Review by New York Times Review
JOHN verdon writes grown-up detective novels, by which I mean stories with intelligent plots, well-developed characters and crimes that have social consequences. WHITE RIVER BURNING (Counterpoint, $27), featuring the author's brainy gumshoe-for-hire, Dave Gurney, checks all these boxes. The primary crime is the "coldblooded assassination" of a police officer, who's picked off by a professional sharpshooter. The authorities in the town of White River are supposedly knocking themselves out to solve the case, but the widow has her doubts and asks Gurney to conduct his own inquiries. So when there's a second sniper killing of a cop, he suspects a link to the victims' secret investigation of corruption in their department. Upstate New York locales like White River can be home to a remarkable assortment of social and political factions. Although the main industry is a prison, this seemingly bucolic place attracts enough moneyed weekenders to support a poets' colony and some serious real-estate investors. Verdón indulges his satirical impulses with takedowns of painters who create "burgundy cosmologies" with beet juice and charities like LORA, an animal rescue group that prides itself on spiritually bonding with its fourfooted clients. "We give animals friendship," one devotee explains. "We have conversations." On a deeper level, it seems to Gurney that White River, like many other towns, is "suffering from industrial collapse, agricultural relocation, a shrinking middle-class population, political mismanagement, the spreading heroin epidemic, troubled schools, eroding infrastructure." Verdón doesn't address all these issues, concentrating instead on the racial antagonisms that are fueled by them. Half the populace blames demonstrations by the Black Defense Alliance for stirring up hatred for local law enforcement after a traffic-stop fatality. The other half blames the blamers, creating one of those hate-fests that feed on their own furies. While keeping inside the lines of a classic whodunit plot, Verdón enriches the formula with a probing analysis of the way a community rips itself apart. THE CHILDREN steal the show in Belinda Bauer's unnerving suspense novel, SNAP (Atlantic Monthly, $26). When his mother disappears and his father ambles off in a fog, Jack Bright shoulders the parental duties for his younger sisters, Joy and baby Merry. Washing the windows, painting the front door and mowing the lawn keep snoopers away. ("The lawn mower was the best thing Jack had ever stolen.") But his newfound skills as a burglar - who also raids the kitchen of one house to make a vegetable omelet before settling down for a nap - earn him a cool rep as the "Goldilocks" thief who's unsettling the neighbors and irritating the police. In a secondary plotline that elbows itself into the principal story, a pregnant woman named Catherine While is being taunted by a stalker who leaves a nasty greeting ("I could have killed you") scrawled on a birthday card by her bedside - next to a knife. Bauer's sleuth, Detective Chief Inspector John Marvel, notable for the "piggy cunning" in his eyes, has a hand in tying up both narrative threads. But we're more in awe of young Jack: thief, con man and hero. if your chosen line of work is being a hermit, you couldn't pick a better location than Maquoit, a fogbound island 20 miles off the coast of Maine. In STAY HIDDEN (Minotaur, $26.99), Mike Bowditch, the game warden investigator in Paul Doiron's nature-loving mysteries, flies out to Maquoit to investigate the accidental (or accidental-on-purpose) shooting of a sort-of famous journalist named Ariel Evans. Ariel was supposedly on the island to do research on Blake Markman, a producer who fled Hollywood to live as a hermit and raise Icelandic sheep. But when the ferry arrives from the mainland, who should step onto the dock but Ariel herself - fit as a fiddle and anxious to investigate her own death. Doiron captures the stark beauty of his setting without averting his eyes from the sick and starving wildlife, the rancorous feuds among the lobstermen or the homicidal impulses that push islanders off the deep end. JOHN STRALEY has been holding out on US. BABY'S FIRST FELONY (Soho Crime, $25.95), his first Cecil Younger novel in 17 years, is bursting with the sort of oddball characters who make Alaska's wildlife look tame. Younger, a hapless criminal defense investigator, has had some success in educating his dodgy clients about smart ways to beat a rap. ("Don't hurt the dog and don't do the meth.") He has also witnessed some creative drug-smuggling methods. (Stuff the dope inside a fish.) But when his 13-year-old daughter and her best friend are kidnapped, he finds himself gambling for their lives - and way out of his depth. Straley knows how to wrap deadly violence in a bubble of black humor that suits the novel's beautiful but harsh setting, where whales open their maws to dine on oceans of salmon fry and men kill one another while ravens fly overhead, screaming with laughter. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 8, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Small cities throughout the Rust Belt are suffering, and White River, not too far from retired NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney's rural Catskills home, is no different. But White River's greatest stress is racial tension. African American residents have formed the Black Defense Alliance in response to the fatal shooting of a black motorist by a white city policeman. Demonstrations, arson, and looting have occurred; then a policeman is killed by a sniper. County DA Sheridan Kline, more politician than lawyer, asks Gurney if he will serve as an independent investigator. Gurney reluctantly agrees, but his presence clearly bothers law and order icon Dell Beckert, the chief of police, who seems to relish quelling a race war. The body count rises, and Kline dismisses Gurney. Gurney breaks the case anyway, but then he realizes that nothing in White River is as it seems, setting the scene for an explosive and murderous denouement. Verdon is a gifted writer and storyteller, but White River Burning lacks some of the power of his earlier work (including the outstanding Peter Pan Must Die, 2014), though he definitely nails the zeitgeist.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Verdon's outstanding sixth outing for ex-NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney (after 2016's Wolf Lake), White River, N.Y., cop John Steele, who is white, is killed by a sniper on the first anniversary of the controversial shooting of Laxton Jones, a black motorist. Jones was shot by a white police officer, who later claimed self-defense and was cleared of wrongdoing by the authorities. Jones's death prompted the creation of the Black Defense Alliance, which alleged that he was probing rampant corruption in the White River PD and was deliberately gunned down. Steele was shot while attempting to maintain order at a demonstration organized by the BDA, and the chief of police believes the shooting was payback for Jones's. Brought in by the district attorney to consult on the case, Gurney has his doubts after Steele's widow shares that shortly before her husband's murder, he received a text message warning that he would be shot and the BDA would be blamed. The twisty plot builds up to a logical and satisfying reveal. Verdon expertly combines a baffling whodunit with thoughtfully drawn characters in this timely examination of racial tensions. Agent: Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Verdon's sixth series outing (after Wolf Lake) featuring retired NYPD detective Dave Gurney, the upstate New York town of White River is reeling after a police shooting claims the life of an unarmed black man. During resulting protests, a police officer is murdered and the obvious suspect is a member of the Black Defense Alliance (BDA). An anxious district attorney brings a reluctant Gurney into the investigation, which has pit a law-and-order police chief and his department against the BDA. A plot line that includes motives of hate, ambition, justice, and power also addresses many issues of social concern today: dystopian media outlets, police corruption, a racial divide, and an economically distressed town doing its best to survive. Characters, especially that of Dave Gurney, are believable, if a bit static, and compelling. And while the story involves police corruption, it also includes several good, honest police officers who are disturbed by what is happening and will work to stop it. VERDICT Verdon's gripping, fast-paced police procedural will appeal to crime fiction readers with an interest in current events who enjoy David Baldacci, -Michael Connelly, and Carrie Smith.-George Lichman, Rocky River, OH © Copyright 2018. 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
Once again, the bucolic upstate retirement of NYPD homicide ace Dave Gurney is disrupted by a grisly murder spree.In the sixth installment of this series of mystery-thrillers by ex-adman Verdon (Wolf Lake, 2016, etc.), the specter of racial tension comes to roost near the woodsy farmhouse in Walnut Crossing, New York, that Gurney and his wife call home. A petty-minded district attorney with big-ticket ambitions wants Gurney to look into the shooting death of a police officer in the nearby town of White River. Because the officer was white and the incident took place at a demonstration marking the one-year anniversary of a police shooting of an unarmed black motorist, Gurney must deploy all his urbane discretion, implacable concentration, and innate logic to work his way through thickets of bad faith and ill will. Much of the latter comes from White River's belligerent police chief, who is eager to pin the murder of his patrolman on two leaders of the demonstration's organizer, the Black Defense Alliance. But that scenario sinks when those two suspects are found naked, branded, and beaten to death on a local playground. From that point forward, nothing remains certain in Gurney's inquiry as more bodies pile up, each of them disposed more brutallyand diabolically. With the determination and craftiness that in his previous life won him the "supercop" designation, Gurney methodically tries to connect each murder to the other. All he can count on for reliable backup are cool-headed White River policeman Mark Torres and short-fused but bombastically-effective private investigator Jack Hardwick, a holdover from previous novels. And there's his forbearing wife, Madeleine, who at one point deep into the investigation observes of her husband: "You're good at assembling bits of information and seeing a pattern in them. But I think sometimes you enjoy the intellectual process so much you don't like to rush it." That could also be said of Gurney's creator, whose systematic approach to his material may tempt his readers to feel the need to push things along at times.It's easy to see why this series is so popular, blending as it does the hard-boiled social observations of noir fiction with the inscrutable pleasures of classic "whodunit" puzzle-solving. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
