Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

“Anyone in this world could kill, in the right set of circumstances. The questions is, what circumstances?”
- Tariq Lawrence

Oh, what a deliciously tangled web of circumstances does author Hilary Davidson weave in her masterful debut, The Damage Done.

Travel writer Lily Moore is called home to New York from Spain with the horrible news that her sister, Claudia, has been found dead in the apartment they share. Even worse, Claudia’s death appears to be a suicide, tragically timed to coincide with the anniversary of their mother’s suicide.

Given she had fled to Spain in large part to get away from the downward spiral that had become her heroin addict sister’s life, Lily returns home under a shroud of guilt. Could she have prevented her sister’s death if she had been there?

Lily’s grief quickly turns to confusion, however, when upon going to the medical examiner’s office to officially identify Claudia’s body she discovers the person found dead in their apartment was not her sister. Someone had been impersonating Claudia and living as her for the past six months. But who, and why? And where is Claudia?

Lily’s quest to find the answers to those questions forms the framework for one of the most tantalizing, twisted, multilayered pieces of crime fiction I’ve read in quite some time. Like her protagonist, Hilary Davidson’s background is that of a travel writer, and the experiences she has had traveling the globe to varied cultures and locales clearly shine through in the wonderfully nuanced descriptions of both people and places that permeate The Damage Done. (more…)

If you are unlucky enough to have known the dark as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for darkness is a movable feast.
- Adam Lee

There’s enough darkness following Adam Lee, the main character in Grant Jerkins’ debut novel A Very Simple Crime, to fuel a Thanksgiving sized feast.

The book opens with Adam on trial for the murder of his wife, Rachel. As we learn through Adam’s narrated flashback to the events that brought him to this point in his life, it seems that darkness has followed him like a specter from the time his parents were killed in a car accident when he was a child.

He grows up only to marry a woman whom turns out to be seriously mentally disturbed, and with her has a son, Albert, who is born severely developmentally disabled. Though he doesn’t grow much mentally, Albert does grow to be a very physically large young man, one prone to violent outbursts. After nearly killing his mother during a confrontation Albert is finally institutionalized.

Trying to get some breathing space from his suffocating home life, Adam begins having an affair with one of Albert’s attendants at the institution. To occupy his wife while he sneaks away with his mistress for the weekend Adam brings Albert home from the institution for a visit. Upon his return home from the tryst, however, he finds Rachel dead and Albert nearly nearly catatonic, rocking back and forth in a corner of the room.

With Albert the only one present, and having a history of violence against his mother, the police conduct a perfunctory investigation; it’s clear to them what happened. The setup and majority of the backstory established, it’s at this point A Very Simple Crime turns from pure Southern Gothic into a legal thriller that just happens to be set in the South. And, if possible, it gets even darker. (more…)

As he grew older and honed his talents, he came to realize that he was the thing people feared – he was the monster in the dark. – Ray McDaniel

Are you ready for a Halloween treat? I hope so, because author Chris F. Holm sure has some goodies ready for your reading pleasure. In 8 Pounds: Eight Tales of Crime, Horror, & Suspense Holm serves up eight wonderfully entertaining short stories that will have you up late into the night reading, and leave you hungry for more. Though every story in the collection is a home run, there were a few standouts for me.

“Seven Days of Rain” starts the collection off, and right away you know you’re in for something special: “There’s men’s plans and then there’s God’s plans, and it looks for damn sure like God don’t think much of mine.” So thinks Eddie Hanscombe, a man whose plan 60 years ago was to bury something, literally and figuratively, and be done with it. During a biblical seven day rain, however, Eddie comes to understand nothing about the past is ever really buried, and that God always has the last laugh.

“The World Behind” also deals with the past. Timothy Hewitt was a shy, fearful kid in the summer of 1986, one who let his fear drive him down a path that forever changed his life. He took to hiding in the woods that summer to avoid a bully that had it in for him and, as the adult Timothy reflects, it was in those woods he discovered who he really was… as well as what had been happening to all the animals that were disappearing from homes around town. “The World Behind” is a wonderful coming of age story, albeit with a slightly ominous undertone. (more…)

There would be silence, but cold has a sound of its own. The branches of trees freeze solid and crack under the weight of the snow with sounds like muted gunshots. – Kari Vaara

Set in Lapland, Northern Finland during Kaamos, the time of year just before Christmas when temperatures plunge to -40° and night never gives way to day, Snow Angels marks the stunning English language debut of author James Thompson.

Inspector Kari Vaara knows he has a serious problem on his hands when he arrives at the scene of a horrific murder and finds that the victim is famous actress Sufia Elmi, who also happens to be a Somali immigrant.

Finland being a nation of closet xenophobes – We don’t talk about hatred, we hate in silence. It’s our way. We do everything in silence. – Vaara realizes the combination hate-crime / sex-crime the murder appears to be could make for explosive headlines if not solved quickly.

Unfortunately for Vaara, what initially appears to be a pretty decent lead on the vehicle that transported the body to the dump site ends up mushrooming into multiple suspects and scenarios, all of which seem possible. Further complicating things, Vaara has a personal connection to one of the prime suspects, the man for whom his ex-wife left him, causing some to speculate about the validity of the evidence Vaara has gathered. (more…)

I didn’t know that once you’ve proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you’ll never be free again. – Michael Smith

In the wake of a horrific night of violence that leaves him without his parents or his voice, eight year-old Michael Smith finds comfort in drawing and playing with locks.

Though he has a natural talent for drawing, it soon becomes clear he has a preternatural talent for opening locks. At first just working with old combination padlocks, Michael eventually graduates to opening key locks with his own crude, homemade lock pick set.

It’s a talent that seventeen year-old Michael never considers the potential implications of until a high school prank gone wrong puts him in the position to meet the wrong people, and from that point on his life will never be the same.

Presented as the reflections of a 26 year-old Michael who has landed in jail and is contemplating the life that got him there, The Lock Artist is told in chapters that alternate between the distant past that set him on the path to becoming a safecracker and the job gone awry that led to his incarceration.

The two narratives unfold on slowly converging paths before ultimately colliding in a final reveal of the shocking night of events that stole both Michael’s parents and his voice from him. (more…)

The only oath I took, as I recall, was to first do no harm. I’m thinking we’re past that point. – Dr. Peter Brown

As should be abundantly obvious from that quote, Dr. Peter Brown is not your typical doctor. In fact, he spent the majority of his adult life before we meet him in Beat The Reaper taking lives, not saving them.

He didn’t even begin life as Peter Brown but as Pietro Brwna, a young man whose life was set on the path to violence when his grandparents, who were raising him, were murdered when he was fourteen. Fortunately, he is taken in by the family of his best friend, “Skinflick” (don’t ask) Locanos. Unfortunately, it just so happens that the Locanos family is a major player in the mob.

It takes him a year, but Pietro tracks down his grandparents’ killers and exacts his revenge. Impressed with the young man’s natural talent for killing, the Locanos “family” recruits Pietro as a hit man. He enjoys and excels at the job until one day circumstances arise which force him to choose between going to jail and turning state’s evidence.

Not thinking that’s really too difficult of a choice he enters the Witness Protection Program, Pietro Brwna becomes Peter Brown, the Feds send him to medical school, and he ultimately finds himself working as a medical intern at a low-rent hospital in Manhattan.

Everything seems to be going fine until one day Brown goes to break the news to a patient that he has cancer, only to discover that he recognizes the man as a wiseguy from his days working with the mob. Worse, the patient also recognizes Brown. The mobster, who’s terrified of dying during his scheduled operation, offers Brown a deal he can’t refuse: make sure he gets through his surgery ok and he won’t rat Brown out to the family. Except… he rats him out anyway. And this is the point, boys and girls, where you’d better buckle-up because the ride gets decidedly bumpy. (more…)

Just a few hard knocks. That’s what he’d kept telling himself, these past couple of years, but now he had to consider a more disturbing possibility. That perhaps the circumstances were not to be blamed, but only himself. – Will Magowan

Former LAPD narcotics detective Will Magowan has pretty much hit rock bottom. Having been fired because of the heroin addiction he picked up while working undercover, he’s estranged from his wife and living in a beat up Airstream trailer at the opening of author Ken Mercer’s debut novel, Slow Fire.

Still unemployed and trying to get his life together two years after his firing, Magowan’s prospects for another job in law enforcement are looking rather grim. Until, that is, he gets an offer from the Mayor of Haydenville, California to become their Chief of Police.

Located far upstate and deep inland in National Forest territory, the once idyllic town is suffocating under a growing methamphetamine problem, one so bad that the Mayor is willing to overlook Magowan’s current baggage in favor of his past expertise.

Magowan accepts the position, and in relatively short order identifies the person he believes to be the source of the meth; Frank Carver, a man who served time in the 1970’s after being convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of his wife. Unfortunately, Carver also wrote a bestselling book shortly after his release from prison which, in conjunction with his generous patronage of the town’s library, makes him ‘hands off’ as far as the Mayor is concerned. (more…)

“I’ve already shot a man this evening, so what’s the difference now? Like smoking, it gets easier after the first one, right?” – J. McNee

Dundee, Scotland based J. McNee (full first name never given) is not at a good place in his life when we meet him in author Russel D. McLean’s debut novel, The Good Son. Formerly on the Dundee police force, McNee was forced into early retirement following a car crash that killed his fiancée and left him physically disabled and psychologically crippled.

Now working as a private investigator, McNee receives a visit from local farmer James Robertson whose estranged brother, Daniel, was found hanging from a tree on the family’s farm. Though the police have it down as suicide, James is convinced his brother did not kill himself and hires McNee to investigate what Daniel had been up to during the 30 years since James last saw him.

In addition to putting him at odds with his former colleagues on the police force, McNee’s investigation opens up a Pandora’s box of local thugs, London gangsters and a mysterious woman with connections to both, as a visit to London reveals that Daniel had been working for one of that city’s most notorious gangsters, Gordon Egg.

Not pleased with either Daniel’s unexplained disappearance from London, with a substantial sum of Egg’s money, or McNee’s visit inquiring about him, Egg sends two of his thugs to Dundee to get to the bottom of things. And that’s when things go seriously sideways, as Egg’s thugs, Ayer and Liman, cut a bloody path through Dundee in their efforts to retrieve the missing money. (more…)

“All I wanted was some peace. I just wanted to sleep.” – Gerry Fegan

Set in Belfast in the aftermath of Northern Ireland’s Troubles*, The Ghosts of Belfast introduces us to ex-con Gerry Fegan. Treated by the locals as a hero for his activities as a “hard man” during the Troubles, activities that got him sent to prison for twelve years, Fegan just wants to leave his past in the past and live out his life in peace. That, unfortunately, isn’t going to happen.

The guilt of his own conscience weighs heavily enough upon him, but that is not the only burden Fegan has to bear. Shortly before his release from prison Fegan began getting visits. Not from friends or family, but from the ghosts of the twelve people he killed during the Troubles. Sometimes only one or two at a time, other times all twelve at once, when we meet Fegan it has been seven long years since his “followers,” as he calls them, first came calling.

Tormented to the very edge of sanity, Fegan barely manages to do more each day than wander down to the pub, get drunk, go home and pass out, then get up and do it all over again. One night a friend Fegan used to run with before his time in prison comes to visit him in the pub. Now a smooth talking politician, Fegan’s friend, McKenna, was once one of the men Fegan took orders from during the Troubles. Orders that led to deaths, including one of Fegan’s followers, the one he calls “The Boy.” (more…)

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell is the first book since Minette Walters’ The Shape of Snakes that genuinely took my breath away. On the surface there is absolutely nothing pretty about the world in which 16-year-old Ree Dolly lives. The people of her community in the backwoods of the Ozark mountains are multiple generations into an existence of poverty, violence and drug addiction; a place where the primary source of income has evolved from making moonshine to cooking crank.

Fortunately for Ree her father, Jessup, is in demand as a crank chef, “practically half famous for it.” Unfortunately for her and the two younger brothers and mentally ill mother she’s struggling to keep fed and functioning, Jessup has gone missing after being released on bond, a bond secured by signing over the family home as collateral, following his most recent arrest. Unwilling to see her family split up if they lose the family’s meager homestead, Ree sets out to find Jessup and make him keep his court date.

Not only is Jessup nowhere to be found, however, but none of the locals, many of them extended members of the Dolly family, seem inclined to help Ree with her search. In fact, they are downright hostile to her inquiries and seemingly determined to derail her efforts, even by means of violence if necessary. Yet, Ree persists. And throughout it all Woodrell offers glimpses of the hidden beauty lurking beneath the surface of the stark environment, and conveys in no uncertain terms that the people who inhabit it have a deep sense of honor, pride and purpose, just ones that don’t necessarily mesh with what most consider normal. (more…)