Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Crush by Phoef Sutton

Crush by Phoef Sutton (Prospect Park Books, 2015) is the first book about Caleb Rush, son of a Russian Mafia kingpin. Rush turned his back on the mob and escaped with his mother to southern California to start a new life. He supplements his work as a bodyguard with serving as a bouncer for a nightclub where his taekwondo master is the bartender. His enormous physical size earned him the name Crush. Despite his appearance, he still manages to fade into the background until he needed to be noticed.

It was business as usual at the nightclub as the book opens. Crush whisks two fighting semi-drunks off the dance floor and out the back door so smoothly no one notices. He rescues a girl who’d been given rolfies from the gang who doped her. When a couple of guys with serious tattoos in a Lamborghini try to kidnap the blonde that’s been hanging around watching Crush in action, he engages in ferocious fisticuffs while the girl disappears. After the fight is over, she re-appears in the back seat of his car, wanting to hire him as her bodyguard. When he learns her name, all Crush wants to do is to avoid her, the daughter of a corporate magnate who had him blackballed in the security world years ago after Crush protected a call girl from him. Crush decides to serve as Amelia’s bodyguard after all just to annoy the magnate’s security firm who fired him after the incident with the call girl.

From there it’s one car chase or punch-up after another in this fast-moving story with great characters and a couple of interesting surprises. A sly wit infuses the story: Rush decided “after meeting Stanley Trask … that he was a filthy rich, arrogant asshole. … Trask … probably stole loose change from his left pocket when his right pocket wasn’t looking. In other words, it was an honor to be protecting the guy.”

There’s an intriguing subplot about one of the people destroyed by Amelia’s father’s wheeling and dealing. While her father came out of a corporate bankruptcy just fine, many of his franchisees were completely ruined. This one is so embittered he decides to take his revenge and fails spectacularly.

A fine read with two more in the series so far. Kirkus starred review.

·         Paperback: 224 pages

·         Publisher: Prospect Park Books LLC (July 14, 2015)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1938849361

·         ISBN-13: 978-1938849367

Aubrey Hamilton ©2020

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

Lesa's Book Critiques: An Old Man's Game by Andy Weinberger

Lesa's Book Critiques: An Old Man's Game by Andy Weinberger

Lesa's Book Critiques: Iced in Paradise by Naomi Hirahara

Lesa's Book Critiques: Iced in Paradise by Naomi Hirahara

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Sayonara Slam by Naomi Hirahara

Sayonara Slam by Naomi Hirahara (Prospect Park Books, 2016) is the sixth book in this award-winning series led by an irritable semi-retired Japanese-American gardener in his 80s named Mas Arai who just wants to be left alone. Instead, his daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live with him, interfering with Mas’s potential plans to ask his girlfriend to move in with him and generally complicating his life.

The son-in-law has finally gotten a good job as head groundskeeper at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and Mas is helping him out during the World Baseball Classic series where Korea and Japan are playing. An obnoxious Japanese sportswriter from an unsavory publication drops dead among the crowd of spectators and journalists jostling for position near the dugout. Mas ends up answering questions from the police instead of watching the game, since he was helping pass water among the group.

The grandson of Mas’s childhood girlfriend arrives from Japan a couple of days later ostensibly to take over the dead sportswriter’s job and hires Mas as chauffeur and translator. In reality Yuki is investigating what has turned out to be a homicide. The victim’s computer files are missing and just what he was working on isn’t clear. Some signs point to the dead journalist dabbling in blackmail on the side. Mas’s unwillingness to explain his relationship to Yuki’s grandmother to Mas’s current girlfriend creates a possible turning point in their lives.

This is a leisurely mystery, perhaps not for everyone, no car chases and no shoot-outs, but it is a fine read about people who sound authentic. It holds a great deal of history woven into the background of the story, Japan and Korean political relationships, Hiroshima and World War II survivors, prisoner exchanges, but none of it obtrusive. Other reviewers suggest starting at the beginning of the series for a fuller picture of the characters and their backgrounds.

·         Paperback: 280 pages

·         Publisher: Prospect Park Books LLC - Prospect Park Books (April 26, 2016)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1938849736

·         ISBN-13: 978-1938849732

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: It Happened at Two in the Morning by Alan Hruska

It Happened at Two in the Morning by Alan Hruska (Prospect Park Books, 2017) is an engaging thriller that careens through its pages from beginning to end. Tom Weldon is walking home in the city that never sleeps at 2:00 in the morning after finishing a legal brief for his boss. In front of an office building he witnesses a group of masked felons shooting a well-dressed man and kidnapping a young woman. He jumps into the fray only to be knocked unconscious and kidnapped too. The young woman is Elena Riles, youngest daughter of Robertson Riles, the incredibly wealthy CEO of Riles Whitney & Co., the man who was killed.

The two find their way too easily out of their makeshift prison in rural Pennsylvania into a town where they learn from news outlets that Elena is believed to be her father’s murderer and Tom to be her accomplice. They are the subjects of a nationwide manhunt. Despite having never met, Tom’s cell phone records have been altered to show multiple phone calls to Elena. Tom knows that a frame-up that thorough has been established by someone with considerable power. Once found, they will both be jailed with no hope of parole, so they must dodge the police to keep their freedom in order to search for the real killers.

Tom calls in his friends for help and begins to piece the back story together. Elena’s father was immersed in an ugly corporate takeover battle, which appears to have been the motive for the murder. The killers grow impatient with the authorities and decide if Elena and Tom are dead, the investigation will be closed. The couple is pursued from place to place, just escaping the killers by a hair more than once.

This book has a couple of my favorite plot devices. First is the “just walking down the street minding my own business when havoc erupts” method to pull the protagonist into the lives of people he doesn’t know and wouldn’t know in the normal scheme of things. Lee Child used the same technique in his second Reacher adventure. Then there’s “fugitive fleeing from the police with no money and no resources.”  Just how this pair generates living expenses, since using their credit cards will draw attention to their location, is creative and diverting, even if it isn’t terribly realistic.

The emphasis here is on action, not character development or even logic. One or two of the characters disappear without explanation toward the end of the book, for instance. (Hruska writes for films and it shows.) How Tom is cleared to pursue the killers is not credible at all. A reader unfamiliar with the mechanics of corporate takeovers will miss some of the key plot points. Overall, though, a good entertaining read that kept my attention from start to finish.

·                     Paperback: 312 pages

·                     Publisher: Prospect Park Books (November 14, 2017)

·                     Language: English

·                     ISBN-10: 1945551178

·                     ISBN-13: 978-1945551178

                    

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Aubrey Hamilton © 2018
 

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