Review by New York Times Review
I'M always stumped when someone asks me to find them "a good mystery," because I might recommend a serial killer thriller like Jo Nesbo's fiendishly clever novel THE SNOWMAN (Knopf, $25.95) to someone hankering for a civilized British detective story like Peter Lovesey's STAGESTRUCK (Soho Crime, $25). So let's play favorites - but pick your poison first. FAVORITE BOOK The final exit of a beloved sleuth is the focal point of my choice: THE TROUBLED MAN (Knopf, $26.95). Henning Mankell makes it clear that his brilliant if chronically depressed Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, has solved his last case. In the course of investigating a political conspiracy that dates back to the cold war, Wallander comes to realize "how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in" and how inadequate his efforts to fix that broken world have proved. Although it accounts for his perpetual mood of despair, that insight also makes him a hero for this age of anxiety. FAVORITE NEW SLEUTH George Pelecanos's new protagonist. Spero Lucas, is not only younger and friskier than most private eyes, he's also untainted by the cynicism that goes with the profession. Making his first appearance in THE CUT (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), Lucas brings his lusty appetites and taste for danger to a vivid narrative about gang wars in Washington, D.C. The big question: Can Pelecanos keep his young hero from flaming out? FAVORITE DEBUT NOVEL/FAVORITE ACTION THRILLER Sebastian Rotella scores twice for TRIPLE CROSSING (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which begins on the San Diego-Tijuana border and sends good guys from both sides of the fence to combat drug smugglers and terrorists in the badlands of South America. FAVORITE COZY That would be A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99), Louise Penny's mystery starring Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and set in the enchanting village of Three Pines. FAVORITE REGIONAL MYSTERY In SHOCK WAVE (Putnam, $27.95), John Sandford drags Virgil Flowers away from an all-girls volleyball tournament and dispatches him to Butternut Falls, where a bomber is intent on keeping out a big-box store. FAVORITE SUSPENSE NOVEL Cara Hoffman takes on rural poverty, domestic abuse and teenage violence in her first novel, SO MUCH PRETTY (Simon & Schuster, $25), which watches a family of urbanites come to grief in upstate New York. Runner-up is another novel on the same theme: BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), in which Lori Roy observes the breakdown of a family that has moved to Kansas to escape racial tensions in 1960s Detroit. FAVORITE MYSTERY WITH A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE A tie between THE END OF THE WASP SEASON (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $25.99), by Denise Mina, and THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE (Soho, $24), by the Danish authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis. Mina's gritty Glasgow procedural features a female cop who takes pity on a 15-year-old killer because she's witnessed the neglect that can produce such damaged children. The criminal mistreatment of children is also the focus of the Danish thriller, which follows the efforts of a nurse to identify the 3-year-old boy she rescues at the Copenhagen train station. FAVORITE NOIR Antiheroes don't get much darker than the protagonist of James Sallis's moody existential mystery, THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who wants to make one last clean kill before he dies. But I have to go with the rogue Scott Phillips introduces in THE ADJUSTMENT (Counterpoint, $25). This prince of a fellow made a killing pimping and working the black market as an Army quartermaster in Rome during World War II. But peacetime life in Wichita is so dull it takes all his ingenuity to come up with a new way to make a dishonest living. FAVORITE SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY Michael Koryta easily takes top honors for two eerie novels, THE CYPRESS HOUSE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a 1930s gangster story with spooky undertones, and THE RIDGE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a ghost story set in an old mining region of Kentucky. FAVORITE HISTORICAL MYSTERY If the category were narrowed to World War II-era novels, it would be a tossup between FIELD GRAY (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), the darkest of Philip Kerr's Berlin stories, and David Downing's POTSDAM STATION (Soho, $25), with its horrific scenes of Berlin falling to the Red Army. But in an open field, top honors go to C.J. Sansom for HEARTSTONE (Viking, $27.95), a Tudor mystery that captures the chaotic state of England in the aftermath of Henry VIII's ill-conceived invasion of France. FAVORITE PERFORMANCE BY AN OLD PRO That's a tough one in a year that saw top-drawer work from Michael Connelly in THE FIFTH WITNESS (Little, Brown, $27.99). James Lee Burke in FEAST DAY OF FOOLS (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) and Thomas Perry in THE INFORMANT (Otto Penzler/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). Sue Grafton earns special mention for keeping Kinsey Millhone engaged and endearing through her 22nd alphabet mystery, V IS FOR VENGEANCE (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27.95). But for sentimental reasons, I'm going with Lawrence Block's nostalgic novel, A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF (Mulholland/ Little, Brown, $25.99), set in New York in the 1970s, when Matt Scudder was still a working cop and crime was still "the leading occupation" in his Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Crime-fiction megastar Connelly can always be counted on to try something a little different. In The Reversal (2010), his last Mickey Haller novel, starring the L.A. lawyer who prefers to work out of his Lincoln Town Car, Connelly offered a tour de force of plotting on multiple levels. Here, he narrows the focus considerably, concentrating almost exclusively on what happens inside the courtroom but bringing to the traditional give-and-take of prosecutor, defender, judge, and jury an altogether more complex commingling of personality and legal strategy than is typically on view in legal thrillers. He accomplishes this with a particularly rich first-person narration in which Haller takes us through the courtroom drama as it happens, noting his blunders and praising himself for quick-thinking improvisations. It doesn't hurt, either, that the plot is meaty: a woman whom Haller was representing in a suit against the bank attempting to foreclose on her mortgage is accused of killing the bank official in charge of foreclosures. Combining ripped-from-the-headlines information on the mortgage crisis with a cast of characters that defies stereotypes at every turn of the plot, Connelly shows once again that he will never simply ride the wave of past success. And, neither, apparently, will Mickey Haller, as he reveals a shocking change of direction in the novel's final pages. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Connelly's latest Mickey Haller novel will benefit from the release in March of a movie version of The Lincoln Lawyer, the first Haller novel, starring Matthew McConaughey. 750,000 first printing.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Connelly's compelling fourth legal thriller featuring Mickey Haller (after Reversal) finds the maverick L.A. lawyer who uses his Lincoln town car as an office specializing in "foreclosure defense." Haller's first foreclosure client, Lisa Trammel, is fighting hard to keep her home, maybe too hard. The bank has gotten a restraining order to stop Trammel's protests, and she becomes the prime suspect when Mitchell Bondurant, a mortgage banker, is killed with a hammer in his office parking lot. A ton of evidence points to Trammel, but Haller crafts an impressive defense that includes "the fifth witness" of the title. Connelly has a sure command of the legal and procedural details of criminal court, and even manages to make the arcane, shady world of foreclosure interesting. While the prose may lack some of the poetic nuance of his early novels, the plot is worthy of a master storyteller. The film of The Lincoln Lawyer, the first Mickey Haller novel, releases in March. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Mickey Haller defends a woman accused of murdering the banker responsible for her foreclosure. Connelly's outstanding legal thriller offers an insightful portrait of the current economic crisis. (LJ 2/15/11) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Just in time for his movie debut this spring, Connelly brings back the Lincoln Lawyer for a satisfying case that pits him against a real-estate foreclosure mill.Lisa Trammel never met Mitchell Bondurant, but the two of them had reason to loathe each other. As senior vice president at WestLand National Bank, Bondurant made the call to foreclose on Trammel's house after her husband left her and their 9-year-old son and her mortgage went underwater. Nothing daunted, Trammel started a grassroots organization called Foreclosure Litigants Against Greed (FLAG) to fight WestLand and its allies in the media, and hired Mickey Haller (The Reversal, 2010, etc.) to fight WestLand in court. Both the legal battle and the media circus take a dramatic new turn when Bondurant is found bashed to death in a parking garage and a witness places Trammel half a block away within a few minutes of the bashing. Det. Howard Kurlen, LAPD, immediately picks up Trammel, questions her and then arrests her for murder. Digging in her heels, she insists that she didn't kill Bondurant; she never even met Bondurant; she's never changed her story one bit; and every bit of forensic evidence against herand by the end, there's plentycan be explained as part of a frame-up. It's the job of Mickey, his investigator Dennis ("Cisco") Wojciechowski and his new associate Jennifer ("Bullocks") Aronson to dig up someone who could plausibly have framed her. As the evidence piles up against Trammel, evidence casting suspicion on Bondurant's other associates piles up alongside it. Mickey is beaten up by two guys who clearly don't like the questions he's been asking. The mountain of paperwork prosecutor Andrea Freeman reluctantly shares with Mickey discloses an unsavory connection that could well point to another killer. And the third-party suspect Mickey zeroes in on obligingly behaves exactly like a guilty party."With me, it's don't ask, don't tell," Mickey tells the starry-eyed Bullock, who wonders why this junkyard dog never asks his client if she's innocent. Though the answer isn't as mysterious as you might like, the courtroom scenesthrust, parry, struggle for every possible advantageare grueling enough for the most exacting connoisseur of legal intrigue.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
