#14: Night in Tehran by Philip Kaplan

A diplomat in late 70s Iran navigates the end of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollah in Philip Kaplan's Night in Tehran.

Kaplan is a former ambassador writing his first fiction, though it is heavily populated with real figures and situations.  He writes more of a political chess game than an espionage novel (there is only one solitary karate chop, delivered late in the narrative).  But it reads like a World War II spy novel, and even has a mysterious French journalist/spy love interest.

Kaplan's narrative is stone sober and moves at a funeral pace until the last one hundred pages or so, which have the mounting terror of a slow-motion car crash.  Readers with an interest in this time and its politics will be engaged here.

Kaplan's debut belongs in the same family as the writing of Alan Furst and John LeCarre and is a worthwhile addition to genre.

I got this from the Henry County-New Castle Public Library in New Castle, Indiana.

#13: Walk Tall, Ride Tall by Burt and Budd Arthur

Canavan is a former lawman who just wants to settle down with a new wife and a new ranch; but when he immediately gets into a gunfight with a trio of youths whose family runs the town, things get rough quickly in Burt and Budd Arthur's Walk Tall, Ride Tall.

Burt and Budd Arthur were father and son, and prolific western writers on their own and together.  

This is a pretty standard oater in the "one man against a crooked town" vein.  To me the biggest drawback is that Canavan is not particularly likeable; he is aggressive and belligerent throughout and it occurred to me more than once that the townspeople were right, and he wouldn't make a very good neighbor.

I got this from a stash of books in a Secret Santa exchange and read it quickly.

#12: The Tenant by Katrine Engberg

Two mismatched cops (is there any other kind?) look for the killer of a young Copenhagen woman with strange carvings in her face in Katrine Engberg's debut The Tenant.

The young woman's landlord was writing a murder mystery featuring a character--and murder--very much mirroring real life, leading the detectives to look into her writing group, among other leads.

Engberg comes from an arts background, and it shows in interesting details, from a subsequent dead body found in a chandelier during a ballet performance to a famous artist with a penchant for manipulating his assistants.

Otherwise this is a pretty straightforward, though fast-moving, police procedural, for fans of Scandinavian crime novels.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library and read it quickly.

#11: The Westside Park Murders by Keith Roysdon and Douglas Walker

The Westside Park Murders is a nonfiction account about the notorious double homicide of two high schoolers in 1980s Indiana, with an extensive summary of past events and some speculation as to what happened by two local newspaper reporters.

I was extremely conflicted about reading this, as I went to high school with these students (though they were younger than me).  But it was interesting to revisit the people and places that I knew at the time.

This account is written in a very clear-eyed, journalistic style and appears to be made up of some prior newspaper articles as well as new information and interviews.  The case remains unsolved--it is occasionally revisited locally and appears to still be open--so does not really wrap up as continue to explore questions.

Although it has been featured in other articles, television programs, and podcasts over the years, this is a good read for fans of true crime.

I bought this from Amazon and read it very quickly.

#10: The Missing American by Kwei Quartey

An American goes to Ghana to meet a woman he connected to online and disappears; soon it's up to a straight-laced private investigator to find out what really happened in the first entry of Kwei Quartey's new series featuring Emma Djan, The Missing American.

Although Djan is the protagonist, there is a wide net of interesting characters, from enterprising streetwise internet scammers, to crooked cops and priests, to the highest politicians in the land.

The internet scam the American falls for is threaded all through the culture of Ghana, and Djan ends up brushing elbows with her former police colleagues (she quit after being targeted for sexual harassment), a charismatic priest with a pet alligator in a tub, and a mysterious masked journalist targeted for assassination for his writing, among others.  

This is an expansive, fast-moving crime novel with unique characters and situations.  For readers who wants to read something different.

I checked this out from the Henry County-New Castle Public Library in New Castle, Indiana and read it quickly.

#9: The Preserve by Ariel S. Winter

A small-town cop and his big-city ex-partner--who happens to be a robot--try to solve a murder that seems to lead to a mysterious drug-trafficking network in Ariel S. Winter's The Preserve.

Winter writes a real genre-buster; it is a hard-nosed buddy-cop crime novel, but in a dystopian future where the human race has been reduced by plague (!) and has ceded control to robot overlords.  What few humans remain live in a vast self-governed preserve that functions somewhat like a reservation, with the robot government always sniffing around the borders.

What I liked about it was that the world-building is in the far background; the mystery is grounded in two cops chasing bad guys over 24 hours, with the clock ticking on a dangerous drug getting out.  There's no planet-shattering change in the status quo by the end of the fast-paced story.

Highly enjoyable and offbeat police procedural/science fiction mashup.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library and read it quickly.

#8: Nympho Lodge by Jack Lynn

Swingin' PI Tokey Wedge goes to a resort to bodyguard a woman afraid of being murdered by her husband, only to find his list of suspects--and potential love interests--continuing to grow exponentially in Jack Lynn's Nympho Lodge.

Jack Lynn was Max Van DerVeer, a working mystery writer who penned these "spicy" mysteries under a different name for reasons that were probably more obvious in 1959.  By today's standards, the spiciness is very mild indeed and more implied than anything.

And it is all presented in a fairly comedic manner reminiscent of a low-grade version of Richard Prather's Shell Scott (and I don't think that's a coincidence). 

To put it politely, the characters are not finely shaded by contemporary standards; every woman is eager to jump into bed with Wedge, and he never pauses for self reflection, even when he ends up shooting one five times at the denouement.

This is the first in a new line of reprints by Grizzly Pulp, a company committed to putting out at least a half dozen of the hard-to-find Tokey Wedge books.  

I will get the next one as well, but would hope they would work more closely on editing, as there were a lot of mistakes in the text that threw me for a loop a time or two.

For fans of pulp paperbacks.

#7: Architects of Memory by Karen Osborne

 A space salvage crew finds a powerful alien weapon at the center of a galactic war, pitting human against alien and corporation against corporation, in Karen Osborne's Architects of Memory.

The spine of Osborne's plot is not unfamiliar; a future run by megacorporations rather than governments, and a perhaps misunderstood first contact with a mysterious alien race, but the central characters are well-rounded and interesting.

And it's high-octane space opera most of the way, to an action-packed finale that leaves open the door for a sequel that is reportedly in the works.

Osborne's debut novel didn't break new ground, but was interesting and enjoyable throughout.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library Bookmobile and read it steadily.

#6: Zero Zone by Scott O'Connor

In 70s Los Angeles, an artist built an outdoor installation to honor a dead lover--only to find it taken over by a handful of disenfranchised people with a dangerous agenda--and has to live with the fallout in Scott O'Connor's Zero Zone.

We see the artist's backstory unspool over several chapters, which includes the death of her parents and estrangement from her cinephile brother, threaded with the lives of the people who hole up in the installation--including an affluent teenage runaway, a Las Vegas waitress, a recent parolee, and a charismatic but physically and emotionally scarred young man.

The last chapters have a more cinematic feel, as several untimely prison releases threaten to heighten the danger around the artist again. 

This is the kind of literate thriller I have always enjoyed, with musings on the art and film worlds and how a creative life can work for and against people.  Recommended.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library Bookmobile and read it quickly.

#5: Agatha by Anne Cathrine Bomann

 A therapist at the end of his career seems to find life again when taking on a lively young patient in Anne Cathrine Bomann's debut Agatha.

This is Danish author Bomann's first novel--she has previously been a therapist as well, and a table tennis national champion--and it is a warm-hearted story, though the basic plot--an older person finding the will to live through a vibrant younger person--is familiar.

Well-drawn characters, including the therapist's strict secretary who has a surprising home life, and a long-time neighbor who turns out to have an interesting backstory, add value to the slender but engaging volume.

My wife got this for Christmas and I picked it up myself and read it quickly.  Recommended for those who want a light, literary novel.  I'll be interested to see what Bomann does next.

#4: Babysitter Massacre: Daddy's Little Killer by David O'Hanlon

In the past, a babysitter is killed in a night of passion and rage; years later, a group of babysitters face the fallout of this killing over several terrible days in David O'Hanlon's first installment in the new "Babysitter Massacre" paperback series, Daddy's Little Killer.

Babysitter Massacre was a 2013 b-movie directed by my friend Henrique Couto, who I have workedwith on several films, including two of my own.  Couto set his film squarely in the 80s-90s slasher film genre, and having a book series to accompany it falls right into that era as well.  Couto is working with O'Hanlon on the first trilogy of stories.

Readers who cut their teeth on those slasher franchises will find all the familiar beats here, with sexually-charged situations and a passel of gruesome killings.  There are callbacks to the Ohio-based film, but its storytelling is self-contained in an Arkansas setting that includes some escaped mental patients, a stalker ex, and the seen-it-all cop who is, naturally, a step behind the intrepid babysitter protagonist trying to save two children in her charge.

I ordered this book online and read it quickly.  Recommended for slasher movie fans.

#3: Amnesty by Aravid Adiga

In Sydney, an illegal immigrant who works as a cleaner begins to suspect that one of his customers killed another, but calling the police could lead to his deportation, in Aravind Adiga's Amnesty.

Throughout a single long day the cleaner debates about what to do, all the time being goaded via cell phone by the suspected killer to come clean his apartment before he decamps.  

He relives his experiences in Sydney, from hiding in a storeroom above a grocery to meeting his girlfriend on a vegan dating website to getting too involved in the explosive relationship between his two clients, who pay cash and know his status is precarious.

Adiga's novel has a thread of thriller woven through it, but really is a literary novel focusing on the immigrant experience in all its facets.

I had previously read Adiga's Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger which deals with an Indian cab driver who carries on a one-sided correspondence with the Premier of China; the protagonist here also is an eccentric character and somewhat unreliable narrator prone to flights of fancy, which makes for an interesting read.

A worthwhile literary work that I checked out from the New Castle-Henry County Bookmobile and read quickly.

#2: The Last Quarter Hour by Jean Bruce

In 1950s Argentina, a cell of escaped Nazis have wiped out two networks of American agents, sending OSS-117 into action in Jean Bruce's The Last Quarter Hour.

OSS-117, along with a partner with a garrote and a genial disregard for human life, changes up the spy formula and sets the sex aside to focus all on violence in speedily dispatching the villains.

French writer Jean Bruce's OSS-117 predates Ian Fleming's James Bond, and ran hundreds of installments from the 50s to the 90s, the pseudonym first used by Jean Brochet, then his wife Josette upon his death in a car crash, and ultimately by their children aftet Josette's death, a true writing family.

This series also spawned a film franchise in France, but neither the handful of books translated into English (by a British publishing house) nor the movie franchise ever seemed to catch on here.

However, I am a big fan of French noir, and this installment is as hard-hearted and tough-minded as any of them, and would come recommended if it wasn't so very hard to find any of these in the wild.  I actually got this one in a batch of books I purchased from the web and was genuinely surprised to get this single one in the lot at a goodbye price.

The Last Quarter Hour is a cool spy entry in an interesting series, if one goes hunting.

#1: Echo on the Bay by Masatsugu Ono

 An officer is assigned to a seemingly tranquil coastal police station, but his teenaged daughter sees its comings and goings through different eyes in Masatsugu Ono's Echo on the Bay.

Ono's story starts out a bit whimsical, with comical and colorful characters, but pretty soon we uncover backstories that involve dark themes, including child abuse, sexual abuse, and murder.

This makes for an unsettling, enigmatic read.

Ono offers a lot to think about, including a deer--or something else?--hit by the policeman on a late night, and the origins of a "ghost ship" that appears offshore after a red tide.

Echo on the Bay has elements of the crime novel, but is most successful as a literary work with dark undertones for discerning readers.

I got this for Christmas and read it quickly.  

Best Reads of 2020

Passed my goal of reading 50 books in 2020 and topped out at 66 in a strange year.  Here are my favorites, if you are looking for a new read.

The Black Jersey by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

These Women by Ivy Pochoda

Blacktop Wasteland by SA Cosby

The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter

The Fragility of Bodies by Sergio Olguin

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

Winter Counts by David Heska Wambli Weiden

Red Dust by Yoss

The 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Philippe Blondel

Enjoy!

#66: Sidewinder by Jack Slade

Gun-hand Lassiter travels to Mexico to collect on an IOU, and ends up embroiled in local corruption and national politics, in Sidewinder, an entry in the long-running series by "Jack Slade."

Jack Slade was a lot of different people, in this case Frank Castle, considered one of the second-tier scribes of the series.  

But I liked this overheated, spaghetti-flavored western, written in a baroque style but never lacking in action.  

This one opens with Lassiter digging his own grave, but he quickly escapes only to be jailed a few more times in between killing owlhoots and bedding women.  

With a whole Mexican town against him, he hides away dynamite and weapons all over town, and needs them all in fast-paced finale.

I got this western in a Christmas swap in a paperback collecting Facebook group I belong to, and read it quickly on a camping trip.

#65: Hangman's Territory by Jack M Bickham

 A gunhand comes to a Montana town to help settle a range war and goes against a hanging judge, a creepy hangman, and a murderous sheriff in Jack M. Bickham's Hangman's Territory.

The gunhand ends up teaming up with a greenhorn lawyer and a colorful, dynamite-happy friend for a tough battle and an action-packed finale.

Bickham wrote a lot of novels across genres, and perhaps is best known for The Apple Dumpling Gang and his Wildcat O'Shea stories.  It seems clearly that the eccentric character "Boom Boom" is an early incarnation of Wildcat, who is a somewhat comic figure with an appetite for explosives as well.

This was once half of an Ace Double but has been reprinted on its own several times.  One of the later versions came to me in a holiday book swap from a paperback collecting group I belong to on Facebook.

I read this one very quickly and would recommend for western fans.

#64: Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

In 1990s Los Angeles, race relations are simmering when a Korean shop owner shoots an unarmed Black teenager; nearly 30 years later, the two families are threaded back together by another crime in Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay.

Cha's novel has elements of the crime genre, but is even more successful when it looks at the lives of the two families; in the Korean family, secrets around the shooting have caused estrangement, and in the other family, mourning has taken both positive and negative forms, from activism to violence.

And readers quickly learn that racial tensions haven't stopped simmering in Los Angeles since, although Cha tries to end on a somewhat positive note.

Your House Will Pay is a worthwhile novel for both genre and literary readers.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Bookmobile and read it quickly.

#63: Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

 A man who is part private eye/part enforcer on a South Dakota Indian reservation goes on a personal quest when drug dealers involve his young nephew in David Heska Wanbli Widen's debut crime novel Winter Counts.

Complicating matters further is the arrival of an old flame, which also embroils him in tribal politics.  Both stories intersect in an explosive, violent denouement.

The crime elements of the book pretty much go where you expect, but the settings and characters are noteworthy.  The reservation and its denizens provide a fresh look at the genre.

Our tarnished protagonist tried to ignore the old ways in favor of stark contemporary reality, but the old ways keep guiding him, whether he wants them to or not.

I enjoyed Winter Counts throughout and would recommend it to readers who enjoy contemporary crime fiction but would like a more unique character and setting.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library Bookmobile and read it quickly.

#62: The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly

 "Lincoln Lawyer" Mickey Haller gets the most personal case of his career when a routine traffic stop finds the body of a former client in the trunk in Michael Connelly's The Law of Innocence.

Haller ends up defending himself as the prime murder suspect.  But he has to try to unravel the conspiracy against him from a jail cell, where he is under constant threat from inmates and prison guards alike.

Connelly is probably best known for his notable, long-running Harry Bosch series, but Bosch's half-brother has starred in a couple of his own books (and one movie).

This one is one of my favorites in that series, as it starts on a rocket in the first pages and never lets up.  More of a courtroom drama than Connelly's other books, but still written in the no-nonsense style I have always enjoyed from the author.

Recommended for fans.  I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library Bookmobile and read it very quickly.

#61: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Immediately following the events of Gideon the Ninth, a necromancer joins the Emperor and his inner circle in a bid to destroy an invading army of monsters, all while trying to navigate internal politics, in Tamsyn Muir's sequel to one of my favorite books from last year, Harrow the Ninth.

However, I flat didn't know what to make of this book.  The first one hundred pages (of approximately five hundred) are basically Harrowhawk getting over the shocking finale of the previous book.  Subsequently, she has flashbacks to the events of that novel, which actually don't match the earlier storyline.  

It becomes so dense and unwieldy that I kept going back to Wikipedia and the internet to refresh my memory on who the characters were and what was going on.

When all is revealed, it is a genuine surprise, and the story rockets along for the last one hundred pages or so (and ends basically on a cliffhanger for the wrap-up of the trilogy).

I ended up really enjoying this book but can't recommend it on its own merits; at this point, I feel it is best for new readers to wait for the trilogy to complete, and then read them all straight through.  I love Muir's writing style, and  Harrow the Ninth is a highly memorable science fiction romp, but just doesn't really stand on its own merits.

But if you have already read the first one, refresh your memory and then dive right in.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library Bookmobile and read it quickly.

#60: Tall Man Riding by Peter McCurtin

 Gun-hand Carmody decides, at the spur of the moment, to rob a small bank, only to cross a gang who also wanted to rob it; when they beat him mercilessly in the middle of the street, he won't rest until the whole gang is dead in Peter McCurtin's Tall Man Riding.

McCurtin was an extremely prolific writer and editor across many genres; Carmody was a western series character that appeared in a number of volumes.  

To say Carmody is an anti-hero is putting it mildly; he kills men and beds women without much of a thought for either throughout.  To that end, it would be most polite to say that the book is a product of its time, with race relations and gender relations not portrayed in a contemporary vein.

But McCurtin is just a cracking good paperback writer, and I've found his books to be enjoyable for discriminating readers.

I got this in a batch of mixed western paperbacks from a friend and read it quickly.

#59: Southern Showdown by Louis Masterson

 Lawman Morgan Kane walks away from the badge and becomes a hired gun, but soon suspects he signed on to the wrong side of an oil dispute, in Louis Masterson's Southern Showdown.

Masterson was Norwegian writer Kjell Hallbing, and his Morgan Kane series numbered close to a hundred volumes and was immensely popular.  Holding the storytelling threads together through various books, and showing the character grow and change, seem to be two hallmarks that readers enjoy.

But my sampling size is two, as only some have been translated into English, and are extremely hard to find in the wild.  If I see one on eBay for less than ten dollars, I snatch it up, which is where I found this one.

Southern Showdown is definitely spaghetti-flavored, full of sex and bloodshed, with an above-average story.  Masterson is worth seeking out for western fans looking for a series they might not have known about.

#58: These Women by Ivy Pochoda

 A serial killer is dispatching women on the bad streets of LA, and it's up to a disparate group of struggling women to sort out the truth in Ivy Pochoda's These Women.

Pochoda's writing is downbeat and clear-eyed, and the characterizations are vivid.  Chapters alternate between a haunted mother whose daughter died 15 years before, a hard-living stripper, a demoted police detective with PTSD, an artist with a myriad of repressed emotions, her equally repressed mother, and the killer's lone survivor whose voice goes unheard through the years.

The identity of the serial killer unspools rather readily but the storytelling is striking throughout, as the dominoes begin to tip over--who was a babysitter, who was a neighbor or a friend, until the plot threads right together to a tight finale involving everyone.

A compelling crime novel with a literary bent that I read at a rocket pace and found rewarding throughout.

I checked this out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library bookmobile.

#57: The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda

 A mass poisoning at a family gathering in the 1970s, where only an enigmatic blind child survives, resonates through the decades in Riku Onda's The Aosawa Murders.

The plot sounds straightforward but the storytelling is unique, with each chapter telling the story from different perspectives, including characters with major roles such as a neighbor child who later writes a bestseller about the murders and an origami-loving detective down to people who only were involved peripherally, such as the neighbor of the suspected killer, the author's research assistant, and the children of various characters like the family housekeeper.  

Newspaper articles, interviews, and segments from the bestselling novel-within-a-novel also play an unusual role.

This is a strangely elliptical crime novel that had me guessing right to the very end, and even then I wasn't sure what had happened.  

Really a fascinating and offbeat read from a popular Japanese writer.  This is her first novel translated into English, via Bitter Lemon Press.  I hope more of her work is translated.  Recommended.

I got this for my birthday and read it steadily.