The Narrows, by Michael Connelly

Harry Bosch, the former L.A. police detective now working on his own, gets a call from Graciela McCaleb.  Her husband, Terry, had worked with Harry a few times before his early retirement from the FBI.  Terry, a heart transplant recipient, has just died and she wants Harry to look into his death.  The official cause of death was complications from his body rejecting his new heart but Graciela wants a second opinion.  Harry quickly learns that Terry’s heart transplant medications had been tampered with and his investigation is now looking into a likely murder.  Meanwhile, FBI agent Rachael Walling receives word that Robert Backus, the notorious Poet, has sent her a message at headquarters.  Backus is a former FBI agent who went bad and became a serial killer.  A huge embarrassment for the Bureau, he has been presumed dead after a shootout several years ago in L.A.   Backus was the mentor for both Terry and Rachel at the beginning of their careers.   Could Terry’s death be tied to the Poet?   Harry thinks so and he joins forces with Rachel, who is being used as bait by the FBI to lure the Poet out of hiding.  This was a terrific suspense read and it was interesting to have characters from several previous Bosch novels make another appearance in this worthy addition to a great series.

 
Hark!, by Ed McBain

Gloria Stanford has been found shot to death in her luxurious highrise condominium in one of the wealthy neighborhoods of Isola, the fictional metropolis modeled on New York City.  Detectives Carella and Meyer of the 87th Precinct get the call but they are making little headway on the case—until mysterious notes begin arriving by courier at the precinct.  The anonymous messages, some in the form of palindromes, some passages from Shakespeare, seem to be related to the Stanford murder.  Soon, to Carella’s horror, it becomes apparent that the Deaf Man is back in town.  This crafty criminal, who may or may not be deaf, shot and wounded Carella several years ago, eluded the detectives, and then disappeared.  Now, he seems to be back to once again vex Carella and his fellow detectives, daring them to decipher the clues he is sending them.  Is he confessing to the murder of Stanford or letting them know he is planning another caper in their precinct?  Will the detectives figure out the clues in time to finally capture him—while at the same time dealing with some shakeups in their personal lives?  This was another winner from McBain, who makes writing seem so effortless.

Monday Mourning, by Kathy Reichs

Tempe Brennan, the forensic anthropologist who divides her time between Montreal and Charlotte, is spending some time in Montreal before returning to Charlotte for the Christmas holidays.  She should be out holiday shopping with her old friend, Anne, who has come for a visit but she finds herself in a cold, dark, rat-infested basement digging up old bones.  Once all the bones are recovered Tempe is able to determine that they are from three teenage girls.  Found with the bones are three buttons from the late 19th century and the police would dearly like the girls to be from that era, too, rather than a current problem to investigate.  Tempe senses that the bones are more recent and she orders a test that determines the bones are from the late 1980s and the 1990s.  The bones are now clearly a police matter and Tempe works with detective Andrew Ryan, her sometime lover, to try to discover who the girls were and what happened to them.  Her investigation will put her and Anne in the crosshairs to be the next victims.   This is the seventh book in the series and an okay addition but I’d like to see a little more suspense mixed in with the always interesting forensic science.

Garden of Beasts, by Jeffery Deaver

It’s the summer of 1936.  Paul Schumann, a German-American living in New York City, has just been arrested.  Paul, a former boxer and an expert marksman, has been a very successful hitman for the mob but his luck has finally run out.  However, being so successful, and being fluent in German, he has caught the attention of a government spy agency and he is given a choice.  He can go to prison or he can go to Berlin and assassinate a high government official.  No, not Hitler—the agency views him as a lightweight with no staying power.  The person the agency fears and wants to eliminate is Reinhardt Ernst, a brilliant, ruthless, and dangerous man who is in charge of Germany’s military buildup.  If Paul is successful his record will be cleared and he will earn $10,000.  Truth be told, Paul is ready to get out of the hitman game and he wants to buy into his brother’s printing business so he agrees to the mission.  He sails to Germany with America’s Olympic team and he has scarcely arrived in Berlin when he gets into trouble and attracts the attention of Willi Kohl, an anti-Nazi Columbo-like Berlin police detective.  While Paul is trying to locate and assassinate Ernst, Kohl is trying to discover Paul’s identity and what he is up to.  Both are relentless and determined and both have to cope with the added danger of the Nazi government—which could just as easily arrest either one of them.  This suspenseful cat and mouse game is played out with the Olympics as a backdrop in a Berlin of 1936 that is a garden of beasts, and we don’t mean the Tiergarten.

Not long ago I skimmed a depressing article that came out I think around the time of the annual convention of the American book publishing industry.  Basically, the article stated that more books than ever before were being published in the United States but fewer people were reading than ever before, too.  It’s sad that we have more books than ever to choose from yet fewer and fewer people have time to read them.  Which is my long and winding road to this.  If you are one of the people with only enough time to read one or two books a year and you like suspense, this is your book for this year.  Deaver has always written outstanding suspense but he has truly outdone himself with this wonderful novel packed with fascinating period detail, nail-biting twists and turns, and terrific cameos by all the top Nazi bad guys.   Absolutely the best suspense novel I’ve read this year.  Turn off the tv, turn off the computer, and get ready to be really entertained. 


 
 

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