Barry Ergang Reviews: PANIC ATTACK (2021) by Dennis Palumbo

            On a bitterly cold afternoon in late October, I was one of twenty thousand witnesses to a murder.

            That’s protagonist/narrator Dr. Daniel Rinaldi, clinical psychologist and occasional consultant to the Pittsburgh Police Department, in the opening sentence/paragraph of Panic Attack, the sixth title in the stellar series of mystery thrillers by Dennis Palumbo.

            Rinaldi has acquired something of a “brand” as a result of his involvement in a number of police investigations; from his role in the most recent case (see Head Wounds) involving Sebastian Maddox, the assailant who, years before, killed his wife and left him wounded and emotionally scarred; and from the subsequent development of his reputation for helping traumatized victims of violence, both official and civilian. Thus, the night before the event described above, he delivered the commencement address at Teasdale College, located in the small town of Lockhart less than twenty miles from Pittsburgh. Teasdale’s dean, Martin Hobbs, has invited him to join him at the game wherein Teasdale will face off with its division rival.   

            Shortly before the opening kickoff, Teasdale’s mascot, a student in a tiger costume, takes the field to perform. Shortly after, the tiger’s encouraging crowd noise is overridden by a gunshot which leaves the mascot lying motionless on the field. Rinaldi becomes immediately but indirectly embroiled in both the local investigation and one that expands considerably when a serial sniper begins picking off other ostensibly unrelated victims and creates a panicked atmosphere in the greater Pittsburgh area. 

            Although initially it would seem Rinaldi’s role in the Steel City Sniper case, as the media has come to label it, is strictly as an unfortunate witness to the death of the first victim, he is gradually drawn into it by a number of circumstances and individuals.

Among the latter are sophomore Jason Graham; Teasdale College’s assistant dean, Dr. Indra Bishara and her troubled daughter; Lockhart’s Sheriff Roy Gibson; Pittsburgh PD Sergeant Harry Polk, a Rinaldi “frenemy” from bygone investigations and one with serious personal issues apart from this one; and politically ambitious Pittsburgh District Attorney Leland Sinclair. Rinaldi is also one of many witnesses to the sniper’s execution of a city councilman.

            To cite a variation on an old expression with regard to Panic Attack, “you can’t tell the corpses without a scorecard” because more murders follow and Rinaldi becomes unavoidably caught up in their cases, not least because attempts are made on his life.

            He must also contend with various traumatized clients, his current intimate relationship with FBI agent Gloria Reese, and with prior involvements with and attractions to women he met after his wife’s death.

            Forgive some of this reviewer’s vagueness about story details. In mystery/thrillers of this sort I hate to reveal anything that might be regarded as a spoiler lest I detract from readers’ excitement and enjoyment. This definitely applies to the novel under consideration, which should keep most readers turning its pages because they are laden with twists and surprises. 

But it’s important to add that besides being a thriller, Panic Attack is also a novel of character. Dennis Palumbo, like Rinaldi, is a practicing clinical psychologist, so the story’s primary figures are not cardboard cutouts. As a native Pittsburghian, he also delivers a strong sense of place. What also struck yours truly about one of the plotline’s major revelations is its timeliness.

As anyone who has read this far has undoubtedly surmised, I’m as enthusiastic a fan of this novel as I am of the others in the Daniel Rinaldi series, and can strongly recommend it to all but those readers who cannot contend with raw language and a modicum of on-screen sexuality. 

 Barry Ergang © 2021 

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

Brief Thought on Billy Summers

Back in early September, Barry Ergang reviewed Billy Summers here. Because of his review I read and enjoyed the book. Because of his review, I will not take a swing at reviewing it as he did a great job on a good book. Even if I did not like the ending, it is a very good book, and one heck of a character study. 

Barry Ergang Reviews: BILLY SUMMERS (2021) by Stephen King

Former Marine sniper who served in the Iraq war, Billy Summers is a hit man with a conscience. Hired by Las Vegas mob boss Nick Majarian, for whom he's done jobs in the past, Billy thinks this latest might be his last based on the payment offered: two million dollars, with half a million up front, the remainder when the job is done.

 

 The target is one Joel Allen, whose execution by Billy depends upon when and if he's extradited to the small southern city of Red Bluff from California. Billy must thus establish himself in the city and surrounding suburbs using fake identities, one of which is as David Lockridge, writer working on a novel he won't talk about lest he talk it out and thus fail to actually write it. In a different area near the city, he rents a basement apartment under the name Dalton Smith.

 

In addition to becoming friendly with occupants of the building he "works" in, the building from which, if things go as planned and hoped, he'll fire the fatal shot and then disappear, Billy also becomes friendly with his suburban neighbors. He knows from long experience and caution that getting too close to anyone is potentially dangerous to him, but this particular job rather demands more than casual proximity. It might also bring regret.

 

When he rescues Alice Maxwell, a woman half his age, he knows instinctively that his life will never be the same. (No, I won't explain and thus spoil the nature of the rescue and/or its consequences.) He knows on the one hand that he shouldn't have meddled, knows on the other that he couldn't have not done so.

 

Beyond reporting that Billy had a gut suspicion that things probably wouldn't proceed as he'd been told they'd planned, and that those he'd trusted can't be relied on, which "revelation" will not surprise astute readers, I won't go further lest I insult anyone who has read this far. Suffice it to say that Billy Summers is a gem of a page-turner, revenge story, and an engrossing character study.

 

Barry Ergang ©2021

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

Barry Ergang Reviews: A MAJOR PRODUCTION! (2018) by Thomas B. Sawyer

A MAJOR PRODUCTION! (2018) by Thomas B. Sawyer

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

New Yorker Barney Moon, private investigator, hates Los Angeles, a city for which he has a number of unflattering appellations including “Whackoville,” “Tinselburg,” and “Goofyland.” But after clearing up a case for a client of the Eller Insurance agency, one involving a corrupt judge and an incriminating file labeled Stuff, Barney gets a phone call from his old friend Saul Flockman. A hedge fund manager, he and Barney exist “in distant worlds, largely out of touch except for several instances of Saul’s personal stress during which he had hired Barney for domestic surveillance.” Saul constantly worries that his actress wife Wanda Gooden is playing around on him, and has on three prior occasions hired Barney to check up on her. Barney has yet to catch her “in anything even approaching compromise or lying.”

Now Saul wants to hire Barney again, and for the same purpose. One of Saul’s clients, Hollywood agent Irwin Kerner, has told Saul that if he—Saul—invested half a million dollars in an independent film production, Kerner could get Wanda a good role. The production company is Ganell Films, about which Kerner has been unable to find any information. Wanda has gone to L.A. to try to learn why her part hasn’t yet happened.

Saul explains that over time, Kerner has come to owe him over a million dollars—money he paid the agent to help along Wanda’s career. He suspects Kerner has gambled it away at “casinos and the like.” But as much as he needs to recoup his losses to Kerner, Saul needs to know if Wanda has been cheating on him with the agent. He also knows Barney hates L.A., and is willing to double the usual fee plus a bonus, also figuring the job will be a quickie: “red-eye out, red-eye back.”

Barney feels for his friend, but also “knew himself. That no matter how simple his cases were, there was almost invariably something else that would catch his eye—and his curiosity…a kind of a fatal flaw.” But because both Saul and Wanda are friends, he curses and takes a flight to Los Angeles.

Having grown up and lived most of his life in New York City, Barney has never learned to drive. Thus, he must avail himself of the services of the lovely Melodie Seaver, whom he’s known from a prior visit to L.A. With her chauffeuring, he stakes out Kerner’s home, then Kerner at a Rodeo Drive restaurant with Wanda, and later Kerner’s office. At the latter he observes an attractive woman who emerges and burns some papers, after which he goes inside to case the office himself and rifle it for some evidence for his friend and client, Saul Flockman.

When he cautiously returns to the car, police vehicles and sirens having pierced the vicinity, Melodie tells him she witnessed the shooting death of the woman whom Barney had earlier seen outside of Kerner’s office.

What ultimately ensues and keeps Barney an unhappy professional captive in Cloud- Cockamamie-Land, in part because of his aforementioned fatal flaw, is his inadvertent embroilment in situations that involve, among others, the mechanically-skilled brothers Cory and Pete Bilchek; drug dealer and money-launderer Renaldo Esteban and his crew; fledgling screenwriter Jonah Whiting, and Homeland Security Agents Vincent Rogers and George Lippet—all while trying to solve the murder of Phyllis Carridi, wife of powerful mob boss Angelo Carridi. Caught between Carridi and the cops and D.A., and up against a literal deadline, Barney will need all of his wits to figure out everything that’s going on in this entertaining rapid-fire amalgam of thriller, whodunit, and screwball comedy.

The version I read was a digital advanced reading copy which contains some typos and other errors, the biggest problem being a plethora of incorrect punctuations. I hope and assume an editor/proofreader corrected them in the paperback and electronic final editions.

© 2018 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

Barry Ergang Reviews: PHANTOM LIMB (2014) by Dennis Palumbo

 PHANTOM LIMB (2014) by Dennis Palumbo

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Dealing with Skip Hines, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who lost a leg but can still feel it, prompts clinical psychologist/first-person narrator Daniel Rinaldi to muse about his deceased wife: “Yet, like with my father, a felt sense of her lingers. Perhaps this is true for everyone. That those with whom we’re most intimately connected persist, not only in memory, but almost like missing parts of ourselves. Like phantom limbs, we feel their presence, even though they’re gone forever….”

The concept applies in degrees blatant and subtle to some—not all—of the other characters in a variegated cast which includes and aged and infirm billionaire industrialist; his bitter alcoholic son; a tough and tough-minded head of a private security agency who lives on the industrialist’s estate; the industrialist’s attorney; a canny but narcissistic crime boss and his murderous chief henchman; a paranoid schizophrenic bar employee and his girlfriend; Pittsburgh Police Department (to which Rinaldi is a consultant) personnel; and FBI agents, one of whom is friendly toward Rinaldi, the other haughty and officious.    

 Thus we come to my problem when trying to review a Daniel Rinaldi mystery/thriller, the  construction of which is a course in itself about how to grab a reader on page one—see my review of Mirror Image—and keep him or her turning the pages to its stirring climax. The problem is one of degree: how much of the storyline to provide without giving away too much lest I spoil potential readers’ excitement and enjoyment of an exceptionally tense novel.

Here goes:

When Lisa Campbell arrives at Rinaldi’s office, he recognizes her immediately: “I knew her story, of course. At least, the public version. Most people here in Pittsburgh and environs did, too. Especially in her hometown of Waterson, about a hundred miles east of the city. Her career journey, from small-town beauty contestant to Playboy Playmate to sexy film actress, had been a long, well-publicized one. Accompanied by the shrill carping of Waterson’s outraged local press, ex-communication from her church, and the painful yet predictable estrangement from her pious, deeply conservative family.” After a “career” of mostly being nude, tortured and slain in a number of Hollywood cinematic schlockers, and also having “a reputation as a reliably freaky party animal, clubbing every night with the rich and trendy,” married and divorced twice, she eventually returned home to Waterson, where her family rejected her. Subsequently, she went to Pittsburgh and “landed a job as a clerical assistant in the CEO’s suite at Harland Industries, a Fortune 500 favorite. After six months, she landed the CEO himself.”

So for about the last ten years she’s been married for the third time, now wife to septuagenarian Charles Harland, about whom Rinaldi observes: “People were possessions to him. Prized for their utility. For what they could do for him, or for what they represented.” When Lisa meets Rinaldi, she makes it clear that she knows a fair amount about his past before telling him: “Here’s the deal: I plan to kill myself at seven o’clock tonight. Which means you have fifty minutes to talk me out of it.”

When they reach the end of a revelatory session, Rinaldi accompanies her through the waiting room to the door to the outer corridor. When he opens it, he beholds a man who is “Big, taller than me. Filling the doorway. In a black jacket and jeans. Eyes hidden by dark glasses.

“He had something in his hand. Raising it…”

When he awakens from the assault, Rinaldi learns that Lisa has been kidnapped, is later summoned to Charles Harland’s estate where he meets some of the aforementioned persons and learns Harland’s private nurse has disappeared, and is chosen by the cunning culprit, who has managed to electronically surveil the estate, to deliver five million dollars in bearer bonds to the site of his choice.

What happens beyond this I won’t reveal beyond saying that things don’t go as hoped, corpses pile up, and that Rinaldi gets further involved to his personal peril and that of others. Readers who find raw street language and “on-screen” violence offensive will want to avoid Phantom Limb. Those who don’t, and who enjoy meticulously-paced, action-packed, character-driven, surprise-laden, high-tension thrillers (whew! My word processor just ran out of hyphens) will find it well worth their time.

© 2018 Barry Ergang

Interested readers can find some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work at Amazon and Smashwords.

Barry Ergang Reviews: RESCUE (2013) by Earl Staggs

RESCUE (2013) by Earl Staggs

As I did in my review of Short Stories of Earl Staggs, I have to mention up front that Earl and I are old friends and editorial colleagues. That said, and based on some of the short stories of his I read before I ever got to know him, I thought he was an excellent storyteller.

"Rescue" underscores my contention. A novelette-length adventure, it stars Tallmadge "Tall" Chambers, who was introduced in the superb thriller Justified Action, and who has become the head of a secret nameless agency that puts terrorist groups out of business: “When a terrorist group was determined to have definite plans to strike and harm innocent people, the agency stepped in and stopped them by whatever actions were necessary. That included insurgent groups on American soil, homegrown and foreign, who thought the American way needed to be changed by violent methods.”

After preventing a busload of terrorists from killing attendees of a street festival in Abu Dhabi, Chambers and his crew, one member of which is on loan from the Air Force and utterly inexperienced in this sort of operation, are assigned by the President to effect a rescue of hostages from a location "in a rural area north of Dubai" so exposed on all sides that mounting a sneak attack is impossible.

To say any more would be to spoil a rapid-fire tale which deals with the kinds of regrettable real-life episodes we hear about in the news all too frequently at the time of this writing. It’s not likely that action and adventure fans will be disappointed by “Rescue”—with the possible exception of those offended by a few instances of the kind of street language which isn’t out of place in a story of this kind. (Relax! No f-bombs in a carload.)

Interested readers can find “Rescue” in multiple formats at Smashwords, and in the Kindle edition at Amazon.

© 2016 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work can be found at Amazon and Smashwords. The latter site has it on sale through the end of July.