Tag: book-reviews

Book Review: Somone Is On a Hunt For The Hunters

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

Blood Trail by C.J. Box is a pretty good thriller featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett and delivers an impressive twist toward the end as to the motivation behind the murders.

A man has been gutted and flayed on the mountain, resembling the treatment of elk after they have been hunted and killed. Joe Pickett has been especially assigned by the governor to look into the matter. He has had a tumultuous time in his career due to the politics and chaos surrounding him and his family. Pickett is going to rely on some dubious allies to determine if these latest killings is because of some extreme anti-hunting views or a much more personal vendetta. Pickett will have to deal with a hostile supervisor and just the general trappings of political figures to get to the bottom of this rather gruesome mystery.

Like any good thriller writer, Box does put his heron through the wringer. Not everything here strikes me as completely plausible, but real life is even more troubling, so I won’t complain too much about Box’s plotting.

It’s still pretty well written, and I like that Pickett has a pretty stable family life in spite of all the chaos his profession beings upon the homestead. There is some pretty scathing commentary in the subtext of this story about the cruelty humans can exhibit. Also, the friendship between Pickett and Nate Romanowski is rather intriguing. Nate is some kind of an avenging falconer who will go to great and sometimes lethal lengths to protect his friends, especially Joe and his family.

Box also revisits some of Joe’s checkered history from previous books involving old foes and other questionable characters.

Anyway, Box comes through again with an engaging addition to the Joe Pickett canon, and I look forward to getting the next novel in this series to explore the aftermath and the emotional wreckage that is left behind.

Before I circle back to the works of C.J. Box, it looks like the spirits of leisure reading have led me to return to Michael Connelly and his novel, Resurrection Walk.

Book Review: A Cannibal In Vegas

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

Neon Prey is a thriller from John Sandford that sounds more thrilling than it turned out to be for me. It’s another in his long-running series featuring Lucas Davenport, who is now a US Marshal on the hunt for a killer who actually feasts on human flesh.

A freelance enforcer for organized crime named Clayton Deese skips out on bail after a job that goes wrong for him. During the search, bodies are discovered on his Louisiana property. It is discovered that Deese is also a cannibal and on the run. Lucas Davenport and his team of United States Marshals join in the manhunt which almost gets him killed. Deese is traced to Las Vegas with his group of miscreants, and he turns out to be cleverer than Davenport anticipated.

I have read some Sandford novels before, but I had a hard time getting into this one. I think part of my problem is that nothing feels all that distinctive about Davenport. He’s just another determined cop who maintains his cool no matter what. I did respect that he sort of didn’t dwell on the injury he suffers in the first part of the novel that took him months to complete his recovery. He just basically got back into the fray once he got himself back in shape.

Sandford is an efficient writer, but nothing really pops off the page for me. Even the reprehensible cannibal didn’t really keep my interest. I was just ready to finish the thing and move on to the next book.

Anyway, Sandford has his devotees, and that’s fine. I may return to his works, but it will be a while. I may just prefer his other well-known protagonist, Virgil Flowers. Anyway, this was a disappointing port of call in my unending literary journey.

I will return to a more classic crime novelist who wrote a novel that had two pretty good screen adaptations. I am about to revisit Cape Fear by John D. MacDonald in its original presentation.

Book Review: A Master Class In Murder

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

Murder She Wrote: A Time for Murder by Jessica Fletcher and Jon Land was likely written solely by the latter since the charming Mrs. Fletcher is a fictional character from the television series.

This is my first foray into this long-running novel series. Of course, I was and still am a watcher of the television series that starred the late, and truly great Angela Lansbury.

Jessica Fletcher is invited to a retirement party of a former colleague from her teaching days. She is also interviewed for a high school newspaper; however, the young woman who met with her is subsequently murdered. Jessica and the sheriff in Cabot Cove, Maine discover a connection to a previous murder over decades in the past in which Jessica had her first exposure to amateur sleuthing. This was back before she became a bestselling novelist, and her husband was still living. The readers sort of get two murder plots for the price of one here.

It’s a fun, easy read for the most part. I did have some trouble conjuring Angela Lansbury’s portrayal in my mind’s eye with some of the dialogue and scenes. written by Land. Land also did not worry too much about age discrepancies or anything since the television series ended well before the Internet and ubiquitous cell phone use. That was a little distracting, but I was able to set that aside for the most part and enjoy the story.

Obviously, this isn’t really great literature, but it was a fun diversion. The novel series has yet to really slow down. This particular novel was published in 2019 and was by no means the first one. If I feel like revisiting Mrs. Fletcher’s exploits in print, I will have plenty of options. There is actually little doubt that I will do just that.

Until then, I am on to a grittier reading indulgence with Mickey Spillane’s The Killing Man.

Book Review: Unlucky In Love

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

The Inmate is another implausible, yet strangely compelling, thriller from Freida McFadden.

A single mother named Brooke Sullivan has returned to her hometown with her son and moved into her recently deceased parents’ house. She gets a job as a nurse practitioner at a nearby prison where a murderous ex-boyfriend is incarcerated. Brooke reconnects with a childhood friend who was also almost killed by the seemingly sociopathic Shane Nelson. The strange reunion occurs, and Brooke has some reason to doubt her memories of that traumatic night eleven years earlier. Shane is in prison because of her courageous testimony, but Brooke is suddenly doubting herself, especially when another murder occurs.

The novel is written in first person from Brooke’s point of view and often alternates between the present day and eleven years earlier.

McFadden seems to; rely on quite a bit of coincidence as usual. Brooke’s judgment is kind of questionable, which is tempting for me to have limited sympathy. It then occurs to me that my judgment in romantic relationships hasn’t exactly been all that stellar either, although I have not been involved in any gruesome murders, just to be clear.

There are a few twists that are a little hard to buy into, but McFadden did manage to keep me interested in spite of my admittedly mild exasperation.

McFadden is an imaginative and pretty competent writer. I have no real objection to her prose style because the story does flow pretty easily.

In spite of my skepticism I experienced, I did like the novel overall. I am still kind of new to McFadden’s works, but I have enjoyed the few that I have read.

Next up is something which is complete nostalgic fluff. I have decided to try out one of the Murder, She Wrote novels which have been published for many years now. Jessica Fletcher has a new murder to solve while taking a trip down memory lane as she and Jon Land relate the events of A Time for Murder.

Book Review: There Is Only One Win Who Matters

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

Win is a pretty good thriller written by Harlan Coben and features a character usually seen in the Myron Bolitar novels. Winston Horne Lockwood III gets to tell his own story here. He is the extremely wealthy, hedonistic financial consultant with a knack for avenging the misdeeds and abuses committed by others. He is charming, yet ruthless. He has few friends but has had many lovers.

Win is met by FBI agents who take him to an apartment which is occupied by a corpse. He does not know that dead man, but he does recognize a rare painting and a suitcase that were stolen from his family home a couple of decades previously. His cousin was also abducted and assaulted around that time, and the perpetrators were never found. Win starts his own investigation which brings him to a confrontation with family secrets and a notorious incident of domestic terrorism which is also connected to his missing heirlooms. He does have a hefty fortune to help him unearth these secrets, but he also has a unique disinterest in playing by the rules. Win’s search for long overdue justice gets the attention of those whose ruthlessness and desperation may cause him to face his own mortality in ways that may surprise even him.

Win is kind of an antihero one would hope to have in their corner in the most dangerous of times. It’s a pretty good mystery with q few unexpected twists. Win operates in a pretty fascinating level of society. I liked the way Coben threads two or three seemingly unrelated atrocities together.

Win’s almost constant crowing about his wealth and how much he enjoys the advantages is refreshing and terribly amusing.

Coben is a consistent and solid writing talent. Coben does expose a depth in Win that seems so rarely glimpsed when he is alongside Myron. I like Myron well enough, but I am glad that Coben resisted the temptation to include him in some kind of literary cameo.

I also think that writing this in first person was a good choice made by the author.

It’s a good read, and I wouldn’t mind another novel told from Win’s perspective.

The unending literary journey brings me to Louise Penny’s Still Life.

Book Review: Winter’s Lost Love

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

A Woman Underground is a pretty interesting mystery novel by Andrew Klavan and is the fourth installment of his Cameron Winter series.

Cameron Winter is a university professor, who has a past as a dangerous government operative. He also has a peculiar tendency to get involved in the investigation of unusual crimes. He is not exactly psychic, but he has a gift of imagining how something actually occurred when it seems to baffle others who look into these misdeeds. Winter calls this tendency “a strange habit of mind”.

Winter has been seeing a therapist for a while due to overwhelming loneliness and guilt over some of what he had to do for the service of his country. He is one of the most dangerous men on the planet and also one of the most sensitive.

Winter starts to unravel a bit more when he believes that the first woman he ever loved tried to reach out to him because she was in danger. He comes across a book seems to spell out what her life may have been like in recent years. In the meantime, Winter is trying to convince a colleague to not leave his wife over some fantasy involving a hot student. During his therapy sessions, Winter discusses a previous mission to Turkey that went sideways in all kinds of ways including betrayal and very troubling revelations about those for whom he worked.

Winter has been a tortured soul since his first appearance, but he is even more troubled than usual, which is a state of mind that could get him killed as he searches for the lost woman who meant the most to him.

Klavan is a pretty thoughtful and talented writer who weaves his story through events of the character’s past. There is a pretty established pattern on how this Winter novels unfold, but the main plots are usually quite intriguing.

There are times when Klavan’s exposition seems to slow down the action a bit more than I would prefer, however it didn’t discourage me all that much.

There are some interesting twists in the story that I did not predict. Winter’s strange habit of mind got directed to a crisis that I wasn’t expecting, which was pleasantly jarring. He’s probably going to remain a pretty melancholic guy for some time in the series, but it was a bit troubling to read about his near complete mental unraveling. I did give a mental cheer when some of his usual sharpness started returning.

Klavan accomplished his goal, at least with me, in that I am most interested in where the next installment will take this complicated, curious professor with his strange habit of mind.

Next up, I will check in with the detectives of the 87th Precinct in Ed McBain’s Kiss.

Book Review: Not The Most Welcoming Inn

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier is a gothic thriller first published in 1936 and reads a little easier than expected in spite of the typical lengthy exposition of its time.

The protagonist is Mary Yellan, a young woman whose mother has recently died. Mary is on her way to Jamaica Inn where she is to be reunited with her aunt. Aunt Patience is married to a man who is quote a brute and involved in some unsavory activities on the moors in Cornwall. Uncle Joss begins the new arrangement by bullying and intimidating Mary, who feels duty bound to remain at the inn to protect her aunt. Mary meets her uncle’s brother and becomes attracted to him against her better judgment. A peculiar vicar is also lurking around is may not be the ally he presents himself to be.

Mary gets a close look at what her uncle does to supplement his income and has even more reason to wonder how long she has before her life is on the line.

Du Maurier is best known for her novel Rebecca which was published later. She does have a distinctive eloquence in her prose, and I can appreciate how she became so respected.

The character of Joss Merlyn, the abusive uncle, comes across as a bit campy in his bluster. It got a little difficult at times to imagine him as authentic. The tension between Joss and Mary was quite compelling in any case.to read.

Du Maurier also does well with describing the hostile and oppressive environment surrounding the inn. Sometimes it seems to go on a little long, but one must also understand the time in which that was written and what was expected versus the short attention span of today’s audience.

This is a little bit of a departure from my usual reading interests, but I was glad to find this one.

Next up, I am taking on the Big Kahuna of the true crime genre. I am delving into the intricacies of the Charles Manson case as told by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry with Helter Skelter.

Book Review: Trouble In Cypress County

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

The Long Lavender Look is a decent novel written by the revered crime writer John D. MacDonald and features his best-known protagonist, Travis McGee. It was first published in 1970.

Travis McGee is a salvage consultant with a peculiar tendency to get involved in murder investigations. He lives in a houseboat called The Busted Flush in Florida and just has a talent of falling into dire peril involving greed, corruption, and murder.

This story begins when McGee and his friend, Meyer, are returning home from attending a wedding when a scantily clad woman darts across a darkened road right in front of his car, causing them to end up in swamp water upside down. As McGee and Meyer make their way to civilization, they are accosted by someone in a truck passing them taking shots at them. When they make it to the authorities, they find themselves arrested for the murder of a guy in Cypress County who was apparently involved in an armored truck heist some years prior. McGee finds himself in the middle of a complicated web of corruption where he is not sure who he can trust as he fights to clear his name and return home.

First of all, I will say that I will likely be revisiting this author’s works again, but MacDonald does require some patience because he is a bit wordy. His exposition at times slows down the story and kind of makes it a bit of a chore to get through.’

I do appreciate that MacDonald does display an impressive eloquence in his prose for what is classified as a hard-boiled crime novel. The friendship between Meyer and McGee has its charm as well. I had heard of Travis McGee for years but did not really know much about this series. I do like the set-up MacDonald has created for him. For example, The Busted Flush seems to be a great name for a boat.

MacDonald is generally considered one of the great ones in this genre, and I can understand how he gained that acclaim even though I struggled a bit with this one. I suspect that I have spent too many years with writers who are much more abrupt and simple in their prose to fully appreciate MacDonald’s writing style.

Once again, I may not be doing myself any favors by starting well into the middle of a series. MacDonald has numerous standalone novels, which I will also likely explore, but I doubt this will be my last effort to hang with Travis McGee.

I wish this particular novel hooked me more, but I am not ready to throw in the towel in my exploration of the works of John D. MacDonald.

My next read is going to take me further back in time to another legendary suspense writer named Daphne Du Maurier, who is most famous for the novel Rebecca. I thought I would be introduced to this author’s works by way of Jamaica Inn.

Book Review: Never An Easy Path For Mr. Rawlins

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

A Red Death by Walter Mosley is an interesting mystery novel featuring the author’s best-known protagonist, Easy Rawlins.

It is 1953 in Los Angeles, and Easy Rawlins has become a property owner who keeps his assets a bit of a secret due to the hostility he would likely face since he is a black man living in the midst of ongoing racial strife. The secret’s out when an IRS agent has reason to file a tax evasion charge against Rawlins. An FBI agent comes to Easy’s aid, but the aid is not going to be unearned. Easy is given the task to spy on an alleged communist who has volunteered at the First African Baptist Church. The matter turns more dangerous when people start getting killed, and Easy has to protect his life as well as his livelihood.

Easy’s life becomes even more convoluted when he falls his friend’s estranged wife. That friend known as Mouse is one of the most dangerous men in the city. That’s only the beginning of the pressures gathering around Easy Rawlins.

This is the second novel in the series featuring Easy Rawlins and follows Devil in a Blue Dress. Mosley is a talented writer and seems to capture the era well. I like Easy because he is not a saint. He also has some scruples and is easy to root for.

Mosley does write in the dialect that someone like Easy and his peers likely spoke, so that could be a little tricky to interpret correctly. It does give the characters and setting authenticity, so I don’t begrudge Mosley making the effort.

It was a good book, and I will likely revisit Easy Rawlins and see how his story unfolds. I recently confirmed that Mosley still brings Rawlins and drops him in the middle of trouble. Mosley actually has quite a bibliography in his wheelhouse, and I will likely pick up some more of his works.

My literary journey which is not going to end anytime soon will continue with another iconic suspense writer. I have not read this guy before, but I am about to rectify that. The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald is the next to be picked up and hopefully enjoyed.

Book Review: Lew Archer Takes The Case

~ Peter Kanelis ~ Leave a comment

The Archer Files provided me with a welcome introduction to an author I had not read before. This is apparently the definitive collection of short stories by Ross MacDonald that feature his best-known private eye character, Lew Archer.

There are several stories and other material in this volume, so I don’t have the time and patience to analyze each entry. I will just merely recommend for any mystery fans to try this volume out.

There is a rather helpful and interesting biographical profile of Archer written by Tom Nolan, who edits and reviews crime fiction and apparently has done a thorough account of MacDonald in the past. I guess he is one of these experts in crime fiction. He seems to be a pretty good writer in his own right. I had no real issues with his introduction.

There are a dozen short stories that follow. Some are better than others, as one would expect, however none stand out as being really bad. Archer himself is pretty typical of other fictional, hard-boiled, protagonists of the era of the early Cold War days and the subsequent decades. He is does have a cool blend of toughness and intelligence. Archer is no slouch when it comes to his knowledge of literature and culture, but he’s certainly no push-over. He is a likable enough hero, and I will likely peruse a novel or two before long.

A somewhat more intriguing feature of this volume is a section known as the Case Notes. These are stories that MacDonald started and either just not finished or recycled the ideas into other works. It was interesting and a little annoying t the same time in that there were several stories that I was really wanting to know the resolution.

I am not sure that Ross MacDonald really broke much new ground in the genre at the time of his publications, but I can certainly see how he earned whatever acclaim he enjoyed during his lifetime. MacDonald died in 1983, and his real name was Kenneth Miller.

MacDonald certainly was not lacking in his writing talent. From what little research I did, it does seem that MacDonald has held in quite high esteem in the world of crime fiction, and as near as I can tell from my so far limited exposure to his works, that reverence from his peer seems pretty justified.

I am moving on to another highly regarded, long-standing crime writer who is still very much alive and quite prolific. It has been a couple of years, but I think it’s time to revisit Easy Rawlins as he gets himself into a bit more trouble with A Red Death by the formidable Walter Mosley.