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Bitter Tea and Mystery: Short Story Wednesday: Three from Mistletoe Mysteries

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Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Tropical Heat by John Lutz

John Lutz has been a byword in the world of crime fiction for years. He is the author of more than forty novels and over 200 short stories and articles. He is a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. Among his awards are the MWA Edgar, the PWA Shamus, the PWA Life Achievement Award, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society's Golden Derringer Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the author of two private eye series, the Nudger series, set in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Carver series, set in Florida, as well as stand-alone books. 

In the first of a 10-book series, Tropical Heat (Henry Holt, 1986), Fred Carver is introduced as a former policeman injured on the job and forced to take early retirement. He acquired a private investigator’s license and hung out his shingle in Del Moray, Florida, where he is still recovering from his wounds. His former lieutenant sends Edwina Talbot, a hotshot realtor who is searching for her lover, to him. All the evidence suggests that Willis Davis committed suicide by leaping from a cliff into the ocean. Edwina does not believe that he would leave her and, since his body has not been recovered, prefers to think he disappeared because of money problems.

Carver is reluctant to take the case – if the police think it’s suicide, it probably is -- but he needs the money and he needs to be busy. He learns that the Davis was skimming cash from client deposits at the realtor firm where he was working. Then he finds forged ID in multiple names in his apartment. Suspicions justifiably aroused, Carver doubles down on talking to Davis’s coworkers and associates, which attracts the attention of some knife-toting, drug-dealing Cubanos who expend considerable effort to discourage Carver’s research. Federal law enforcement representatives who happen to be watching the Cubanos aren’t happy to have Carver in their way. Violence begins to trail Carver wherever he goes, and Carver finds he’s in better shape to deal with it than he thought.

Well written and plotted even if the outcome is predictable. A solid start to a fine series.

·         Hardcover: 246 pages

·         Publisher: Henry Holt & Co; 1st edition (July 1, 1986)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0030069580

·         ISBN-13: 978-0030069581

Aubrey Hamilton ©2020

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

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Spark by John Lutz

John Lutz has written almost every kind of mystery there is, with more than 50 books and dozens of short stories to his credit. The Private Eye Writers of America have given him multiple Shamus awards, one for best PI short story in 1983 and one for best PI hardcover in 1989, as well as the Shamus Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986 and has been shortlisted many times for more Edgar and Shamus awards.

He started out writing private investigator stories, first with the Alo Nudger novels set in St. Louis, and then the Fred Carver series set on the west coast of Florida, then branched out into police procedurals and other forms of the mystery. Spark (Henry Holt, 1993) is the seventh title featuring Fred Carver, a former policeman whose knee injury was his ticket to early and reluctant retirement.

When Jerome Evans, declared in perfect health two months earlier, dies suddenly of a heart attack, his widow receives an anonymous note saying the death was murder. The police decline to look into it and instead refer her to Carver. Carver is bemused by the completely self-contained retirement community that the Evans lived in. Shopping, golf, restaurants, medical care, it is all available to the residents of Solartown without leaving the premises.

Carver brings his significant other Beth Jackson, an investigative reporter, in to help research the principals behind Solartown. A little digging turns up the fact that the people who live in Solartown have a nearly 10 percent higher than average death rate. And that nearly all of the homes are purchased on a reverse mortgage plan, such that the houses revert to the owners of Solartown upon the death of the purchasers. Carver wonders if the higher than usual mortality rate and the mortgage arrangements are related. Even so, they don’t explain the anonymous note or the unexpected death of Mr. Evans.

Within a few days, Carver has a visitor that forcibly impresses upon him the need to drop the inquiry. Bruised and shaken, he presses on, only to be nearly run off the road by a runaway Winnebago soon thereafter. The degree of physical punishment Carver endures in this book is amazing.

Solid private investigator fare, definitely a little darker than some PI novels, with a nasty twist at the end. A good strong read for fans of the PI genre and for fans of mysteries set in the Florida landscape.  

·         Hardcover: 243 pages

·         Publisher: Henry Holt & Co; 1st edition (January 1, 1993)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0805019936

·         ISBN-13: 978-0805019933

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

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

FFB Review: "BURN" (1995) by John Lutz ---Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books hosted by Patti Abbott. Patti is currently celebrating five years of forgotten books with good reason. Check out the complete list here after you read the review below from Barry Ergang for lots of other book suggestions……

BURN (1995) by John Lutz

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Joel Brant "looked a lot like the serial killer Ted Bundy, only older. Mid-forties, probably, Carver's age." The situation he hires Del Moray, Florida private detective Fred Carver to look into isn't the kind that becomes bizarre as the investigation proceeds; it's bizarre from the outset. The owner of Brant Development, a construction outfit that builds residential properties, Joel Brant wants Carver to find out why a woman named Marla Cloy, whom he insists he's never met, has accused him of stalking her. As he digs into their lives and encounters their friends and associates, Carver is confounded by possibilities. Is Marla Cloy trying to set up Brant to kill him, claiming self-defense? Or has Brant lied, and is he using Carver so he can kill Marla and make a similar claim? If either scenario is valid, what's the motive behind it? Who hired the seemingly mindless hulking brute of a killing machine named Achilles Jones to stop Carver from asking questions?    

The debates Carver has with his journalist girlfriend, Beth Jackson, about male versus female perspectives on a number of issues complicate his thinking and broach ambiguities he's forced to consider. Personal matters of an intimate, intense, and highly emotional nature also create conflicts between and within them that add tensions to the events they have to contend with. A man who seeks core truths, Carver is frustrated by the uncertainties the case entails, as well as those in his love life.

Burn's two plotlines are as simple and straightforward as described, and I don't want to spoil surprises by revealing anything more. Like the work of Ross Macdonald (whose plots tended to be far more convoluted), this is a strongly character-driven novel. Fred Carver, a divorced and disabled ex-cop, is flawed and fallible and thus relatably human. Beth Jackson is a strong, self-possessed, insightful woman who, despite hardships in her past, is ready to tackle almost any challenge. Del Moray Police Lieutenant William McGregor is as repugnant a specimen barely classifiable as a human being as any in fiction. Carver's friend Desoto, a detective with the Orlando PD, is a contrastingly sophisticated professional who favors a stylish wardrobe atypical of most fictional cops. These and other characters, even minor ones seen briefly, come alive on the page thanks to John Lutz's skill.

Lutz writes a clean, lucid prose from which some wonderfully terse but telling descriptive passages shine through. For instance, he describes Marla Cloy's mother as a woman no longer young whose "classic bone structure" indicates that "the beauty of her youth lay immortal beneath the surface of time."

Despite the fact that John Lutz has been writing for a long time and has an impressive body of work that includes several series (the Carver novels being among them) and many standalones, this is the first of his books I've read. Barring unforeseeable events, it won't be the only one.

Readers who dislike street language—most of which emanates, along with body odor, from the odious Lieutenant McGregor—and onstage violence will want to avoid Burn. Those who can accept them as elements of hardboiled fiction will likely find it a thoughtful, compelling, intelligent, top-shelf read.    

Barry Ergang ©2013

The current issue of the e-zine King's River Life contains a reprint of Barry’s flash fiction "Spring Idyll" (http://kingsriverlife.com/04/20/spring-idyll-a-mystery-flash-fiction-story/) as well as a great review of his novelette  "The Play of Light and Shadow" (http://kingsriverlife.com/04/20/celebrate-earth-day-with-4-e-book-mysteries-reviewsgiveaway/) 

Burn is one of the many books Barry Ergang has for sale at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/. He'll contribute 20% of the price of the books to our fund. A Derringer Award-winner, Barry's fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. You can find some of it at Amazon and Smashwords.