Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part VII: J. Kingston Pierce

J. Kingston Pierce wears an abundance of hats. He’s the editor of both The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers, the senior editor of January Magazine, and a contributing editor of CrimeReads.

• We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker (Henry Holt):

Characters trapped in a small town, trapped within small expectations, and often trapped in and by a collective past so fixedly delineated as to resist examination propel this complexly plotted, unexpectedly poignant thriller. Walker, or “Walk” (no first name given), is the veteran police chief of Cape Haven, a northern California coastal burg slowly forfeiting its idiosyncrasies to tourist demands. He’s preparing to welcome back a childhood friend, Vincent King, who has been released after spending three decades in prison following the death of a little girl, Sissy Radley. Naïvely, Walk hopes Vincent’s return will bring healing to his town; in fact, it brings only hardship. Sissy’s elder sister, the still-beautiful but self-destructive Star—Vincent’s ex-girlfriend and now the neglectful parent to two fatherless children, 13-year-old Duchess and 5-year-old Robin—is murdered in the wake of Vincent’s arrival, and the ex-con appears responsible. Again. However, neither Walk nor the rage-consumed, grown-up-too-soon Duchess (who habitually introduces herself as “the outlaw Duchess Day Radley”) accept that explanation; instead, they set out amid hazards to ascertain the truth behind Vincent’s alleged crimes. Duchess is the more compelling player—both needing and angry at her mother, pugnaciously protective of her brother, and obstinately distrustful of anything resembling affection. Yet Walk, with his worsening physical ailments and deeply entrenched loneliness, executes a more nuanced, though equally engaging evolution as this stunning tale of loss, dejection, and defiant hope patiently discloses its surprises. Whitaker’s poetic prose only serves to smooth the ride. Published last year in the UK, We Begin at the End has already won the British Crime Writers’ Association’s 2021 Gold Dagger award and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. It should be strong contender for U.S. prizes in 2022.

• Blackout, by Simon Scarrow (Headline UK):

Philip Kerr is responsible for my being so fond of World War II-era crime fiction. His novels about Berlin homicide detective-turned-private eye Bernie Gunther (beginning with 1989’s March Violets and concluding with Metropolis, published 20 years later) were ripe with the period’s public fears and private secrets, and gave us in Gunther an alternately cynical and romantic outsider, an advocate for liberal justice, and a German Everyman who deftly defied pressures to join the Nazi Party. Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke of the Kriminalpolizei, the Kripo—the star of Blackout—likewise steers clear of Nazi affiliations. That makes him an ideal candidate to investigate the rape and murder, in December 1939, of Gerda Korzeny, an erstwhile actress of part-Jewish descent who’s linked romantically with Reich propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. If Schenke, with his minor aristocratic background and history as a race-car driver (before a crash ended his career), should expose anything too uncomfortable to Adolf Hitler’s fascists, he’s dispensable. It doesn’t take long for what had appeared to be a straightforward murder inquiry to become something more bewildering, with additional corpses turning up amid Berlin’s newly instituted blackouts and suspicions brewing that the person responsible for this string of slayings may be prominent in Hitler’s regime. Author Scarrow, who is best known for penning Roman historical fiction, captures the peculiar subtleties of the German capital in those early days of the war, before its citizens realized what privations would result from the fighting. He doesn’t have quite the wit Kerr boasted, nor is his man Schenke such a contradictory and watchable figure as Bernie Gunther. But Scarrow has said that he’s working on sequels to Blackout, so he’ll have more time to find this series’ stride. I very much look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

• Daughters of the Night, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle UK):

I’ll admit, I hesitated to pick up Daughters of the Night. I loved Shepherd-Robinson’s first historical mystery, Blood & Sugar (2019), but knew that in this sequel, she had switched protagonists. Gone was aspiring politician Captain Henry Corsham, who in the previous yarn had so enthrallingly explored the horrors of the Georgian-era slave trade, to be replaced here by his wife, Caroline (“Caro” to her friends), a fairly minor member of Blood & Sugar’s cast. As it turns out, that substitution of a woman’s viewpoint was far from disappointing; instead, it lends Daughters an intimacy and empathy it would surely have lacked had Henry been given its helm. As this story begins, it’s 1782 and Captain Corsham is away in France on some hush-hush diplomatic assignment. Caro, meanwhile, has arranged a nighttime rendezvous with an Italian countess she hopes will aid her in a troubling personal matter ... only to discover that woman stabbed and dying in a south London park. Soon afterward, the “countess” is revealed to have been Lucy Loveless, a high-end prostitute catering to wealthy callers, and London’s quasi-police force—the Bow Street Runners—promptly loses interest in her savage demise. Caro has reasons for wanting justice done, though, and employs a thief-taker named Peregrine Child to dig further into the killing. What follows is a danger-fraught, elegantly rendered account that transports Caro and Child into both the sumptuous and seamy sides of London, as they probe the depths of Britain’s sex trade and through their efforts threaten to expose powerful men who benefit from it. Were this the plot of a modern narrative, it might seem trite; but Daughters of the Night imparts a historical foreignness to the whole affair that enhances its twists and intrigues. Shepherd-Robinson deserves special credit for making clear that, while 18th-century filles de joie were limited in their rights and freedoms, even well-off women such as Caro Corsham had little control of their finances, and could be disgraced and ostracized for contravening moral norms. Two such thrilling tales as Shepherd-Robinson has given us merit a third outing for the Corshams, yet the author has suggested she’ll pen a standalone next.

• The Dark Remains, by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin (World Noir):

Glasgow, Scotland, teeters on the knife edge of inter-gang warfare in this unforeseen fourth novel about cop-cum-philosopher Jack Laidlaw. The Dark Remains is a prequel to McIlvanney’s first “Tartan noir” novel, 1977’s Laidlaw, but was left unfinished when the working-class-born wordsmith died in 2015. Fellow Scot Rankin, whose award-winning John Rebus detective series was inspired by McIlvanney’s work, completed the story—and in wholly satisfying fashion. The year is 1972, and Laidlaw—never a team player, yet good at his job—is the “new boy” in the city’s Crime Squad. He’s tasked with solving the alleyway slaying of a criminal lawyer who had enjoyed the protection of a local mob boss. Eschewing routine investigative procedures, Laidlaw sharp-elbows his way directly into the thick of Glasgow’s underworld trenches to discern who benefits most from the victim’s passing. More even-tempered Detective Sergeant Bob Lilley tags along for the ride, supplying readers—and perhaps Rankin before us—with fresh eyes on Laidlaw’s professional dedication, moldering home life, and endangered moral universe. “Maybe he’s a streetsman,” Lilley muses of his new partner, “the way Davy Crockett was a woodsman. Davy could read all the signs in the wild, he’d lived there so long.” Laidlaw’s path amid the deceptive leads and broken figures in The Dark Remains may be different, slightly less poetic than how McIlvanney would’ve engineered things, but it’s hardly less rewarding.

• The Good Turn, by by Dervla McTiernan (Blackstone):

Crime fictionists who can consistently deliver sinuous, atmospheric yarns boasting clever resolutions are never to be discounted. Which explains why I keep reading works by Irish-born Australian writer Dervla McTiernan. In this third novel starring Galway, Ireland, police detective Cormac Reilly (introduced in 2018’s The Ruin), her protagonist—under strain in his personal relationship, and long resented by imperious superiors and lesser colleagues alike—is suspended from duty after the search for an abducted girl goes appallingly tits-up. Much of the blame for said fiasco, however, falls on an ambitious member of Reilly’s team, Peter Fisher, who—hoping to avoid prosecution—agrees to be exiled to a remote coastal hamlet where his estranged, overbearing father serves as top cop, and where “the main occupation of every inhabitant aged forty and older was minding each other’s business.” While a restive Fisher raises uncomfortable questions regarding the supposedly uncomplicated murder of two local farmers, Reilly is drawn into a corruption probe targeting the Galway constabulary. With multiple plot lines, intricately constructed; investigative roadblocks, captivating characters, and the heady promise of imminent vindication; and only a couple of suspect coincidences, The Good Turn is something of a master class in developing modern police procedurals.

Finally, one work from the non-fiction stacks …

• The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, by Dean Jobb (Algonquin):

It was my interest in Jack the Ripper that introduced me years ago to Thomas Neill Cream, a Glasgow-born, Montreal-educated doctor turned serial poisoner. Newspapers reported that as the trap was sprung at Cream’s 1892 hanging, he cried, “I am Jack…” A death-drop confession? Journalist Jobb thinks not, for as he notes in this assiduously researched, altogether consuming chronicle, at the time of the Ripper slayings in 1888, Cream was behind bars in Illinois for having offed his putative mistress’ husband​. That was still early in an unsavory career that found Cream preying primarily on women, both those he sought as lovers and those he thought unworthy of mercy (i.e., prostitutes). A foppish, debauched, and self-destructively arrogant sociopath, Cream hid behind his standing as a physician and left behind a string of up to 10 victims—most of them done in painfully with strychnine—that stretched from Canada to Chicago to England. That he got away with his predations for so long, and even continued taking lives in London after his U.S. incarceration for murder, can be largely attributed to what was then a notorious lack of coordination between police departments and official distrust of female witnesses’ statements. This is the finest study of Victorian-era misdeeds and social dysfunction since Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five (2019).

Other 2021 Favorites: Silverview, by John le Carré (Viking); The House on Vesper Sands, by Paraic O’Donnell (Tin House); Widowland, by C.J. Carey (Quercus); Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron); How to Find Your Way in the Dark, by Derek B. Miller (Mariner); and The Shadows of Men, by Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus).

READ MORE: “Arresting Crime Fiction of 2021,” by J. Kingston Pierce (January Magazine).

Another Year in the Books

After a full week spent highlighting the new-in-2021 crime-fiction works that Rap Sheet contributors most relished reading this last year, we will conclude that series later this morning. If you missed any of our seven picks posts, you can link directly to them here:

1. Steven Nester’s Favorites
2. Ali Karim’s Favorites
3. Fraser Massey’s Favorites
4. Jim Thomsen’s Favorites
5. Kevin Burton Smith’s Favorites
6. Jim Napier’s Favorites
7. J. Kingston Pierce’s Favorites (still to come)

Thanks again for reading, and we hope you’ve discovered in our lists at least a few releases that weren’t previously on your radar.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part VI: Jim Napier

Jim Napier is a crime-fiction critic based in Canada. Since 2005, more than 600 of his reviews and interviews have appeared in newspapers and on various crime-fiction and literary Web sites, including on his own award-winning review site, Deadly Diversions. Legacy, the first entry in his Colin McDermott mystery series, was published in 2017; a sequel, Ridley’s War, came out last year from FriesenPress.

• Find You First, by Linwood Barclay (Morrow):

Forty-four-year-old Miles Cookson has had a life-changing day. Told by his doctor that he has a non-treatable and fatal genetic disease, he is advised to use part of the time he has left to put his affairs in order. Miles resolves to do just that, and before long he receives some equally dramatic news: sperm donations he made in his youth have resulted in nine offspring. Miles has done well in life. A tech-savvy billionaire, he decides to track down his children and leave them a sizable portion of his wealth. As he begins to do so, though, he learns that several of them are either dead or disappearing. It seems someone else is trying to track down those same people … but for a very different purpose. For the ill-fated benefactor, what ensues is a race against time. Think Bill Gates meets Jeffrey Epstein. In Find You First, author Linwood Barclay has fashioned an original and gripping tale of good versus evil. But it is not a classic story in which readers can expect that in the end, good will prevail. For evil, in this case, has the face of a wildly affluent sociopath with virtually unlimited means at his disposal—and no shortage of enablers to do his bidding. Find You First is a dark and compelling story, exquisitely told, and frighteningly apropos for our twisted times.

• Five Decembers, by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime):

Honolulu, Hawaii, December 1941: Police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to solve a gruesome double homicide on the eve of the United States’ long-awaited entry into World War II. A young man has been found hanging upside-down in a remote dairy shed, naked, his body split open by a knife, and dead for a day or more. After reporting his find by phone, McGrady returns to the shed to find a gunman lying in wait. A firefight ensues, and when the dust has cleared McGrady is alive; the other man isn’t. Entering the shed, the detective investigates the murder scene more closely. A nearby cot attracts his attention, and he discovers underneath some clothing the body of a second victim, a young Asian woman, bound with her throat slit. Back in Honolulu, the male is identified as Henry K. Willard, the nephew of Admiral Kimmel, the ranking naval officer at Pearl Harbor. He’d been in Honolulu preparing to study at the university there. Kimmel is anxious to solve his nephew’s death, and McGrady is given a free hand to go wherever the evidence leads him. Ultimately, McGrady will follow the trail across the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong and on to the Empire of Japan, where the detective finds himself caught up in the global conflict and struggling to survive. After the war ends, the dogged cop returns to finish his investigation, ultimately tying up some very personal loose ends in Japan. An evocative hard-boiled tale that is part Dashiell Hammett, part James Michener, Five Decembers is a sweeping saga of love, hate, innocence, and evil, consummately told.

• Diamond and the Eye, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime):

In Bath, England, Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond focuses on a break-in at a local antiques shop. The owner, one Septimus Hubbard, has gone missing, and a week later his daughter, Ruby, is growing increasingly concerned. Diamond is bemused to find that Ruby has hired a private invesrigator to help locate her father. And not just any private detective, but an especially brash—and to Diamond’s mind, offensive—gumshoe in the classic American mold. His name is Johnny Getz. The motto on his business card reads “Getz Results.” Not the sort of thing to impress the stolid and methodical Diamond. Following the break-in, the shop was taped off by police. A week later, Getz, Ruby, and Diamond enter it to determine whether there is any clue to Septimus Hubbard’s disappearance. Before long they discover a body concealed in an Egyptian coffin and overlooked in the earlier (and cursory) search of the premises. However, the body is not that of the vanished shop-owner. To his chagrin, Diamond soon finds himself saddled not only with the insufferable P.I., but also with Lady Bede, a local member of the nobility who also sits on the police ethics committee. It grows increasingly unclear as to whether Lady Bede, a woman with an overactive libido, is interested primarily in the conduct of this case or in the widowed Diamond himself. In Diamond and the Eye, prolific British fictionist Peter Lovesey has great fun juxtaposing the very different styles of Diamond and his shamus nemesis, assigning them alternating chapters marked by dissimilar narrative voices, and creating a comic send-up of the private-eye genre. Readers will enjoy the duel between the brash P.I. and his more prosaic alter ego, Detective Superintendent Diamond, as well as a cracking plot that has its own version of the much-sought-after Maltese Falcon.

• Slough House, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime):

Mick Herron occupies a unique niche among spy thriller writers: he eschews the sensationalistic (and formulaic) chronicles of authors such as Ian Fleming in favor of the darker and more prosaic portrayals of the craft offered by writers on the order of the late John le Carré. But while le Carré’s writing is spare and largely humorless, Herron’s is packed with an uncompromisingly dark humor more characteristic of Irish writers: barbed and with a cynical message firmly embedded in the narrative. In this outing the denizens of Slough House, a marginalized purgatory to which apparently underperforming spooks are relegated, find themselves under attack— not metaphorically, but literally. Someone seems to have them in his or her crosshairs. Soon it emerges that this is payback for the killing of two Russian agents on their own soil, itself retaliation for the (real-life) effort to kill a dissident Russian and his daughter on British soil, using a highly toxic nerve agent known to be the product of Russian research. The attack had failed, but it left the targets fighting for their lives. The rules of spycraft are amorphous at the best of times, but one of them is fixed in stone: one nation doesn’t kill another nation’s spooks on their home ground. So when Russian agents start dying, the Russkis seek to even the score, and events threaten to spiral out of hand. The latest in a growing series of Herron novels currently being adapted for television, Slough House casts a caustic (and dare I say brilliant?) light on the dark world of spies.

• Seven Down, by David Whitton
(Rare Machines):

Canadian crime writer David Whitton draws on several literary efforts (not least Dorothy Sayers’ The Documents in the Case) to create his debut novel, Seven Down, and comes up with an original tale lampooning the world of spies and black ops. The setting is the aftermath of a clandestine operation gone awry. Decades earlier, seven sleeper agents had been inserted into the ranks of the employees at a single upscale hotel in downtown Toronto, Ontario. None of them are aware of the identity of the others, or even that they exist. Their brief is to remain in place and go about their normal duties until such time as they are activated by their controls with a special phrase. Just so is Operation Fear and Trembling conceived. Yet as any parent knows, there is a world of difference between the most elegant of plans and everyday reality. In the wake of what becomes an unmitigated disaster, a senior analyst is assigned to discover just what went wrong with the operation, and how. He reviews the written debriefings of each of the clandestine agents; this slender novel consists entirely of those debriefings, together with the analyst’s own observations. Little by little the curtain is drawn aside, and the reader is given snippets of information, which only confirm Murphy’s Law: what can go wrong will go wrong. Thus, Seven Down thumbs its nose at the spy trade, and at novels which attempt to take it seriously. It’s a commentary on the tendency of Those in Power to assume that grandiose plans can be made which will change the course of history. A highly amusing and a much-needed antidote to the writings of too many spy novelists.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part V: Kevin Burton Smith

Kevin Burton Smith is the Montreal-born founder and editor of that essential resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site, as well as the Web Monkey for The Private Eye Writers of America and a contributing editor of Mystery Scene. He’s currently hiding out in Southern California’s High Desert region, where he’s still working on a non-fiction book about married detective couples with his wife, mystery author D.L. Browne (aka Diana Killian and Josh Lanyon), and waiting for the end of the world.

• A Man Named Doll, by Jonathan Ames (Mulholland):

I can’t remember the last time a private-eye debut hit me so hard, but Jonathan (Bored to Death, The Alcoholic) Ames delivers a bare-knuckled KO with this one. Gone are the arch, semi-autobiographical works of his past. Instead, he delivers here something more directly aimed at pleasing fans who share his obvious love for old pulp fiction and classic black-and-white detective films, topping it with his own cock-eyed, thoroughly postmodern mojo, all making for a bracing blend of old and new. Ex-U.S. Navy and ex-LAPD, Happy Doll (blame his dad for that boy-named-Sue moniker) is low-hanging fruit on the P.I. tree, reduced to working security at the Thai Miracle Spa massage parlor. He tries not to drink too much, watches his weight, and keeps his appointments with his therapist, but his get-up-and-go has got-up-and-gone. He can’t even drum up enough courage to ask out local bartender Monica, a woman he clearly adores. Happy’s saving grace is that he’s a stand-up guy—decent, conscientious, and loyal to his friends, and he clearly loves his feisty little mutt, George, with whom he lives in a bungalow just under the Hollywood sign, a gift from a grateful client—back when he had clients. Then a bad night at the Thai leaves him with a dead customer and a broken face, and the next day an old pal shows up at his door, just in time to bleed out from a gunshot wound. Soon the bodies are piling up, and Happy, sporting more bandages than Jake Gittes and popping painkillers like they were going out of style, sets out to “do something” about his murdered friend. It’s all safely familiar middle-of-the-road hard-boiled shtick, until about two-thirds in, when Ames heads for the ditch, and goes all Grand Guignol on us. Horrid, macabre things ensue that shouldn’t happen to a dog. Happy may work at a tug-and-rub joint, but there’s no happy ending here—just a promising one, which bodes well for Ames’ sequel, The Wheel of Doll, due out next April.

• An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, by Helene Tursten (Soho Crime):

A charming little stocking stuffer of a read, all gussied up with seasonal and floral graphic embellishments that just reek of innocence, this tiny hardcover—a sequel to 2018’s equally pint-sized An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good—is just as delightful as its predecessor: a crafty blend of Miss Marple sweetness and Scandinavian noir heated up to pure blackness. Once again, it follows the charming but homicidal adventures of cranky elderly Maud, a retired schoolteacher from Gothenburg, Sweden, who’s pushing 90 and has absolutely no qualms about bumping off anyone who gets in her way. This time out, she’s in the mood for a little reminiscing, as she journeys to Africa on a long-anticipated holiday—while conveniently avoiding some possibly unwelcome questioning from the police back home (including Tursten’s series character, Inspector Irene Huss), who would like to discuss a dead body or two discovered in Maud’s apartment building. Over the course of six interlocking stories, Maud looks back on a life tinged with tragedy, disappointment, and homicide, even as she and her fellow travelers sightsee across Africa, going on safari and exploring local hot spots. The dance between the seemingly benign, amiable Maud and her inner heart of pure, evil darkness makes this an entertaining read for anyone who doesn’t mind a little mirth with their murder. It should appeal to any mystery reader with a sense of humor who’s not afraid to read over boundaries. The book also serves as a handy-dandy how-to guide—for those so inclined—to homicide, with a tantalizing list of ways to set the world right (i.e., the way you want it), and it concludes with a couple of recipes for ginger snaps—divided, presumably for the holidays, into both “Naughty” and “Nice” versions.

• Friend of the Devil, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image Comics):

The second in a series of hardcover graphic novels by the award-winning team of writer Brubaker and artist Phillips is such a labor of love, it’s almost embarrassing. Like, get a room already, guys. But that being said, the dynamic duo’s heartfelt affection for men’s adventure novels, 1970s TV private detectives, film noir, and hard-boiled crime fiction in general is something I can get behind. It’s the 1980s in Los Angeles, and former ’60s radical/undercover FBI agent turned surfer dude/troubleshooter (or is that troublemaker?) Ethan Reckless is on the prowl, going down mean streets Raymond Chandler could never have imagined: streets teeming with sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll (“for some reason, there always had to be skinheads”), and more than a dollop of male wish fulfillment. I mean, Ethan works out of an old abandoned movie theater; his assistant, Anna, is a mouthy but sorta cute teenage DJ/punkette; and he tools around town in a way cool Dodge van from the ’70s. Sure, there’s plenty of action here—but even better is that Reckless isn’t just some bare-chested meathead whose knuckles barely clear the ground. He’s fully aware of the world around him, and his part in it. Sure, he may half-jokingly dismiss himself as a “maudlin old stoner,” and he may occasionally retreat into the comfort of screening old TV shows, but he knows it’s only temporary; that out there in the real world things don’t always end well. Like his search for a woman last spotted in the background of an old, cheesy B-movie, on behalf of her sister. The hunt soon wanders into the weeds, as Ethan encounters war criminals, Hollywood execs run amok, and a Satanic cult leader, and there’s more than enough he-man action along the way to keep things moving until the bittersweet, noirish ending. Cheesy? Over the top? Maybe. Do I want more? YES.

• Billy Summers, by Stephen King (Scribner):

The master storyteller finally delivers a straight up, woo-woo-free, hard-boiled crime story, and it’s a corker—a pulpy, ripping yarn that reads like a 1950 Fawcett Gold Medal paperback, cranked up to 11 and retooled for the faithful. Former army sniper Billy Summers is a quiet, blandly affable guy who likes to read. He’s also a contract killer for the Mob. But he only kills bad people. That shaky justification, however, is wearing thin—especially since his clients aren’t exactly angels themselves. He wants out, but reluctantly agrees to take on one last, lucrative job. Anyone familiar with crime fiction, of course, knows what’s coming, but King runs with it, working the tropes like Keith Richards plays guitar, adding crunch and heft and swing to a rhythm that will not be denied, adding his own special sauce. Billy figures there’s something hinky about the gig, but it’s too tempting to turn down, so he puts on his “dumb face,” and accepts. Posing as a writer, he heads to an unnamed city in the American South, rents a downtown office overlooking the local courthouse, and waits patiently, with his high-powered rifle, for a certain witness to arrive to testify. In the meantime, he goes all Joe Citizen, renting a home in the ’burbs, meeting the neighbors, and fitting in … perhaps a little too well. Is he being set up? What’s with his landlord? Will the grass on the lawn of his rented house ever grow? Of course, King can’t quite help scratching one of his favorite itches: writing itself. To kill time, Billy begins jotting down the (slightly fictionalized) story of his life, but that story-within-a-story soon becomes just as compelling—especially when everything goes pear-shaped and Billy and a girl (Hey! There’s always a girl) have to go on the run. From the really bad guys. OK, there is a vague, possibly supernatural bone slyly tossed in for King’s veteran fans; but for everyone else, this book’s just a white-knuckled ride—and an unabashed ode to the redemptive and transformative power storytelling can offer. Which is a whole other kind of woo-woo.

• Every City Is Every Other City, by John McFetridge (ECW Press):

The ever-growing regionalism of the mystery genre (Boston! Botswana! Baffin Island!), particularly in the post-Parker/Leonard era, seems to know no bounds—a notion McFetridge riffs on constantly in his latest novel, wherein Toronto, Ontario, the Lon Chaney of cities, gets to play a multitude of other burgs, faking it for (mostly American) movies and television. Sometimes it even gets to play itself. But it’s all in a day’s work for Gord Stewart (with a moniker like that, what else could he be but Canadian?), a sometime location scout for productions in the Toronto area whose longtime job is finding local settings that can be passed off as other places entirely. He boasts that he’s been doing it “since before Google Maps was born,” but in this first entry in a promised new series, he supplements his income with a little private-eye work for OBC, a local security company run by ex-cops. At loose ends, single and 40-something, Gord’s crawled back to the endless suburbs of Toronto from which he sprung to care for his widowed, aging dad. But there isn’t much going on, and so he agrees to look for a fellow crew member's missing uncle, last seen walking into the Northern Ontario bush, somewhere up near Sudbury. He’s also undertaken, warily, a few hours of shadowing a woman on behalf of OBC who may—or may not—have been raped by a big-shot client of theirs. Aiding and abetting him in these investigations—and sometimes simply being a pain in the ass—is Gord’s on-and-off girlfriend, would-be comedian Ethel Mack, who brings the sass, playing Nora to his Nick. But it’s not all slap-and-tickle—there’s some serious grit in here among the wit. Clever, compassionate, and smart, John McFetridge deserves a bigger audience. Maybe this novel (his first since 2016’s One or the Other) will finally win him one.

Other 2021 Favorites: Blood Grove, by Walter Mosley (Mulholland); Clark and Division, by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Crime); Hell and Gone, by Sam Wiebe (Harbour); Dolphin Junction, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime); So Far and Good, by John Straley (Soho Crime); Sleep Well, My Lady, by Kwei Quartey (Soho Crime).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part IV: Jim Thomsen

Jim Thomsen is a writer, editor, and book reviewer based in the small town of Kingston, Washington. His work has appeared in Mystery Tribune, Pulp Modern, Switchblade, Shotgun Honey, and West Coast Crime Wave, among other outlets.

My list of top crime-fiction novels of 2021 probably says a lot more about me than about the genre, so I’ll explain a little.

One, I’ve grown tired of the brand-first strictures of series storytelling, so I almost entirely skipped those this year; I just can’t find satisfaction in any story in which commercial concerns preclude what and where the characters themselves may want to go in a story.

Two, even my choice in standalones says something about that restlessness: I tend to look for novels with crime at their center, but “crime novels” seems too reductive a term. The novels I tend to be drawn to these days take on structural approaches and thematic weight far beyond who did what or what will happen when everything comes to light. That doesn’t mean they’re War and Peace, but only that they try new things in pleasurably accessible ways.

And three, I’ve decided to step away from the crime-fiction “community.” I like crime fiction and social media, because I like to share what I read and my observations about it, but in the past I tended to be concerned with making friends and fitting in, like the new kid in seventh grade. Now I’ve stopped trying to sit at the Twitter Cool Kids Lunch Table and instead just be me: a guy who reads a lot of stories about crime, regardless of who wrote them or published them or promoted them or represented them, and loves to pass along what he thinks about them.

To that end, here we go ...

• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino (Harper):

Like it or hate it, one thing about this novel spun off from Tarantino’s own 2019 film about 1969 comes across clearly: the author had a hell of a good time writing and doing whatever the hell he wanted to with a story and a universe he created. And that exuberance, in every passage on every page, is infectious and irresistible. Partly because it follows no rules other than the ones it makes up for itself, from the compass of a creator incapable of going wrong.

• How to Find Your Way in the Dark, by Derek B. Miller (Mariner):

Much of what I said about Tarantino’s novel can be also applied to Miller’s latest. This prequel of sorts to his indie-bookstore sensation Norwegian by Night (2013) finds its elderly hero, Sheldon Horowitz, as a preteen, just as World War II is breaking out. Sheldon tries to stay focused here on avenging his father’s death, while coming to grips with his Jewish, American, and male identities. By turns wry, witty, and a wallow in darkness, this story grabs you by the suspenders and never lets go.

• The Night Always Comes, by Willy Vlautin (Harper):

Up there with gender and race, one of the great thematic baselines for great crime fiction comes in stories of soulless, grinding gentrification—and those who lose what they’ve long had as a result. The great Vlautin explores this theme in Portland, Oregon, a city beset by homeless encampments on seemingly every corner, as a young woman with a disabled brother and mother who wants out, races over a day and a half around the city in an often bloody effort to hang onto her rundown house by any means possible.

• Getaway, by Zoje Stage (Mulholland):

This is a pitch-perfect example of a conventionally structured isolation thriller that takes the reader through an unbearably tense ordeal and never lets up on the throttle, while thoughtfully exploring power dynamics and conflicts between men and women—and women and women. Getaway is proof that function need never sacrifice anything to form to entertain and enlighten in equal measure.

• Loser Baby, by Jason Bovberg (Dark Highway Press):

One of the current storylines in the crime-fiction community is about who has the right to tell whose stories, and how authentically white males can tell stories of people other than white males. One prominent female author has said that women write men better than men write women, because men tend to default to the “male gaze” of women. I like to think male authors have taken that on as a challenge and not a demand to go sit in the corner, and Bovberg has more than met this challenge with his prickly, uncomfortable look at a couple of days in the life of a Southern California woman on the margins—and the terrible choices she makes, and the worse ones she makes to get out of trouble. Not a hint of male gaze here.

Other 2021 Favorites: Velvet Was the Night, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey); Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday); Five Decembers, by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime); Undone Valley, by William R. Soldan (Cowboy Jamboree Press); and The Low Desert, by Tod Goldberg (Counterpoint).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part III: Fraser Massey

Fraser Massey is a journalist in London, England. A former columnist for Radio Times, Now, and Real People, he is also a regular contributor to The Times. An early draft of his not-yet-published neo-noir thriller, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted in the New Voices category at the inaugural Capital Crime Festival Awards in 2019.

• Billy Summers, by Stephen King (Scribner):

They say the late Mickey Spillane once declared: “Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.” It’s easy to imagine Stephen King tapping out Billy Summers and thinking: “I’ll show you a middle, Spillane, that people’ll wanna read.” The Billy Summers of the title is a hit man hoping to draw one final big payday before getting out of the game. He has his tender, sympathetic side—but his soul was blackened as a child by witnessing his little sister battered to death. (If you were casting this as a movie, with a former big-screen Stephen King protagonist as Billy, you’d pick Jack Nicholson rather than Tom Hanks.) King teases his readers by having Billy recognize that things always go wrong in these sorts of one-last-job stories. When that inevitability happens is when we reach the plot’s mid-point. Billy is hiding from a crime boss, who’s decided to kill him rather than pay up, when he spots a gang-rape victim being dumped in the street. The pace of this novel changes dramatically in an interlude during which Billy rescues the girl, Alice, and then nurses her back to health before wreaking a particularly apposite revenge on her attackers in an eye-watering scene that features a kitchen food mixer. After that, it’s back to the main plot, with Alice and Billy now working together. Stephen King’s 74 years old now. This spectacular return to form will, one hopes, banish any ideas the author might have of getting out of the game himself. After all, as Billy could tell him, retirement plans rarely go well.

• Lightseekers, by Femi Kayode (Mulholland):

​Investigative psychologist Dr. Philip Taiwo, the hero of Femi Kayode’s breathtaking debut thriller, Lightseekers, is an engagingly complex man: scuttling away to look into three murders on a remote Nigerian university campus, rather than stay home and confront his wife with his suspicions that she’s having an affair. I know little of Nigerian men. Or women. Perhaps he’s not atypical. Maybe running away to avoid difficult conversations with their spouses is something all West African husbands do. All I’m saying is that Mrs. Taiwo must be some formidable lady, if her husband would face a bunch of campus killers before he’d face her. Particularly these campus killers, who are nothing like the cerebral, genteel villains of Colin Dexter’s town-and-gown Inspector Morse mysteries. The terrifying figures in Lightseekers rank among the most vicious crime-fiction murderers of this, or any, year. There’s a whole mob of them, too, and they strip, beat, stone, and triumphantly parade their undergraduate victims through the streets before draping their necks with car tires doused in petrol, which they then set alight. In the same way that Kayode doesn’t flinch from describing these “necklacings” in gruesome detail, Dr. Taiwo—no matter how timid he is on the home front—fearlessly investigates the murders, despite the risk of provoking a similar fate for himself. Kayode’s the latest exponent of Nigerian noir to break through in the wake of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s 2018 worldwide hit, My Sister, the Serial Killer. Braithwaite’s been quick to champion him, describing Lightseekers as “ripe with all the twists and turns you could hope for.” She’s not wrong.

• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino (Harper):

It takes only one whip-smart exchange of culturally referenced dialogue in filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s darkly comic debut novel, set amid the 1960s Manson family killing spree, to gladden the heart that he’s now writing novels, too. It comes when Cliff, an old-school movie stuntman, picks up a teenage hippie hitchhiker, Pussycat. After first mocking him for buying a Tom Jones album on 8-track cartridge, the girl plays it anyway—shimmying in her car seat, while removing her cut-off Levi’s and “the pink panties with little cherries printed on them” that she’s wearing underneath. Like a cross between a UN peacekeeper and a professor of modern literature, only with more eye-catching underwear, she then explains to an amused Cliff how their incompatible musical tastes just don’t matter:

“Mark Twain said, ‘If people didn’t have different opinions, there’d be no such thing as horse races.’”

He asks, “Is that what Mark Twain said?”

She shrugs. “Somethin’ like that.”

By that point in the story I was too engaged in the plot to stop and check whether Pussycat had made up the quote. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is based on Tarantino’s own 2019 film of the same name, which, like the best of his movies, had a retro feel. The book does as well, though Tarantino’s prose style echoes a wholly different era. It unexpectedly draws from Douglas Coupland’s early ’90s Generation X mode of anecdote-laden storytelling, which makes it refreshingly different from any other crime writing today. Oh, and that Mark Twain quote? Turns out Pussycat was pretty much right. It comes from Pudd’nhead Wilson.

• Slough House, by Mick Herron
(Soho Crime):

Gleefully looking forward to new books featuring the latest exploits of favorite characters is like writing to Santa and expecting to wake on Christmas morning to a stocking full of goodies at the foot of one’s bed. When you’re a grown-up, you shouldn’t still be doing it—not least because you’re setting yourself up for potential disappointment. However, during yet another COVID-19-blighted year, fictional figures became the only old friends we could legally have in the house under the strictest lockdown conditions. Not that the protagonists of the three novels I most looked forward to reading this year were the sort that any sane person would willingly invite across their threshold. All of them—Elliot Rook, the devious and unprincipled lawyer created by Gary Bell; the grumpy dinosaur of a BBC hack, William Carver, who was brought to life by Peter Hanington; and above all, Mick Herron’s foul-mouthed and even more foul-smelling spy boss Jackson Lamb—are monsters. But monsters who light up the pages of the stories they grace. Thankfully, neither Bell’s Post Mortem nor Hanington’s A Cursed Place disappointed. And Herron’s Slough House (the seventh novel in this series) is possibly the best outing yet for Lamb. Herron’s main character may be larger than life, but his plots are grounded in reality. The Britain he portrays is ruled by a prime minister mercilessly described as “a cross between a game-show host and a cartoon yeti,” and Russian agents are running amok in it, believing they can commit murder at will with impunity. Lamb’s all we have to save us.

• Under Color of Law, by Aaron Philip Clark (Thomas & Mercer):

You can pick up bad habits from reading crime novels. Theft, though, shouldn’t be one of them. I want to describe Aaron Philip Clark’s latest as a “ripped-from-the-headlines police procedural.” But I can’t, without stealing from Lesa Holstine, who got there first by using the phrase in an incisive review for the esteemed U.S. publication Library Journal. Although the incident that kicks off Clark’s plot—the racially motivated police killing of a suspect for “resisting arrest”—is set in Los Angeles in 2010, it has obvious parallels with last year’s real-life murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked the global Black Lives Matter protests. Clark’s protagonist, the unimaginatively nicknamed “Finn” Finnegan, is a Black LAPD recruit fast-tracked to detective grade as a reward for not intervening, and later keeping his mouth shut, when two colleagues brutalize and kill a suspect—one with the same skin color as Finn—because he swore at them after they asked him to give his name. Years later, Finnegan is investigating the death of another Black victim, possibly also killed by racist police officers. This time he’s determined to seek justice for the deceased, no matter what it costs. Under Color of Law is a shocking indictment of racism and corruption in a big-city police force. But that doesn’t mean it’s preeningly self-righteous. Or preachy. Thinking that would be doing a massive injustice to an adrenaline-fueled noir thriller that grips you like a rabid wolverine from the opening page and never lets go.

Other 2021 Favorites: Northern Spy, by Flynn Berry (Viking); Five Decembers, by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime); 1979, by Val McDermid (Atlantic Monthly Press); True Crime Story, by Joseph Knox (Sourcebooks Landmark); and Never Saw Me Coming, by Vera Kurian (Park Row).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part II: Ali Karim

Ali Karim is The Rap Sheet’s longtime British correspondent, a contributing editor of January Magazine, and the assistant editor of Shots. In addition, he writes for Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, Crimespree Magazine, and Mystery Readers International.

• The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm (Pushkin Press):

Written in a fury over just four weeks, this novel—my favorite crime thriller of 2021—helped Ulrich Boschwitz, then a 23-year-old German Jew living in England, cope with the horrors of Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom that exposed the Nazi Party’s malicious plans for European Jews. When first published in the United States in 1939 (under the title The Man Who Took Trains), and the next year in Britain (as The Fugitive), it provoked scant notice. The author himself died in 1942, after being arrested in England as an “enemy alien” and interned on the Isle of Man, then later in Australia. Not until 2016 was the original typescript of The Passenger rediscovered in a German archive, and it was subsequently revised per instructions Boschwitz had left behind.

This gripping yarn should act as a warning, a message from the past to all of us living in the present. Its narrative details the various journeys undertaken by successful German-Jewish (but Aryan-looking) businessman Otto Silbermann after his Berlin home is ransacked as a consequence of the ’38 pogrom. Trying to evade Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists, who have embedded themselves throughout all the societal structures of Germany, Silbermann tries but fails to reach Belgium; afterward, he becomes a man on the run, hopping one train after the other, crisscrossing the Fatherland with survival his only goal, and paranoia his sole companion. The people Silbermann meets and the situations he must confront, make this a tense, fascinating, and occasionally claustrophobic chase thriller, one that provokes deep contemplation. It’s said that “paranoia is a heightened sense of awareness,” and for Silbermann it is also a descent into the darkest edges of a personal hell—a test of his mental and physical endurance.

Boschwitz’s observations of the Nazis and the lead-up to the Second World War will strike familiar chords with readers who are cognizant of today’s rise of anti-Semitism and those concerned for democracy’s resilience in the face of authoritarian campaigns. My memory of reading this novel will lay in my mind like the shards of glass that fell throughout Germany during Kristallnacht.

• Fragile, by Sarah Hilary (Macmillan UK):

Two years ago, when I reviewed Never Be Broken, Sarah Hilary’s sixth novel, I opined in Shots that the author “has established herself as penning some of the most thought-provoking police procedurals currently in print, and she always presents the reader with a junction at the close of each book. The fork in the road is not just for the reader, it’s also written for the writer as she leaves behind a challenge: How do you ‘top’ this one?” Incredibly, Hilary does indeed top her previous work with Fragile. How? By penning a standalone, parking her award-winning Marnie Rome police-procedural series, and entering the shadows of the Gothic.

Nell Ballard spent a good portion of her childhood in foster care, under watchful and frequently uncaring eyes. Then she ran away, hungry for love and security, and carting a secret she has no wish to share. She finds employment as a housekeeper at Starling Villas, the much-neglected London residence of Dr. Robin Wilder, an inscrutable, stoic, and seemingly very angry man. And so this situation may not provide Nell with the safe refuge she ostensibly craves. There’s palpable tension in that ominous home (if it reminds you of Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley, that’s probably not mere coincidence), and it seems Wilder—a middle-aged gent contained within a pen of self-inflicted rules—has his own secrets worth safeguarding. Nell is soon run ragged by all of her responsibilities, and the sudden appearance of Wilder’s calculating wife doesn’t make things any easier. But is there more to Nell washing up at Starling Villas than we understand?

I don’t wish to detail Fragile’s plot any further, because the story is best enjoyed without benefit of major clues regarding the twisted, treacherous path down which Hilary will lead the reader. The surety of this writer’s ability to engage your mind plays as a counterpoint to the slipperiness of the story she unfolds. Although contemporary, the novel’s atmosphere seems very much of another era, part-imagined and part-nightmare, unsettling yet captivating. It’s set in London, but trails threads to Wales. It’s a lush blend of rejection, redemption, horror, and the understanding of childhood frights and how those fears can reappear in adulthood. It’s creepy as hell—but with heart.

• The Devil’s Advocate, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion UK):

It takes rare literary skill to produce a courtroom drama that is as compelling and riveting as a car chase, yet remains intellectually stimulating. This sixth outing for New York City-based con man-turned-attorney Eddie Flynn (following 2020’s Fifty-Fifty) should come with a warning, because it will surely deprive the reader of a night’s sleep, such is the compelling nature of its narrative.

Flynn and his crack legal team depart Gotham, bound for America’s Deep South—(fictitious) Buckstown, Alabama, to be specific. Flynn’s task there is to defend a 19-year-old Black man, Andy Dubois, who’s accused of brutally murdering his co-worker, a popular young white woman named Skylar Edwards. Dubois’ original advocate has vanished, and Flynn’s efforts to see and speak with his new client are repeatedly obstructed. The local sheriff’s department is riddled with bigotry and corruption, and the district attorney, one Randall Korn, revels sadistically in the fact that he’s sent more prisoners to their deaths (not all of whom were guilty) than anyone else in the United States. He isn’t about to have that record tarnished. And there seems little chance of such a thing happening, anyway: Despite the thin evidence against Dubois (he was simply the last person to see Edwards alive), the whole town is convinced he committed the dastardly deed, and the judge is already in Korn’s pocket. The likelihood of the accused receiving a fair trial is almost nonexistent. Flynn will have to pull out every trick he has to persuade (or con) a jury into declaring Dubois innocent. In the meantime, it becomes clear that Edwards’ slaying was merely the start of a deadly series; the real killer remains on the loose, and Flynn is a likely near-future target.

There’s never any doubt of Dubois’ innocence; Flynn doesn’t defend people he’s convinced are culpable. The drama here is found, instead, in watching Cavanagh’s protagonist turn inevitable defeat into ultimate success—and knock the villainous, arrogant Korn off his high horse in the process. There’s the whiff of High Noon about this tightly plotted tale, with shadows of Bad Day at Black Rock thrown in. It’s also a story charged with relevance, reminding readers of America’s halting reckoning with its persistent prejudices. Cavanagh’s novel may not require a bookmark, but you might invest in leather gloves to prevent the paper cuts that come from turning its pages too quickly.

• Endings, by Linda L. Richards (Oceanview):

The prolific Ms. Richards (Death Was in the Blood, The Indigo Factor) has—once again—reinvented herself and her writing, this time taking readers into a dark and very troubling world. Her protagonist, or antagonist (Richards leaves that distinction to each person’s value system) is likewise in the processes of remaking herself.

Written in an urgent first-person, present-tense style, Richards’ latest novel leaves the name of its lead character unrevealed. However, we do know a bit of her back story: She was once a wife and the proud mother of a 9-year-old son, at least until that boy perished in a house fire she’d caused by leaving an iron plugged in and running. Her life thus torn apart, the narrator is confronted by choices, by moral dilemmas as she gathers up the flotsam and jetsam of her past, and reassembles everything into a new shape … or is it a shadow?

Five years after her child’s demise, this formerly “nice person” has taken on a whole new identity—as a killer for hire. Other “nice” folks now employ her to cleanly remove troublesome people from their lives. As it turns out, she’s pretty good at this assassination business, staying several steps ahead of the law, never getting too involved. But then one day she learns of a serial slayer named William Atwater, who preys on children and has brought fear to California’s (fictional) San Pasado County. Atwater is thought to be responsible for the recent disappearance of a 6-year-old girl. The damaged narrator comes to the realization that her much-honed skills as a killer might be useful in tracking down someone else with blood on his hands. It’s the first time she’s gone in deadly pursuit of somebody without a paycheck waiting at the end, and she’s not exactly clear on whether its revenge or salvation she’s after.

Although Endings has been marketed as a “thriller,” it is far superior to what used to be called a “penny dreadful.” It’s a thought-provoking parable of sorts, an exploration of the costs of re-invention that asks whether the ends of an act ever really justify the means. Like Patricia Highsmith and Thomas Harris before her, Richards explores linkages between the good and the bad that are resident in the human condition. Allowing for the gender switch, I was reminded of a line from the TV series True Detective: “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.” Because when the door is closed, we have endings—plural, not singular.

A sequel to Endings, titled Exit Strategy, is due out in May 2022.

• Nerve Attack, by S. Lee Manning (Encircle):

In my opinion, the test of a writer’s skill is rarely the debut novel; instead, it’s the novelist’s ability to climb back on the horse and pen a sophomore work that engages the reader even more elegantly. Debut novels are often written blindly, but the follow-up has to take the reader on a new journey, one that requires some raising of the bar.

Last year, surrounded by the troubling reality of COVID-19, societal lockdowns, and politicians who downplayed pandemic dangers, I enjoyed an escape thanks to the captivating Trojan Horse, former attorney Manning’s launch as a novelist. I hoped that her second book would be equally engaging, and I’m pleased to say that my wish was fulfilled. There is particular comfort to be found in the return, in Nerve Attack, of former U.S. intelligence operative Nikolai Ivanovich Petrov, aka Kolya. Here we find him being sucked back into the espionage game by a childhood friend, Dmitri Lemonsky, who Kolya sent to prison a decade ago, but who is now evidently integral to heading off a nightmarish attack by terrorists in possession of a lethal nerve agent. Before you can shout out “Novichok” and slip into a hazmat suit, the game is afoot. But can Kolya really trust Dmitri, and can he rely on his own PTSD-stressed abilities to bring what may be his final mission to a triumphant close?

As this surprises-packed story races along, we see Manning’s players zip between North America and the Russian Federation, and other points in between, hoping to prevent catastrophe. (Who knew Vermont could be so dangerous?) The author’s characterizations are deft, brushstroke in style, with the players standing resolutely upright on the page, and her description are vivid but are kept concise so the plot’s propulsion is not affected—instead, it’s enhanced. This is quite a second novel. It attacks the reader’s nerves intently, as they cling to the book as if their hands were nailed to the binding.

Other 2021 Favorites: When Ghosts Come Home, by Wiley Cash (Morrow); The Dark Hours, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown); The Nameless Ones, by John Connolly (Atria/Emily Bestler); The Night She Disappeared, by Lisa Jewell (Atria); and Billy Summers, by Stephen King (Scribner).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part I: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• Smoke, by Joe Ide (Mulholland):

This fifth book starring Isaiah “IQ” Quintable finds the Los Angeles troubleshooter having just about had it, after sleuthing his way through four previous outings. With a price on his head, chased from L.A. by gangs, and exhibiting signs resembling PTSD, IQ decides to hit the road (“He didn’t want to be IQ anymore”), and who can blame the guy. His sidekick, sometime-dealer Juanell Dodson, whose comic-relief escapades are an important ingredient in the recipe that makes this series hum, feels left in the lurch by IQ’s departure, and a bit disgruntled. It gets worse for him (or perhaps more interesting) when Gloria, the mother of Dodson’s baby mama, puts her foot down hard on the shiftless lover: get a straight job or get gone. Meanwhile, an escapee from a mental hospital breaks into IQ’s retreat in a small Northern California town, searching for a serial killer, and a hit man IQ once sent away to prison is released—and sets his malevolent sights on Grace, IQ’s one-time girlfriend in Long Beach, California. IQ’s “experiment with this relaxation thing” is a complete failure, as he is once again dragged into a cesspool of someone else’s making. For his part, Dodson (“Some people think outside the box. Dodson had no box”) will have to “learn how to be white,” as he lands a job with an advertising agency, the perfect spot for a hustler with a sense of humor. The only question that remains is, when will IQ and Dodson, the creations of former screenwriter Joe Ide, become characters in a movie of their own? There’s no doubt we haven’t seen the last of IQ, though Ide’s next novel will be The Goodbye Coast (Mulholland), a Philip Marlowe yarn due in February 2022.

• Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron):

This is one odd couple who ought to be taken seriously. Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins are aging ex-cons who have managed to stay out of trouble for many years. Ike, who’s Black and long-married, has made a good go of it as a landscaper; Buddy Lee, who’s white and divorced, “a lean and weathered piece of work,” lives hand to mouth in a decrepit trailer. When their respective gay sons became an interracial couple, they didn’t consider it any cause for celebration; life just went on. But then those two young men—intelligent and accomplished, with a small adopted daughter—are murdered in what appears to be an execution. Ike and Buddy Lee find themselves flooded with remorse for not having accepted their sons’ life choices. Their rage can barely be controlled: Buddy Lee threatens to gut his landlord over a late rent dispute, and Ike’s blood chills when the preacher speaking at the funeral refers to the dead boys’ “abominable sins.” This gray-haired pair eventually decide that the best response to their loss is to combine forces and seek frontier-style retribution. “Ike wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty,” Cosby writes. “He wasn’t afraid to spill blood. He was afraid he wasn’t able to stop.” As the fathers focus their fury on tracking down their sons’ slayers, they are pursued by gang bangers as well as by a pack of white-supremacist motorcycle punks. Slowly but surely, Ike and Buddy Lee work their way up the food chain to the person who really called the shots in their sons’ killing. Set in rural Virginia, just like Cosby’s debut novel, Blacktop Wasteland (2020), Razorblade Tears is filled with pain and regret, violence and a remarkable humanity.

• Felonious Monk, by William Kotzwinkle (Blackstone):

The perfect place to take it on the lam, or to atone for killing another man in a bar fight, would have to be a Mexican monastery—which is exactly where renowned novelist-screenwriter William Kotzwinkle (Doctor Rat, The Game of Thirty) sends former bouncer Tommy Martini, now known as Brother Tommy, the scion of an American crime family. Twenty-six years old, with an anger-management problem, Tommy has spent half a decade sequestered in that monastery, trying to live a life of peace and chastity. But he gets into trouble when he intercedes between a cartel enforcer and a young boy that enforcer is trying to recruit. Then his retired (and crooked) parish priest uncle, Vittorio—who always understood that while money may be the root of all evil, it’s a necessary commodity to have in quantity—passes away in Phoenix, Arizona. Tommy decides to attend the funeral, which leads to more problems. He is named as the sole beneficiary of his uncle’s sizable estate, and Tommy’s Mafia-connected relatives take that fact pretty hard, all except for his philosophical cousin Dominic. Part comedian, part devil’s advocate, Dominic tosses away Tommy’s anger-management medication (“Rage. It’s good for you,” he asserts), and wants nothing more than to help his brawny cousin … and perhaps turn Tommy into a mixed martial arts fighter in Las Vegas. When a gangster demands million of dollars from Tommy—a debt he says Vittorio owed him, as the result of a shady real-estate deal—it’s finally time to crack some skulls. And plenty of those soon come Tommy’s way, along with assorted mob assassins, Chinese goons, and a sexy new-age cult leader who is intrigued by Tommy’s chastity vows and believes aliens are actively invading human bodies. Tommy reasons that Vittorio has sent him on a quest, and though he can’t figure out the goal, he’s sure he will recognize it when he sees it. Filled with wit, satire, double-crosses, and corpses in need of disposal, Felonious Monk is the first book in a planned series.

• Double Solitaire, by Craig Nova (Arcade Crimewise):

Quinn Farrell is a man with a good head on his shoulders. He’s also a fixer: he makes trouble go away, trouble plaguing wealthy and powerful people. For his endeavors, he is remunerated handsomely. It’s lucky that he lives in Los Angeles, where noir rules and where the peccadilloes and stupidity of deep-pocketed Hollywood players are fodder for tabloids and wagging tongues—precisely the sorts of things Quinn tries to eliminate. Terry Peregrine is handsome and vain, an actor who craves underage girls … until one comes around who knows how to put the shake in shakedown. After another of Peregrine’s pick-ups goes missing, Quinn takes it upon himself to figure out what happened. Meanwhile, he grows close to a new neighbor, Rose Marie, who works with terminally ill teenagers. Quinn long ago constructed an ethical frame within which he can live with his actions. However, his exposure to Rose and her youthful charges, whose health difficulties make the self-inflicted problems of famous rich people seem trifling, forces him to reassess his moral choices. Think Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) in the Coen brothers’ 2016 comedy, Hail, Caesar! (a character also profiled in 2004’s The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, by E.J. Fleming.) Double Solitaire is the opening installment of a projected series.

Finally, one work from the non-fiction stacks …

• True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant, by Brad Ricca (St. Martin’s Press):

Indiana Jones (or someone very much like him) lives on in this tale of early 20th-century treasure hunters seeking that holiest of all holy relics, the Ark of the Covenant. In 1909, a Finnish scholar named Valter Juvelius, who supposedly possesses a secret code he discovered in the Old Testament, approaches a British nobleman by the name of Montague “Monty” Parker. Together with American heiress-socialite Ava Astor (touted at the time as the “most beautiful woman in the world”), Juvelius convinces Parker to gather up a contingent of colorful adventurers, and undertake a clandestine excavation among the caves and tunnels located outside Jerusalem’s ancient city walls, in search of the artifact. That enterprise ultimately ended in controversy and outrage, and left Parker and company empty-handed. It wasn’t until 1922, and the unearthing of Egyptian pharaoh King Tut’s tomb, that archaeologists basked in a discovery of historical magnitude on the order of what Juvelius and Parker had promised. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, the Ark seems ever to fly beyond the range of big-dreamers who pursue it. Ricca, who previously wrote Olive the Lionhearted (2020) and Mrs. Sherlock Holmes (2017), employed recently uncovered and newly translated documents to help him reconstruct Parker’s forgotten exploits.

Other 2021 Favorites: Pickard County Atlas, by Chris Harding Thornton (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux); A Blizzard of Polar Bears, by Alice Henderson (Morrow); Blood Grove, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown); City on the Edge, by David Swinson (Mulholland); and Relentless, by Mark Greaney (Berkley).