Vol. 3 Issue 5
I hope you all had a pleasant summer and had leisure time to read. If you read a crime fiction novel that you’d like to recommend, please let me know and I’ll share it with our newsletter readers in the next issue.
Recommendations
My recommendations in this issue are novels from highly successful series and include one of my favorite authors of classic crime, PD James.
Enjoy the fall season and happy reading.
Hideout by Louisa Luna
Hideout is the third novel in a series written by Louisa Luna, an Edgar Award winner. The series features Alice Vega, a California PI, who is smart, tough and so effective in her work that she earns big bucks. In Hideout, Vega is hired to find Zeb Williams, who has been missing for thirty years. He is a college football kicker notorious for running into the rival teams zone giving them the victory in a tied game. He never stopped running. Vega takes the case and heads to a small town in Oregon where Williams was last seen. But then the story takes an unexpected turn. Vega discovers an active white supremacist group harassing the town, vandalizing homes, and spray-painting cars. Vega suffers a vicious attack but remains determined to stop the gang before the violence escalates. This novel is action-packed. Vega doesn’t hesitate to use violence against the bad guys.
In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty
Adrian McKinty’s series features Sean Duffy, a conflicted Catholic detective in the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary during Northern Ireland’s Troubles. This taut, suspenseful thriller brings readers along as Duffy works to solve a puzzling “locked room” murder while also searching for an IRA terrorist. Duffy is recruited by MI5 to find Dermot McCann, an IRA leader, explosives expert, and escapee from prison, who authorities fear is planning a major bombing campaign. MI5 turns to Duffy, who grew up with McCann, knows his family, and therefore, might have an inside track on locating McCann. McKinty is the winner of an Edgar Award and author of eighteen novels, including the Sean Duffy series. He grew up in Northern Ireland and writes with authority about the impact of the sectarian violence on both Catholics and Protestants. His dialogue moves the story forward and the plot builds into a heart-pounding climax.
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
This is the first novel in the seven-book series that inspired a 2011 film with Matthew McConaughey and a current Netflix series. A Los Angeles criminal defense attorney whose office is his Lincoln Town car, Mickey Haller is hired by a wealthy client charged with attacking a woman who he picked up in a bar. Haller, with his cynical view of the justice system, sees this case as an opportunity to earn the big bucks he rarely sees from his usual client base of drug dealers, bikers, and drunk drivers. A brilliant blend of investigation and courtroom drama, this novel is fast-paced with revelations that move the story in unexpected directions. Eventually, Haller must choose between legal ethics and saving his own ski
Classic Crime Fiction
Phyllis Dorothy (P.D.) James, who wrote eighteen crime novels over a career spanning fifty years, made her indelible mark on the genre by following an old adage most writers are taught: write what you know.
James enriched the realism of her novels by tapping into her work as an administrator in the forensic science and criminal law divisions of Britain’s Home Office. With her in-depth knowledge, she was able to immerse readers directly in the investigations in her novels, such as Death of an Expert Witness and A Taste for Death, two of her best works. And she used her earlier first- hand experience at the National Health Service to create the detailed, realistic setting of a nurse’s training school for Shroud for a Nightingale (1971). James wrote her first novel, Cover Her Face (1962), in the morning before going to her hospital job. It took her three years but the novel, once published, was an instant success. And a large measure of the success is owed to her creation of her protagonist, detective/poet Adam Dalgliesh. A new kind of hero for the genre, Dalgliesh is a Scotland Yard detective who is a thorough professional, intelligent but also sensitive.
James remained within her genre throughout her career, but she was never formulaic or predictable. She was always stretching her talents and searching out innovative approaches to her work. In interviews, James said that the genesis of most of her books came from her reaction to a specific place. The Black Tower, another of her standout novels and one of her darkest, is set in a nursing home on the Dorset coast. It is the ideal bleak and isolated atmosphere for a story with many elements of psychological suspense. The brutal, gory murders in A Taste for Death take place in the usually quiet and serene vestry of a church. In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, James introduced a young, independent female PI, Cordelia Gray, who proved a precursor for 1980’s blockbuster series about tough, single, independent women PIs such as Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski, and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone. These women are smart and streetwise. They know how to handle guns and criminals and are tenacious in their quest to solve their cases. James’ novel Children of Men (1992) is a dystopian novel set in the future when the human race has become infertile. While not a crime novel per se, James created suspense, richly realized characters and a compelling plot that keeps readers turning the pages. And perhaps her best work, Innocent Blood (1980) is a crime novel that is elevated to literary status. It is a complex, psychological thriller in which a young woman searches for her natural parents only to discover more horrors than she was prepared to learn. The New York Times has aptly called James a “champion of the detective mystery.” She saw detective fiction as one of the pleasures and comforts readers seek “from the inevitable tensions and anxieties of contemporary life.” And over her illustrious career, James produced a body of work that continues to bring readers pleasure and comfort as well as mystery and excitement.
[reprinted with revisions from a blog entry by Chris Quarembo]
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