December 2005
Naughty Girls for the Nice People on Your Christmas List

No, I’m not talking about a new Christmas edition of Girls Gone Wild, but truly bad girls, the kind who commit murder for entertainment—Florida female crime novelists. These women are smart, beautiful, funny, and deadly. They’re cheap, too. They lie, steal, cheat, and commit all sorts of dastardly deeds—all for under $25.00.

Dying in Style by Elaine Viets ($6.99, Signet Books) Agatha Award-winning author Elaine Viets (Dead-End Job Mystery series) introduces mystery shopper, Josie Marcus, in her new comic, chick-lit, mystery series. Josie’s job, one many women would kill for, has her going undercover in various shops, stores, and restaurants to report on quality, cleanliness, and service.

In Dying in Style, Josie, a devoted single mom, is sent to investigate Danessa Celedine’s high-end boutique and finds it wanting, which may cost the fashion diva millions. However, it isn’t money Danessa loses, but her life when she is found strangled to death with one of her own thousand-dollar snakeskin belts. Now, Josie finds herself in the midst of an investigation of a different kind, and soon becomes the prime suspect. To save herself and her daughter, Josie the mystery shopper must become Josie the mystery solver.

With her characteristic humor and charm, Elaine Viets has created another cozy crime solver for readers who want a fast, light, entertaining read, which is sure to be a hit with the legions of chick-lit readers. The series has the added bonus of including actual shopping tips for those serious about doing their part to fuel our free market economy.

Dead Roots by Nancy Cohen ($22.00, Kensington Books)
Cohen’s seventh entry in her Bad Hair Day mystery series featuring Florida hairstylist Marla Shore finds Marla introducing her fiancé, detective Dalton Vail, to her extended family at a reunion on Thanksgiving. The gathering takes place at historic Sugar Crest Plantation Resort, a haunted hotel owned by Marla’s elderly Aunt Polly.

When Aunt Polly is suffocated in her bed, Marla must once again play the all too familiar role of girl detective and search for her aunt’s killer. This task is complicated by historic preservationists, tension-filled family interactions, real estate developers, town officials, greedy heirs, ghostly appearances, and auditory anomalies heard in the haunted resort.

Like the other books in her popular series, Cohen once again blends colorful characters and an interesting setting into a fast-paced, entertaining story. With just the right balance of romance, humor, and suspense, Cohen brings her winning characters and the fascinating world they inhabit to life in a mystery novel with plenty of twists and turns.

Relics by Mary Anna Evans ($24.95, Poisoned Pen Press)
Mary Anna Evans’ second book featuring archeology student Faye Longchamp is as interesting and engaging as her award-winning debut, Artifacts—again providing a balanced blend of history, mystery, and archeology.

While in school studying to become an archeologist, Faye Longchamp is invited to join a team in rural Alabama researching the origins of the “Sujosa,” an isolated, dark-skinned people with Caucasian features and an unusual resistance to AIDS. Accepting the invitation, she soon discovers that the man in charge of the project has made a mess of the preliminary dig. Faye determines to prove her worth by planning the excavation of a more likely site, but she gets sidetracked by murder. Dr. Carmen Martinez, an oral historian who was gathering old tales and songs to learn about the group’s mysterious origins, is killed by an act of arson. Days later, the apparent suicide of an 18-year-old Sujosa boy deepens the puzzle, and Faye must use her skills at ferreting out the past to solve the murders.

In addition to Faye making a compelling heroine supported by a cast comprised of interesting characters, the setting is a major player in this mystery—an insulated rural community brought to vivid life in rich detail. Evans makes good use of both the location of the dig and the archeological backdrop of the story, the authority with which she renders them giving her story credibility and literary merit.

Smoke by Lisa Miscione ($23.95, St. Martin’s Minotaur)
In her fourth novel featuring New York crime writer Lydia Strong, Miscione (who lives in Florida though her books are set in New York) crafts credible, multi-dimensional characters with complex inner lives in a suspenseful mystery thriller.

When Lily Samuels, a former writing student of Lydia’s, goes missing while trying to prove that her brother was murdered, Lydia enlists the help of her husband, PI Jeff Mark. A NYPD detective named Matt Stenopolos has some leads but no time to look into them and passes them onto Mark.
After talking to Lily’s father, who is obviously hiding something, Lydia and Jeff focus on a cult-like, paranoid group, with high-level security and a desire for revenge on their perceived enemies. In addition, Lydia must deal with a box she has inherited of her long-absent father’s belongings and the emotional upheaval those belongings cause.

Don’t miss this compelling thriller and its smart, tough heroine. Go ahead and try it. This kind of smokin’ is actually good for you. As usual, Miscione has penned a dark, taut crime novel. Interesting, engaging, gripping, Smoke will keep you (and the readers on your list) turning pages ’til there done—and when they are, wishing there were more.

This Christmas, whether they’ve been naughty or nice, give the readers on your list the works of these Florida Fem Fatales. It’d be a crime not to.

 

November 2005
Two Old Pros Try Something New, One Takes It Easy

A master craftsmen at work is a fine thing to behold, whether he’s building a house or constructing a novel. If the latter, three masters that are enjoyable and inspiring to read are Stephen King, Michael Connelly, and Walter Mosley. There is something workmanlike in the way these skillful old pros string their sentences and ultimately their stories together, especially former journalist, Connelly.

Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid
When is a genre writer not writing genre? When is a mystery not a mystery—at least not the kind most readers expect? When Stephen King, the master of suspense and horror, tries something new.

Signing on with Hard Case Crime, a small imprint dedicated to bringing back the pulp paperbacks of the past, King seems at first to be abandoning the horror genre for the mystery one, but actually writes his least genre book to date and just may have transcended genre altogether in the process.

Because Hard Case Crime publishes hard-boiled detective fiction, I opened The Colorado Kid expecting a novel in the tradition of King’s short story “Umney’s Last Case,” but The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption are much closer to traditional crime stories than is this latest effort. I’m not complaining. I just wish I had been warned. Expectation is everything, and though King eventually and convincingly won me over, had I known what to expect, he would have had me at hello.

The entire book takes place during one afternoon on an island off the coast of Maine as two old newspapermen, Dave Bowie and Vince Teague, tell their intern, Stephanie McCann, about the decades old death of a man who came to be known as the Colorado Kid. It’s a seemingly impossible mystery, an unsolved that continues to haunt them all these years later.

The book, more novella than novel, is told in the form of a conversation, most of the conversing being done by Dave and Vince. This would be a risky move for lesser writers, but King is a master—and not just of the macabre. What the master of genre books has done is written a mystery novel that’s more a meditation on mystery than a whodunnit.

Like his work in shorter mediums—novellas and short stories like those mentioned above—this small novel keeps King focused, helps him maintain discipline, and prevents him from the sometimes seemingly self-indulgent, unwieldiness that results in the tomes he calls novels (and, which, I should add, his millions of fans love).

I recommend spending the afternoon with Dave Bowie and Vince Teague. As usual, King, the master of Maine, has captured its down home places and blue-collar people in vivid and genuine ways—especially the two old newspaper men, who are particularly charming. But don’t open this book expecting to find a traditional murder mystery. Break its spine to find something more transcendent, for this is King examining the very nature of mystery. It’s a work more serious than it seems, dealing with life and death, the mysterious universe we find ourselves in, and the limits of logic. Instead of dealing with vague unknowns, King is working with specific unknowables, creating a mystery far more resonate than a simple whodunnit could ever be.

Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer
With The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connelly, best-selling author of such books as Blood Work and The Closers, demonstrates he’s not just a master of police procedurals, but of legal thrillers, as well.

This time out, Connelly gives his series regular, Harry Bosch, a rest in order to introduce Harry’s half-brother, Michael Haller.

Michael “Mickey” Haller is a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles who operates his practice out of the backseat of his Lincoln, which enables him to move from courthouse to courthouse quickly and easily. His father was a legendary lawyer whose clients included gangster Mickey Cohen. Cohen’s gun, which was given as a gift to Haller’s father and eventually passed on to him, plays a pivotal role in the plot. The gun isn’t the only thing Mickey’s dad bequeaths to him. He also gives his son some advise that is particularly relevant in his most recent case: “The scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client.”

Mickey’s latest client, Louis Roulet, seems to be the one his father warned him about. He’s charged with assault and attempted murder on a young woman—a case that has many similarities to the crime another of Mickey’s clients, Jesus Menendez, was convicted of and is now serving time for in San Quentin.

The first half of The Lincoln Lawyer reads like a mystery with a legal setting, but by the halfway mark, the book shifts into a legal thriller—whodunnit is no longer an unknown, but how Haller, the hero with feet of clay, is going to handle it is. Both halves are filled with suspenseful twists and turns and the exploration of an interesting character/narrator who is endearing in spite of, or perhaps because of, his many shortcomings.

Connelly’s authority as a writer comes from his careful attention to detail. His fiction shows his craft as a journalist who knows the value of research and who has the experience and discernment to know what to include and what to leave out. All details are not telling, and Connelly knows how to tell the difference between those that merely give information and those that provide revelation.

Harry Bosch will no doubt be back, but my guess is, so will Mickey Haller, who is more accessible and endearing than his half-brother (which is helped by the fact that the novel is told in the first person with Mickey serving as narrator), and, who knows, before long we may see Harry and Mickey together—the cop and the defense attorney. They could be the Cain and Abel of crime fiction. Sign me up for the full ride.

 

Walter Mosley’s Cinnamon Kiss
Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.) is easy on the eyes and ears, its prose so enjoyable to read it’s like fine wine, aged to perfection, that goes down easy. The tenth entry in this seminal series, Cinnamon Kiss, is no exception.

Cinnamon Kiss, which takes place at the height of the Vietnam War era, has a slightly silly plot that somehow works when mixed with all the other elements that master craftsman Mosley uses to construct his masterpiece.

Easy’s daughter, Feather, has a mysterious illness, and only an expensive Swiss clinic offers any hope at all. To raise the nearly impossible sum of $35,000, Easy considers robbery with his childhood friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, but decides instead to take a missing persons case brought to him by white friend and fellow PI, Saul Lynx. Easy leaves Los Angeles for San Francisco where his new employer puts him on the trail of a wealthy and eccentric lawyer and the lawyer's exotic lover, a girl known as Cinnamon—both of whom have disappeared. It’s then things get complicated—both personally and professionally, which are intertwined because of Easy’s motive for doing what he’s doing this time out—but the plot is nearly irrelevant. Like so many other true artists of the genre (Raymond Chandler and James Lee Burke leap to mind), it’s not the twists and turns and revelations we read Mosley for, but Easy himself and the world he inhabits.

This isn’t merely Philip Marlowe writ African-American, though. This is a character fully his own, created by an author, who, like Chandler and other literary masters, only uses the crime genre as a mode of expression for a work of art.

What elevates Mosley’s mysteries above the ordinary convoluted noirish mix of crime and criminals, dolls and dames, Knight errant and sadistic sidekick, is the brilliant backgrounds he uses so effectively. Culture is his canvas. He is capturing American history, chronicling the black experience through some of the most turbulent times of the Twentieth Century.

Pick up The Colorado Kid, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Cinnamon Kiss at your local bookstore or library today, find a well-lighted place with a good reading chair, and watch as three masters build a vivid and fascinating world before your very eyes. Each book will do far more than entertain, but you’ll find the experience so entertaining you probably won’t realize just how much more until you close the book and attempt to transition from the fictional worlds fashioned by King, Connelly, and Mosley to the “real” world in which you otherwise exist.

 

 

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