Review by New York Times Review
Nobody knows a man better than his ex-wife. So Moe Prager's ex-wife, Carmella, is wise to this veteran private eye, accepting the fact that no matter how many times he marries, his first love will always be Brooklyn. "When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk," she tells him in HURT MACHINE (Tyrus, $24.95; paper, $15.95), Reed Farrel Coleman's latest book in a series heavily saturated with local color. Since Prager has recently been told he has stomach cancer, that day may come sooner than Carmella thinks. But this stubborn old shamus is determined to do two things before his ashes are consigned to the sands of Coney Island: Attend his daughter's wedding, and find the person who murdered Carmella's older sister, Alta. Alta Conseco and Maya Watson, emergency medical technicians with the New York Fire Department, became pariahs after walking away from a dying man who was stricken at a trendy Manhattan bistro. Although Alta's death was clearly a retribution killing, her fellow E.M.T. (surely the murderer's next target) refuses to offer any explanation for their behavior. This silent treatment forces Prager to do exactly what we want him to do: Travel the length and breadth of the city talking to cops, firemen, gangsters and restaurateurs in their picturesque natural habitats. The Gelato Grotto in Gravesend is the kind of establishment that would welcome any and all looking for a place to die of their stab wounds. "The violence is one of the things that made this place a legend," according to the current owner, "It's sick, but it's business." Finbarr McPhee's Brass Pole, an Irish tavern near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, is a magnet for firemen, and there's a bar in the Forest Hills section of Queens where half the customers are working cops. Prager even knows an Italian restaurant in Bay Ridge where a man might share a meal ("cold antipasto plate, eggplant parm, veal parm, a big dish of ziti with red sauce") with a mobster. Just don't expect this grizzled Brooklyn native to get decent intel from any of the staff at the High Line Bistro, where the two E.M.T.'s left a dying man flopping on the kitchen floor. "Not to judge," but Prager has a hard time picturing these working stiffs tucking into a lunch of "Thai duck confit with tamarind and pomegranate drizzle." For someone who reads people by the places they eat, drink and make merry, that's good enough to make Prager postpone his death until he solves this case. It might not be "The Voyage of the Beagle," but Charles Finch's latest Victorian mystery, A BURIAL AT SEA (Minotaur, $24.99), is a rousing nautical adventure, set on an English ship awash with murders, storms and the threat of mutiny on its journey to Egypt. Charles Lenox, the gentleman sleuth in this beguiling series, had resigned himself to giving up his raffish avocation after becoming a married man and a junior member of Parliament. But in the winter of 1873, at the request of the prime minister, Lenox takes on the dangerous double mission of negotiating for British rights to the Suez Canal while secretly gathering information about French plans for war. Although the onshore bustle at Plymouth Harbor and Port Said is eye-catching, it pales beside the thrilling scenes at sea aboard the Lucy, a trim corvette outfitted for speed and agility. When one of the ship's officers is murdered in a singularly grotesque manner, the investigation becomes a baffling locked-room whodunit with the entire crew as suspects. An expeditious resolution may be critical for the sake of the ship's morale, but Finch's descriptions of life at sea are so fascinating it's a shame Lenox must bring this case to an end. You have to marvel at a woman who snubs the good Samaritan who pulled her from a train wreck, dealt with the ski pole embedded in her thigh and carried her to safety through a blizzard in the mountains 1,222 meters above sea level - and then demands that her savior go back into the storm for her wheelchair. That's how Anne Holt introduces Hanne Wilhelmsen in 1222 (Scribner, $25), the first novel featuring this prickly Norwegian heroine to be translated (by Marlaine Delargy) into English. There's nothing personal about Hanne's tactless behavior. She's also dismissive of the doctor tending her wounds and scornful of the priest who tries to comfort the survivors waiting out the storm in a rundown hotel. But when the priest is shot, this former cop finds herself drawn into a good old-fashioned murder mystery. Wherever Hanne shows up next, my advice is to follow that wheelchair. The assassin who calls himself Columbus and plies his trade in a devastatingly cool series by Derek Haas is back in DARK MEN (Pegasus Crime, $25), only this time he's not alone. Narrating in his usual dry way, this professional killer explains how he was lured out of foreign retirement and back to Chicago with his Italian lover, Risina. Someone has kidnapped his old "fence" (the contractor who sets up the kills), and Columbus is the only "bagman" (the hired gun who executes them) capable of bringing him back alive. Columbus fancies himself a force of nature - even in slumber "the tiger is still a tiger" - and he's thrilled when Risina shows an aptitude for his line of work. But this preening narcissist is also a consummate craftsman, and it's a pleasure to watch him go up against an adversary with a modus operandi even more diabolical than his own. The Gelato Grotto would welcome any and all looking for a place to die of their stab wounds.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 25, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Moe Prager is facing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation for stomach cancer, and the oncologist has euphemistically suggested he get his house in order. Ever the realist, Moe wonders how a man who can't organize his sock drawer can organize his future and past. For starters, Moe opts for silence, at least until after his daughter's wedding three weeks hence. But his ex-wife asks him to look into the murder of her estranged sister, a New York EMT who became a city-wide pariah for refusing to aid a man stricken by an aneurysm. So, with a gnawing, growing pain in his gut, the sixtysomething former cop and former PI begins to ask questions. No one wants to answer, and many tell him the murder was karmic justice. But as always, Moe abides, and crime lovers will get grimly fascinating looks into the mind of a man facing a slow motion death, the clannish world of New York firefighters (EMTs are part of FDNY), and louche, tribal Brooklyn. Moe's fans will be rocked by his diagnosis, but like Moe, they too will abide.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Razor-edged contemporary whodunits don't get much better than Shamus-winner Coleman's seventh Moe Prager mystery (after 2010's Innocent Monster). Shortly after the Brooklyn PI learns that he has stomach cancer, Carmella Melendez, his ex-wife, asks him to look into the stabbing murder of her estranged sister, Alta Conseco. Two months before her demise, Conseco and a fellow EMT, Maya Watson, became the subject of international outrage after failing while off-duty to help Robert Tillman, a cook who suffered a fatal stroke at a Manhattan bistro. Prager pursues the obvious course of seeking a link between Conseco's and Tillman's deaths. Watson has become an uncommunicative recluse, who provides little help, but the owner of the restaurant near where Conseco died is an old friend and an ex-cop, happy to help in any way he can. Logical and surprising plot twists combine with Prager's world-weary narrative voice to produce another winner. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Facing his own mortality when cancer strikes, hardheaded Moe Prager (Innocent Monster) agrees to help his ex-wife once again. What's the real story behind the murder of her sister, an FDNY emergency medical technician, and why is Moe the only one investigating? (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
Innocent Monster, 2010, etc.), Moe Prager copes with an old love, a complex murder and a belly-full of trouble. On the opening page of the novel, Moe exits his oncologist's office thinking about death in a way he never has before. Less abstractly, that is. A newly identified stomach tumor, in all probability malignant, has a way of concentrating attention. Not that Moe was ever a man to approach life blithely. " Hurt, painthey're God's way of letting you know he loves you,' " says a friend, an Auschwitz survivor, encapsulating a worldview Moe long ago tailored to fit himself. And yet right now there are good things in Moe's life. There's the pre-wedding party he's throwing for his cherished daughter Sarah, for instance, at which the estranged love of his life makes an unexpected appearance. Well, Carmella Melendez's appearance may in truth be a rather dubious "good," but there's no question about her blood-stirring impact. Ex-partner in the PI firm they started together, ex-lover, ex-wife, who left him desolate when she walked out on their marriage, Carmella now has a job she begs Moe to do. Won't he please look into the murder of her older sister? It was a story the media had recently feasted on, a homicide that many saw compelling reasons for believing was justified. Moe squirms a bit, but this is Carm after all, and he signs on. As his investigation deepens, however, he discovers connections that surprise and shock him, links to dehumanized people and sociopathic behavior that one would be hard put not to label pure evil. More and more, he finds himself double-thinking his cancer: its pathology, yes, but as a metaphor, too. In both cases, the effect is heart-sinking. Though once or twice he crosses that tricky line between Weltschmerz and cry-baby, Moe Prager remains basically irresistible.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
