As boisterous, hair-raising and funny a crime novel as you're likely to read

The title alone was enough to convince me that I’d found a book I wanted to read. What Robert Adams says in his brief introduction clinched it. “The real experts on crime are not the professionals but the criminals themselves. The Really Dreadful Crime Company sets out to fill the gaps left by the police and carries out its own unique, if not always strictly legal, methods of crime intervention. The next best thing to crime prevention is crime reduction, but if you can’t actually reduce it, at least you can try to bring about a better class of crime.”

Middle-aged Joan Johnson, a part-time private investigator, is mugged one day in her hometown of Hull, England. Getting absolutely no satisfaction from the excuse-making, “too busy” police, she sits down with her good friend Muriel and hatches a plan to make Hull a safer place for all its citizens. Reasoning that criminals know more about crime than the police, and that many criminals might want to leave crime, she proposes the following plan. She will found The Really Dreadful Crime Company and use criminals to investigate muggings, break-ins, harassments, crimes against women and other crimes the local police seem too busy to bother with. Though Muriel is dubious, the idea intrigues her. To Joan’s husband Harold, it is an accident waiting to happen.

The result is one of the most rollicking, hair-raising, funny crime novels I’ve read in many a year. Filled with plenty of action, two rival crime families – the Sleights and the Fiddlers – a bakery that employs ex-cons and serves as a front for the Crime Company, a host of loopy characters and incompetent cops, murder, romance and … The best thing to do is get yourself a copy, sit yourself down and enjoy a great adventure that will have you laughing throughout. I can see this yarn as a wonderful adventure / comic movie or TV series. I’d watch it, more than once.

For you Yanks, one of the crime bosses drives a luxury car called a "merc"; that's a "Mercedes", not a Mercury. I can't imagine anyone mistaking a Mercury (called a "Merc" in the USA) for a luxury car. It's (or was) the Ford product positioned between a Ford and a Lincoln.

A clear ***** read.

Blood Moon's Stormi Rose: A woman and a cop who is not to be trifled with

If you like complex, well-written mysteries with strong female characters and a strong and compassionate male lead, you will definitely like this one by best-selling Shannon Richardson (“Deadly Deception”). The new face and the only woman on the team in rural on the Ute Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, Stormi Rose has a lot to overcome, including her feelings for her boss, Westin Ironcloud.

To complicate matters further, she is the only non-Indian “super-cop” on the team, which means she not only works for Westin Ironcloud, she works for the tribal Division of Gaming, a white woman arresting Indians at the tribe’s casino.

And then people begin to die. Who is killing them, and why? There are several people who make good candidates; it’s finding the culprit that’s the hard part. And finding him (or her) is Stormi’s job.

I hope “Blood Moon” is only the first of a series of novels about Stormi Rose and her boss Westin Ironcloud. I like the people, the setting, and Shannon Richardson’s writing.

Mrs. Lieutenant” -- Memories of Viet Nam and 1970

“Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel”, by Phyllis Zimbler Miller. Publisher: BookSurge, 2008. Available in paperback and Kindle editions.  ISBN-10: 1419686291, ISBN-13: 978-1419686290.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s “Mrs. Lieutenant” is one of those stellar reads that keep you engaged from the first word to the last and how long or how short the book is doesn’t concern you at all. Keep a box of tissues handy, because you’ll need it; I certainly did, and more than once.

If you are a military wife, have been one, or know one or more, then this will tell a story that you are intimately familiar with. If you’re not, it doesn’t matter; it’s the people and their stories that bring you in, keep you there, then linger in your memory for a long time after.

Four newly-married women from different backgrounds meet at Fort Knox, Kentucky where their husbands are enrolled in nine weeks of Army Officers Basic. Sharon and Robert, Kim and Tim, Wendy and Nelson and Donna and Jerry, each from very different backgrounds, each fearing that they could lose their husband before the year is out, each expected to conform to the strict formal rules of the Mrs. Lieutenant booklet each is given. As it says in the booklet, “when a man acquires a commission, the government has gained not one, but two – the officer and his wife.”

The day that Sharon and Robert God leave Chicago to drive south through Indiana to Fort Knox, members of Ohio’s National Guard fired sixty-seven rounds in thirteen seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. A few days earlier, on April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia.

And in only nine short weeks, each woman’s husband could be send to Vietnam, where 2^nd lieutenants had the highest death rate of any combat soldier. Remember, these are newly married women on their way to a world that, except for Donna who grew up an “Army brat”, is like living in another world. Not only that, the racial and ethnic prejudices of the day were obvious, very uncomfortable and lead to one tragedy.

Though 1970 is forty-one years ago, with two wars going on I imagine the worries today’s military wives have are not all that different from the ones these four young women had back then.

Sharon and Rob, Kim and Jim, Wendy and Nelson, Donna and Jerry. Because of the year and their differences, each one stands out. Sharon and Rob are Jewish, Wendy and Nelson blacks from the South, Kim and Jim Southern Baptists, Donna Puerto Rican, and Jerry an Anglo. Back in 1970 when, even in central Illinois where I lived, some of the towns (like the one I lived in from 1964-1966) were “sundown towns”; blacks could go fishin’ there, but they daren’t be in or near the town after sundown. The very thought still makes me cringe, but that was the reality then.

Mrs. Lieutenant is more than a novel about the challenges of being an Army officer’s wife in a time of war; it’s about friendships that develop when people see each other as people and their differences as minor. And therein lies its appeal. Go to Amazon.com, pick up a copy, and settle in for a special read.

Mrs. Lieutenant is a book that, in my book, has a very wide appeal. I hope the subtitle “A Sharon Gold Novel” means that we can expect more from this remarkable writer.

An easy *****

Living inside a maelstrom haunted by ghosts

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite writers. His prose is eloquent, quotable, and graphic. He views the world from the perspective of the marginalized and maimed and forgotten, some of whom struggle to escape an ugly karma and live lives that are happy and relatively tranquil. Some of them make it, some of them don't, and some of them are left with questions that are never really answered.

In this book, and in many others he has written, the protagonists are two friends, New Iberia, Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux and his best friend and compatriot Clete (Cletus) Purcel, ex-New Orleans cop, private investigator, decorated Vietnam veteran and alcoholic. I like both of these men ... and they are not easy men to like because of the ghosts that haunt them both, ghosts of their upbringing and Vietnam and alcohol. 

Over the past several novels, Dave has been working on getting his act together -- he has quit drinking, joined AA, and married Molly, a wonderful ex-nun who loves him and refuses to get enmeshed in his torments. Clete is like watching a runaway eighteen wheeler careening down a mountain highway with bad brakes and a lunatic at the wheel. You know there's an awful crash waiting somewhere, but you don't know just where. The guy has an amazing ability to right himself, but you know he's ultimately going off a cliff if he doesn't stop drinking. 

Most of the Dave Robicheaux novels take place in Louisiana. This one takes place in Montana, where Dave and Molly have gone on a fishing vacation, taking Clete along to give him a break,.

"Clete Purcel had heard of people who sleep without dreaming, but either because of the era and neighborhood in which he had grown up, or the later experiences that had come to define his life, he could not think of sleep as anything other than an uncontrolled descent into a basement where the gargoyles turned somersaults like circus midgets .. His dreams clung to his skin like cobweb and followed him into the day... But on this particular morning Clete was determined to leave his past in the past and live in the sunlight from dawn until nightfall and then sleep the sleep of the dead."

But for Clete, there are no breaks, and trouble finds him on the banks of a pristine river, fishing when two men in a bright red diesel extended cab truck pull up and spoil the idyllic scene. It isn't surprising. From there events descend into the dark regions of the soul where hobgoblins dwell and hurting people struggle to live fulfilling lives and try to stay out of the way of greedy, wealthy elites who use evil as a tool to possess more. "When people talk about class war," Dave muses, "they're dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all." Which, I'd say, is pretty close to the truth.

I found Swan Peak a hypnotic read. It's plot is many-layered, its mood dark and heavy, with glimmers of hope for some of the hopeless characters that one least expects will make it out of the maelstrom that, Burke muses, in which we all live, "an era that is so intense and fierce in its inception ans denouement that it can only be seen correctly inside the mind of a deity."

Yet, in spite of all this, the story ends on a not of hope. Looking at fingerling salmon in a cold stream, Dave knows that when spring comes, the adult salmon will work their way into the main stream and on down to the sea. "All of these things will happen of their own accord, without my doing anything about them, and for some strange reason, I take great comfort in that fact."

A fine novel, if not, like life, always a pleasant one.