The Missing Piece is, I don’t know, the 24th Dismas Hardy novel by John Lescroart. Maybe it’s the 25th, or 22nd. The book is another session with a set of characters we’ve gotten to know over the years: Hardy, the dogged defense attorney, his partner Wes Farrell, who...
Her Deadly Game, by Robert Dugoni, is apparently the first in a series of courtroom novels featuring Keera Duggan, a criminal defense attorney in Seattle. Duggan was formerly an up and coming prosecutor, but an ill-advised relationship with Miller Ambrose, her boss,...
James Ellroy’s newest novel, The Enchanters, brings us back into the life and mind of Fred Otash, which we have encountered in earlier works like Blood’s a Rover. Otash, for the uninitiated, is a disgraced former LA cop and private investigator who extorts and cons...
To Catch a Storm, by Mindy Mejia starts off with Eve, a physicist college professor who studies extreme weather, piloting her research jet through a storm over Iowa. As soon as she lands, she finds that her husband is missing and that his car has been found burning in...
The Viper, John Verdon’s latest novel featuring the retired, but not quite retired New York homicide detective Dave Gurney, starts with Gurney’s placid upstate New York life being interrupted by a request for his skills in investigating a murder. Emma, a friend of...
The Wedding Guest, by Jonathan Kellerman, is the 34th book in the Alex Delaware series of novels. He’s been writing them at the rate of about one per year since 1985. I’ve read most of them, and I’ve been a big fan. So, I say the following with the greatest of...
The Longmire Defense: A Longmire Mystery was my introduction to the series by Craig Johnson. The character is evidently also the subject of a Netflix original series. I don’t have Netflix, so I wasn’t familiar with it. Walter Longmire is the aging sheriff of a rural...
The Twenty, by Sam Holland, is an engaging serial killer police procedural thriller set in the UK. I must confess up front that I am not a big fan of serial killer fiction. I am ambivalent about the voyeurism it encourages, the disingenuous way it seeks to entertain...
Robert B. Parker’s Bad Influence – A Sunny Randall Novel by Alison Gaylin. If you’re familiar with the late, great Robert B. Parker’s Boston, you’ll know Sunny Randall. She’s a former cop who now works as a private investigator in Boston. She has had an on again...
Malibu Burning, by the popular and prolific Lee Goldberg, introduces us to Walter Sharpe and Andrew Walker, a pair of arson investigators at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department. The book is the first in a series. Sharpe is an old curmudgeon, a...
