James L. Thane's Blog, page 6

In 1956, two airliners crashed over the Grand Canyon, killing 172 people and leaving their remains scattered along the Canyon. In Skeleton Man, Tony Hillerman has created a novel based off the event and set nearly fifty years later. This is the seventeenth novel in the series, featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal police force. By this time, Leaphorn has retired, but pops in occasionally to assist Chee in his investigations, and in this book, he basically plays a small cameo role.

These novels are set on the borderlands between New Mexico and Arizona, and this one takes place mostly in the area around the Grand Canyon. It opens when a young Indian man named Billy Tuve attempts to pawn a diamond that’s worth $20,000 for $20.00. As a young boy, Billy suffered a head injury in a rodeo accident that left him somewhat mentally challenged, and he’s arrested and charged with stealing the diamond from a trading post.

Billy claims that the diamond was given to him by a mysterious old man at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon in trade for a shovel. He also says that the old man had many other diamonds just like it.

Enter a woman named Joanna Craig. Craig’s father, a diamond courier, was on one of the planes that crashed into the canyon in 1956. Handcuffed to his wrist was a briefcase containing a fortune in valuable diamonds. Many years later, someone floating down the river reported seeing an arm sticking out of the water with a handcuff attached to it. But before they could retrieve it, it was swept away by the water and never found.

Joanna’s father was also flying home with a special diamond to give her mother who was then pregnant with Joanna. The two were not yet married and the diamond was to be her mother’s wedding gift. Joanna’s mother had letters from her father documenting the relationship, rejoicing in the pregnancy, and confirming the marriage plans. But the father’s very wealthy family refused to accept this evidence and refused to acknowledge either Joanna or her mother and the two were left to fend for themselves.

Joanna has always borne a grievance for the way her mother was treated and wants the link to her father confirmed. When news of the diamond surfaces, she races to Arizona in the slim hope that the diamonds might lead her to what’s left of her father’s arm. DNA tests on the arm could prove paternity.

Jim Chee steps into the case in an effort to protect Billy Tuve and to determine how he actually came into possession of the diamond, especially after someone else tells a similar story. Could there really be an old man passing our diamonds at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?

Unfortunately, of course, the news of the discovery will also attract some unsavory characters who hope to find the diamonds and otherwise profit themselves, and all of this will come to a stunning climax at the bottom of the canyon in the middle of a tremendous monsoon rain storm.

The attraction of these books lies in large part in the settings, which Hillerman so vividly creates and in the Navajo and Hopi customs and beliefs which are integral to the stories. This is not the strongest book in the series; personally, I prefer the earlier books where Leaphorn was the central character, but it’s still a good one and should not be missed by fans of the series.

Prospero "Whip" Stark was once an up-and-coming phenom, pitching in the major leagues. But then he blew out his shoulder and, following surgery, his career never recovered. From there it was all downhill until he found himself in a Mexican jail doing time on drug charges. Now free and back home in the U.S., he's settled into an aging Airstream trailer, living the simple life in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona.

A handful of other misfits have joined him in the tiny community known as Double Wide, and Stark is the unofficial mayor of the settlement, watching over his charges. Life is more or less copacetic in Double Wide until one afternoon Stark comes home to find that someone has left a box on his porch. In the box is a severed human hand, and from the tattoo on the back of the hand, Stark recognizes it as a hand that was once attached to the arm of his former catcher, Rolando Molina.

The last Stark saw of Molina, the man had developed a serious cocaine addiction and was entering treatment. Stark is determined to discover what might have happened to his friend, and he suspects that Molina's death is connected to a cartel that's running drugs through an old mining camp on nearby Paradise Mountain. In the course of his investigation, Stark will become entangled with vicious and dangerous drug runners, money launderers, baseball players, aspiring sports agents, and a sexy stripper-turned-television news reporter named Roxanne Santa Cruz. And by the time it's over, only the strong, wily and smart will survive to see the end of the tale.

This is a very entertaining debut novel with a cast of offbeat characters and a great lead protagonist in Whip Stark. It's by turns scary and funny; the dialogue is great, and the story moves along at just the right pace. A veteran Arizona journalist, Banks knows the territory well, and the setting is vividly described. You can feel the desert heat burning into your skin and the monsoon rains pelting down so hard that a person can't see three feet ahead into the night. The story's various threads all come together in a great climax, and this is a book that should appeal to a broad audience.

This is by no means a traditional crime novel, although there is a criminal--a contract killer named Christian--at the heart of the book. The killer is dying and he has taken one last assignment. His target is an unassuming man who works in the office of an insurance company in Phoenix. Christian scouts the man, learning his patterns, and then, just as he is about to strike, someone else shoots the man. Totally confused, Christian watches as the ambulance screams away, taking the victim to the hospital.

Christian is amazed by the coincidence that someone else would shoot the target just as Christian was closing in on him. But how could this possibly be a coincidence, and what could be going on here? Christian feels a professional obligation to complete the assignment and now must figure out how to get at the target who is hospitalized in an ICU. Meanwhile, as a man who has always lived a solitary life, he must deal alone with his own illness and confront his inevitable mortality.

At the same time, a detective named Sayles is investigating the shooting and tracking Christian. As he does, Sayles is confronting his own existential dilemma. His wife, Josie, is deathly ill and with no warning has left him to die in a hospice, without even saying goodbye. When he left for work in the morning, she was there; when he returns from work, she is gone.

Josie leaves a note specifically asking Sayles not to try to find her but to let her die in peace. he is gutted by the experience and must now try to figure out how to confront the new realities of his life. His partner, a detective named Graves, will try to give him the support and the space to work through this crisis, but for the first time in his life, Sayles is in many ways completely alone.

The final character in the story is a young boy named Jimmie whose parents, first his mother and then his father, have abandoned him. He is still living in the house that they shared, paying the bills by buying and selling things online, trying to prevent the authorities or anyone else from discovering that he is living alone, and attempting to come to grips with his circumstances. And, in addition to all of his other problems, he seems somehow to be having the killer's--Christian's--dreams.

The stories are interwoven, moving from one of the three characters to another sometimes from one paragraph to the next. This can be a bit confusing until you get into the rhythm of the book, which then becomes totally captivating and impossible to put down. This is a beautifully written novel about three men of varying ages adjusting to the solitude and changing circumstances of their lives, and it's one that I'll be thinking about for a long time to come.

This is the sixth and last of the full-length novels that Raymond Chandler wrote featuring his iconic detective, Philip Marlowe. It's also the most personal in that Chandler seems to have based two of the characters, Terry Lennox and Roger Wade, at least in part on himself.

At the book opens, Marlowe meets a man named Terry Lennox outside of a nightclub. Lennox is very drunk and his date drives off and leaves him. Marlowe, being a good samaritan, takes Lennox to his own home, sobers him up and then drives him home to the mansion that Lennox shares with his very promiscuous and extremely wealthy wife. On the basis of this incident, Marlowe and Lennox strike up a friendship of sorts and occasionally get together for drinks. Then one night, Lennox turns up and asks Marlow to give him a ride to Mexico, no questions asked.

Well, what are friends for?

Marlowe gives Lennox a ride and from that point, things generally go to hell in a handbasket. It's very difficult to say anything else about the plot of the novel without giving things away that the reader will want to find out for him or herself. This is, though, one of Chandler's best novels, full of the social commentary and great prose for which Chandler was so deservedly famous. This plot is actually a little less convoluted than some of the others and it's fun to watch it unfold. I finished the book this time around, after reading the other Chandler novels in order, regretting even more than ever the fact that there are only six of these novels along with a number of short stories. I could have used a lot more.

On a side note, this novel was published in 1953 and is set sometime around 1950. It was finally filmed by Robert Altman in 1973, starring Elliot Gould as Marlowe and the story is set in the early 1970s rather than the early 1950s. A lot of people like the movie a lot, but I've seen it twice and have never been able to warm up to it. Given the way that Humphrey Bogart inhabited the role of Marlowe and really made it his own, I just couldn't buy Gould as Marlowe. Also, Marlowe, who seemed to perfectly belong to the late 1940s and early '50s, seemed out of place in the 1970s--almost anachronistic. For my part, then, when I need a Philip Marlowe film fix, I'll stick with the Bogart version of "The Big Sleep," and I'm sure I'll be coming back to this and the other novels again and again in the coming years.

Leigh Brackett was known principally as a prolific writer of science fiction and she also wrote a number of screenplays. She worked on the screenplay for "The Big Sleep" and "Rio Bravo," among others, and at the end of her career worked on the screenplay for "The Empire Strikes Back." She ghost wrote this book in 1946 for the actor George Sanders. It's now been republished by Black Gat Books under Brackett's name.

The protagonist is a businessman named Michael Vickers. Four years earlier, Vickers disappeared in Mexico while on a fishing trip with three of his best friends. His body was never recovered and he has been presumed dead. Now, however, to the shock of virtually everyone he knows, Vickers suddenly returns on a night when his wife is throwing a party at their beach house.

When Vickers strolls nonchalantly into the party, he discovers that his wife has taken their boat out for a cruise. He makes himself at home and greets the three old friends with whom he had been in Mexico on that fateful night. He explains that someone hit him over the head and left him for dead. For a long time he lost his memory and had no idea who he was. During this period, he was effectively kidnapped and forced to work on a tramp freighter. He finally recovered his memory, made his escape, and found his way back home to California.

During his absence, all three of his "best friends," though married themselves, have been trying to make time with Vicker's very delectable wife, Angie. Vickers assumes that one of the three assaulted him in Mexico in order to have a chance with Angie. He also wonders if maybe his wife might have encouraged the attack.

Even before Vickers's wife returns to the party, one of the three men that Vickers suspects of attacking him turns up murdered, and Vickers becomes the principal subject. Is he a killer taking revenge? If so, does he have other targets in mind?

This is a very well done classic hard boiled mystery. Vickers is a very interesting protagonist, and the relationships that unfold between him, his wife, and the other survivors of the trip to Mexico are fun to watch unfold. More than seventy years after its original publication, this is still a book that fans of the hard boiled genre might want to seek out.

This is the twentieth Perry Mason novel, about a quarter of the way through the series. It's set in 1942, just as the U.S. has entered the Second World War, and as always, reflects the standards and the attitudes of its time.

As the book opens, Perry and his secretary are away from the office on vacation in Palm Springs. Why Perry and Della are vacationing together is something that the author doesn't bother to explain, but it turns out to be fortuitous when Mason is approached by a very wealthy local man, named Witherspoon, who has a strange request.

Witherspoon's daughter has fallen in love with a young, penniless college student named Marvin, who will soon be going off to fight in the war. Marvin and the daughter believe that he was kidnapped as a baby and was raised by the woman he thought was his mother, until she died making a deathbed confession about the kidnapping. However Witherspoon has conducted an investigation and knows that the story was false. The boy's father was hanged for murder years earlier and the mother made up the lie to spare the boy the embarrassment of knowing that he was the son of a convicted killer.

Witherspoon is determined to protect his family's good name at all cost and is determined that his daughter will not marry the son of a man rightfully convicted of murder. He has a copy of the trial transcript and wants Mason to review it. If Mason can convince Witherspoon that the man was wrongly convicted, Witherspoon will say nothing and will allow his daughter to marry Marvin. But if there's even a breath of suspicion left, Witherspoon will expose the secret and forbid the marriage.

Mason thus faces several seemingly impossible tasks, the most important of which is saving the young lovers from the stupidity and narrow-mindedness of the girl's father. It won't be easy. More people are going to die, a poor little duck is going to be put in mortal danger, and in the end, only Perry Mason could sort out all the complex strands of this mystery.

All in all, it's a fairly typical Mason story, save for the fact that it does not take place in L.A. Perry will not see all that much time in court, but will ultimately wind up in a judge's chamber trying to explain all the evidence in a way that won't leave the judge and the readers shaking their heads in dismay. A fun read.

This is an excellent early novel from Wallace Stroby who would go on to write the Crissa Stone series, which remains one of my all-time favorites. The protagonist here is Harry Rane, a former New Jersey state trooper. The woman he loves has gone off to Seattle "to think things over," and Harry is left to bide his time, medicating himself with whatever will help him make it through the night, while praying that she ultimately decides to come back to him.

While killing time, Harry goes to work for a P.I. firm owned by another ex-trooper and takes on a case involving a woman named Nikki Ellis, a former "adult entertainer." Nikki was once in a relationship with a thug named Johnny Harrow. Shortly after Harrow went away to prison for attempted murder, Nikki gave birth to their son and, in an effort to do what was best for the child, gave it up for adoption.

The problem is that she didn't consult Johnny about her decision and he's furious about it. Now, after seven years, Harrow is out of prison two years early and is on his way back to Jersey to claim what's his and to settle some old scores with Nikki and with a mobster he once worked for, among others. He has dreams of tracking down and taking his son and riding off into the sunset once he's accomplished his objectives. Nikki comes to the agency, desperately afraid that somehow, Harrow will break the code of secrecy that was supposed to surround the adoption process and find her son. She wants Harry to protect her and to ensure that Harrow won't find the boy.

It's going to be a lot harder than it sounds. Harrow is totally amoral, very resourceful and seems to have a powerful patron who just might be able to break through the red tape and find the boy. Harrow casually disposes of anyone who stands in his path, and before the dust has settled, Harry Ranes will be his number one target.

This is a very bleak, hard-boiled novel with desperate characters living on the thin edge of disaster. The story moves at a rapid clip and one of the things that struck me most about the book was the humanity of the characters, Harry and Nikki in particular. These are real, believable people, trapped in circumstances that threaten to overwhelm them at almost any moment. You care for them immediately and that significantly ratchets up the tension in the novel. All of it builds to a stunning climax and this book demonstrates all over again why Wallace Stroby is one of the true bright lights in contemporary crime fiction. A must for fans of the hard-boiled genre.

The twenty-eighth Spenser novel finds the intrepid Boston detective on the road again. A beautiful blonde widow named Mary Lou Buckman has hired Spenser to get the person or persons who recently killed her husband.

The Buckmans owned a business in the small, fictional resort community of Potshot, near the Sawtooth Mountains, about fifty miles south of Phoenix, Arizona. The former mining community has become a haven for wealthy Californians seeking to escape the rat race, but trouble has found them, nonetheless. A gang of cretins and thugs, led by a charismatic man known as the Preacher, has taken over the old mining grounds in the hills outside of Potshot. The bad guys are extorting money from the town's business people and are otherwise terrorizing the community. People are leaving town; real estate prices are plummeting, and Potshot is going to hell in a handbasket.

Buckman's husband, Steve, had attempted to stand up against the gang and one of its leaders had publicly threatened him and warned him that he was "a dead man." When Buckman is shot to death, everyone in Potshot simply assumes that the Preacher or one of his henchmen was responsible. But the local police chief is useless. He's intimidated by the gang and is cowed into taking no action to investigate the murder or to bring the killers to justice. Thus the widow has no place to turn other than Spenser.

Spenser travels out to Potshot to get the lay of the land and quickly concludes that this job is too big for one man, even if the one man is Spenser himself and even if he has his faithful sidekick, Hawk, to assist him. So Spenser recruits his own gang, comprised of killers and other tough guys that readers will readily recognize from earlier Spenser novels. The gang, seven in all, heads out to Potshot, determined to clean up the town and run out the bad guys. Once they get there, however, the situation suddenly becomes a lot more complicated and even more dangerous than Spenser had imagined.

This is an entertaining novel which owes a great deal to "The Magnificent Seven." It's an atypical Spenser novel in that all of the action takes place far from his home turf, and the book is really as much of a western as it is a typical detective novel. But Spenser is the same, wise-cracking tough guy that readers of the series have come to expect and even though the whole scenario is beyond belief, it's still a quick fun read.

As always, at least in my opinion, the principal downside of the book is Spenser's constant mooning over the impossibly irritating Susan Silverman. Even though the action takes place far from Boston, there's still way too much interaction between the two, and the dialog between them is sappy, silly, and annoying in the extreme. As always in these novels, if you skim all the scenes with Susan, you are bound to enjoy the book all that much more.

This is another excellent, fast-moving novel from Don Winslow. The protagonist is a lifelong loser named Tim Kearney who is doing a stint in San Quentin when he gets into a beef with a Hells Angel named Stinkdog. Knowing that Stinkdog will be looking to kill him, Kearney, a former Marine, makes a preemptive strike, cutting Stinkdog's throat with a sharpened license plate. Kearney knows, however, that his reprieve will be short-lived. The murder makes him a three-time loser. He can expect to spend the rest of his life as a guest of the state of California, but that's of little consequence. Kearney knows that it will only be a matter of days or weeks until the Hells Angels take their revenge and kill him for murdering one of their own.

Just in the nick of time, though, Kearney gets the luckiest break of his life when a DEA agent named Tad Gruza offers to get him out of jail permanently in return for doing the DEA a small favor. Gruza explains that a notorious Mexican drug dealer named Don Huertero is holding a DEA agent captive. Huertero has offered to exchange the agent for a drug dealer named Bobby Z that the feds are holding. Sadly, though, unbeknownst to anyone outside of the DEA, Bobby Z has died of a heart attack while in custody and so it looks like the exchange is off.

It turns out, however, that Tim Kearney is the spitting image of Bobby Z and Gruza proposes that Kearney impersonate Bobby Z for the purpose of the exchange. Once the swap has been made, Gruza promises to extricate Kearney and let him run away and start his life anew. It's a scary idea, but a lot more palatable than sitting around in prison waiting for the Hells Angels to execute him and so Kearney agrees.

Inevitably, of course, as the exchange is to be made, the grand plan goes to hell in a handbasket. Kearney winds up in the hands of Huertero's people who treat him like royalty while awaiting the boss's arrival at a luxurious compound belonging to one of his henchmen. Kearney discovers, though, that Huertero actually intends to torture and kill him because the real Bobby Z apparently stole a large sum of money from him.

Kearny now finds himself on the run from the drug dealers, the cops and, of course the Hells Angels who still want his hide as well. His chances of survival look pretty grim, but he intends to give it his best shot and wreak as much havoc on his enemies as he can before he succumbs.

This is a very entertaining novel and Kearney, for all is faults, is a tremendously appealing protagonist. Winslow tells the story in staccato bursts of narrative and dialog that seem perfectly suited to the subject and that keep you turning the pages. Winslow has gone on to even bigger and much better things since this book first appeared twenty-three years ago, but fans of the author who don't know this book will certainly want to search it out.

Jack McMorrow was a veteran reporter for the New York Times before he made a significant change and left the big city for life in the woods of Maine. Now he's back, briefly, to interview about a job as a stringer for the Times, working from Maine. It's supposed to be a quick trip--in and out overnight--but Jack takes the time to have a drink with an old friend named Butch Casey. Casey is an ex-cop whose wife was brutally murdered. Jack covered the story for the Times, and Casey has never gotten over the loss. He's also never forgiven the D.A., John Fiore, who failed to prosecute the case aggressively.

Jack and Casey have a couple of drinks and when they go their separate ways, Casey seems to be in good spirits. But the next morning, before Jack can get out of town and back to Maine, the cops are at his hotel room door. Casey has been arrested for murdering Fiore, who is now a very popular mayor, and the cops want to know if Jack was involved.

Before long, the city is in an uproar over the death of a beloved mayor and the press is all over Jack, speculating about his involvement in all of this. Beyond that, Jack discovers that, before allegedly stabbing the mayor to death, Casey left an envelope for Jack with the hotel desk. In it are papers regarding an investigation that Casey was making on his own and that he now begs Jack to pursue.

Jack feels an obligation to his long-time friend, but it quickly becomes apparent that some very powerful and dangerous people do not want Jack poking into their affairs. As readers of this very good series learned a long time ago, Jack McMorrow does not scare easily and he can be extremely stubborn when on the trail of a good story, especially one that involves an injustice that needs to be made right. In this case, though, Jack may have taken on more than he can handle and the odds that he will survive long enough to make it back home to Maine are not looking good.

This is another very good story from Gerry Boyle, who seems to know New York City as well as he clearly knows the backwoods of Maine. The tension is palpable from beginning to end and once the action ramps up, it's impossible to put this book down. A very good read.