other hand, isn’t especially troubled by such considerations.

Two teenage girls are missing from the area and Nils is retained to find one of them, Linnea Engstrom. The two girls aren’t particular friends but the connection between the two events is unmistakable. While interviewing Linnea’s parents, the other girl is found dead in the St. Paul caves. Feeling increasing pressure to find Linnea quickly, Nils and Anders go to the scene to learn whatever they can that might apply to their search. Standing outside the cave entrance talking to the police, Nils is hit in the shoulder by an arrow. Not just any arrow, but one meant for big game hunting, with lethal razorlike edges. The medical examiner was leaving the cave as he fell and took prompt action to keep him from bleeding to death.

Nils arranges to leave the hospital with a full-time nurse, whom he escapes as soon as possible to continue his investigation, which takes him to a small town near the Canadian border known as the Hockey Capital of the World. Playoff season is in full swing and many of Linnea’s friends are there. Two more people connected to Linnea turn up gruesomely dead, and Nils is constantly on the look-out for the archer to come back to finish him off while he conducts interviews and visits Linnea’s known hangouts.

New information about halfway through suggests a different motive for Linnea’s disappearance than earlier assumed and leads Nils into Canada with an interesting pair of travelling companions. The supporting cast of characters in this book is one of its strong points.

This new series is a pleasant addition to the catalog of fictitious private investigators in general and to the Minnesota collection in particular. (Why is Minnesota so saturated with crime fiction? We don’t hear anything about private investigators in Idaho.) I noticed three or four jarring typos in the book. “Grilled leaks” instead of leeks and “Char road shotgun” instead of rode for instance. Someone used spellcheck instead of an actual proofreader. I expect better from a prominent publisher like Forge.

  

·         Hardcover: 336 pages

·         Publisher: Forge Books (June 12, 2018)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0765391317

·         ISBN-13: 978-0765391315

  

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Lullaby Road by James Anderson

Lullaby Road by James Anderson (Crown, 2018) is another prose poem and unconventional crime fiction story from the author of The Never-Open Desert Diner. It features Ben Jones, a few months after the events of Diner. Winter started early and a snowstorm seems to be brewing on the horizon. Ben is in a hurry to fill his truck when he finds a large German shepherd or husky guarding a small child in the subfreezing wind at the truck stop. The owner has conveniently disappeared, no one else is around, and Ben can’t leave the child in the cold. Both the dog and the toddler, who doesn’t talk, join him in the warm truck so he can get on the road with the day’s delivery of water, propane, and other necessities to the isolated residents of Utah’s high desert. Among them are John, who walks the lonely state highway six months of the year carrying a huge wooden cross, no one knows why. Occasionally Ben stops to talk to John and they share an imaginary cigarette, as carefully rolled and lit and passed back and forth as if it were real tobacco. Another of the damaged but harmless desert rats is Roy, the proud creator of a solar-powered dog house made of used tires. Others who have come to the desert to hide from the world are not as innocuous but they all need the lifeline to the outside that Ben provides.

Searching for the child’s home is only one of the plots in this story. John is struck by a hit-and-run driver and sustains life-threatening injuries. There are of course no doctors practicing in that part of the state and the nearest hospital’s sole emergency helicopter has multiple calls for its services. Getting John to the hospital falls to Ben, as does stopping a shooting and robbery at the local convenience store. At home, his single-parent neighbor gives up on trying to work two jobs and go to college while taking care of her daughter and calls her domineering mother, who brings an aggressive boyfriend when she shows up.

Beautifully, exquisitely written, I focused on the telling of the story with its evocative imagery rather than the story itself for a considerable part of the tale, then began to fix on the people the narrative brings to life. These mini-plots are vignettes wrapped into a single book with the desert setting and the lost child as the threads that run through it from beginning to end. For readers who appreciate good writing and thoughtful portrayals of humanity.

·         Hardcover: 320 pages

·         Publisher: Crown (January 16, 2018)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1101906545

·         ISBN-13: 978-1101906545

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Defendants by John Ellsworth

The Defendants  by John Ellsworth (Subjudica House, 2014) is the first book in his Thaddeus Murfee legal thriller series, although a prequel released in 2018 makes it the second in the chronology of series events. Less than two years of legal practice in the small town of Orbit, somewhere in southern Illinois, has left Thaddeus ill-prepared to take on a defense for murder, but his client, poor but honest waitress Ermeline Ransom insists he’s the only lawyer she trusts.

Ermeline unfortunately got between the local public works contractor and the Chicago mob to whom the contractor had discontinued kickbacks. When a visit from a mob enforcer did not shake the overdue payments loose, the enforcer attacked Ermeline and set the stage for the contractor to be accused of the crime. After the Orbit Attorney General declined to prosecute for lack of evidence, Ermeline then retained Thaddeus to pursue civil damages.

This was not what the mob had in mind; they did not want any competition for the money they believed the contractor owed them. They decided to squash these upstarts from nowhere once and for all by killing the contractor and slickly framing Ermeline. The local police had no choice but to arrest her on the face of the evidence but Thaddeus knows she didn’t do it. How he outsmarts the cutthroat prosecuting attorney from Chicago while collecting the proof and testimony needed to bring the crime home to its perpetrators make a lively absorbing read.

The author says these books, about a dozen in the series, are based on his early days as a practicing lawyer, and I believe him. Thaddeus makes some rookie mistakes that his more experienced friends and paralegal manage to undo. He makes up in zeal what he lacks in experience, though. The residents of Orbit come together around Ermeline and her son to protect them as much as they can, showing some of the best reasons to live in a small town. Readers of legal thrillers will especially like this book.

·         Paperback: 262 pages

·         Publisher: Subjudica House (January 15, 2014)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0615953778

·         ISBN-13: 978-0615953779

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Death and the Icebox by Linda Berry

Downsizing the book collection has made me look at books I haven’t read or considered for years. This series by Linda Berry is one. Death and the Icebox (Five Star, 2004) is the third Trudy Roundtree cozy mystery. Set in the small town of Ogeechee, Georgia, where Trudy grew up and her family has lived for generations, everyone knows everyone else and their cousins too.

Trudy is taking a bit of a break from her job patrolling the town and showing police presence, part of Chief Henry Huckabee’s community policing campaign, and visiting her best friend Stacy as they watch excavations for a new house near Stacy’s mother-in-law’s home. An old refrigerator is unearthed and falls open when it hits the hard ground, displaying the body of a long-dead woman.

The ensuing cold case investigation reveals cracks in some of the facades presented by prominent names in the town and worries some of her friends, who fear their family members know more about the death than they are telling anyone.

I always liked this series, which combines standard components of cozy mysteries in a new way. The small Southern town setting automatically provides strong family and friend relationships and the investigator’s best helper, a long-time resident who knows everyone and most of their secrets. Putting the main character on the police force allows the incorporation of police procedural elements and does away with one of the hardest parts of an amateur detective series, explaining why the character is becoming involved in police business. The family tie between Trudy and the chief of police who is her boss as well as her cousin adds a great source of dialog and behavioral motivation. Anytime Trudy can’t get what she wants from him, she can go to his mother, her aunt. Typical in a small town, not at all permissible in a city. The inevitable love interest is the son of the local newspaper owner, not an attractive FBI agent or state police detective, another nice difference.

There are six titles in this series that ran from 1998 to 2009 and were released later in paperback. WorldCat indicates many libraries still hold copies.

·         Hardcover: 248 pages

·         Publisher: Five Star Publishing; 1st edition (April 2003)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0786252332

·         ISBN-13: 9780786252336

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Winter Garden Mystery by Carola Dunn

The Winter Garden Mystery by Carola Dunn (St. Martins, 1995) is the second historical mystery featuring the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple, who decides to earn her living by writing feature articles about some of England’s old homes, using her social connections to gain access to them. In 1923 this was a radical step for one of her social position but one she felt she had to take after the death of her father during the flu pandemic of 1919 sent the title to a distant cousin. Her brother and her fiancé both died during World War I, leaving Daisy with no close family beyond her mother.

On her second adventure she visits Occles Hall in Cheshire, home of a school acquaintance whose confrontational mother terrifies everyone. Lady Valeria disdains Daisy’s bid for independence and secretly fears her children might choose to follow her to escape their mother’s tight hold. However, she cannot resist the idea of seeing her model home and village featured in the latest issue of Town and Country magazine. So Daisy is allowed to visit but must listen to Lady Valeria’s endless strictures while she takes notes on the hall’s history and photographs its exterior and gardens.

Daisy is in the winter garden, a sheltered corner of the property where flowers bloom even in January, when the body of the housemaid who disappeared two months earlier is discovered. Grace Moss was supposed to have run off with a travelling salesman she’d been seen talking to at the local pub. No one in the village was particularly surprised at the time: her mother did the same thing to escape Grace’s abusive father. But the discovery of her body was a surprise and a shock to everyone, even more so when the autopsy reveals her pregnancy.

Lady Valeria bulldozes the local police into a quick arrest and she is well on her way to railroading an innocent man when Daisy quietly calls Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, whom Daisy met on her first adventure. Fletcher is a widowed policeman well below Daisy’s social status and some ten years her senior, but they have stayed in touch. Fletcher finds a way to insert Scotland Yard into the investigation and promptly destroys the flimsy case against the arrested man while discovering the true culprit.

This is one of my favorite historical series. Dunn touches on the hardships of the post-war years without dwelling on them, giving the books authenticity via sideways looks at the war’s aftermath rather than a full bore spotlight on the misery and social upheaval caused by the loss of an entire generation of young men. The mystery is well written and definitely cozy, not a lot of gore, pleasant characters mostly, and happy endings for nearly everyone. A nice choice for winter reading by the fire with a cup of tea and a cat nearby.

·         Hardcover: 226 pages

·         Publisher: St Martins Pr; 1st edition (May 1, 1995)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0312132174

·         ISBN-13: 978-0312132170

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamiliton Reviews: The Shadow Killer by Gail Bowen

Continuing my research into Canadian mysteries: No survey of current Canadian crime fiction is complete without mentioning Gail Bowen. She received the Derrick Murdoch Award from Crime Writers of Canada in 2009 and the Grand Master Award in 2018. Gail Bowen writes the Joanne Kilbourn amateur detective series set in Regina, Saskatchewan; #18 was released this month. (I have seven of these books and I am slowly working my way through them.) She also spun one of the supporting characters in this series off into a set of four novellas called Rapid Reads geared toward adults and teenagers.

Charlie D is the host of a popular late-night radio talk show somewhere in Canada. For two hours every night he takes calls from his listeners and offers advice on a specific theme. He and his producer screen callers but they never really know what anyone is going to say on air. It’s an auditory version of walking the tight wire without a net.

The Shadow Killer (Orca Books, 2011) is #3 in the series. It takes place on Father’s Day. Charlie has never had a good relationship with his dad, who decides that this is the day they will reconcile. Charlie is not so sure about it and is dreading their meeting. But the show must go on. Amidst the calls and emails reminiscing about paternal parents is a frightening email from a young man who is planning to kill not only his father but his entire family, making this Father’s Day a memorable one. Charlie and his producer frantically keep the banter lively on the radio show while they try to maintain contact with the young man and bring in the police to find him before it’s too late.

Within a short 90 pages or so Bowen establishes background, characters, relationships, and suspense effectively. The plots are a little light perhaps, but nothing more complicated could be resolved in a work of this length. I enjoyed all four of these books and can recommend them to anyone looking for a quick satisfying read. As usual with Canadian mysteries, I don’t know why, they might be hard to find in local libraries.

·         Paperback: 112 pages

·         Publisher: Orca Book Publishers; First Printing edition (September 1, 2011)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1554698766

·         ISBN-13: 978-1554698769

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.