Review by New York Times Review
DOES ANYONE write creepier villains than Jo Nesbo? Wait a minute, I'm thinking. Still thinking. O.K., the answer is: No, I can't think of anyone who makes my skin crawl like Nesbo. In KNIFE (Knopf, 4SI pp., $27.95), translated from the Norwegian by Ned Smith, a sexual predator named Svein Finne is at large in Oslo. "Finne's driving force is to spread his seed and father children," we learn. "It's his way of gaining eternal life." If he fails to impregnate his victims, he casually kills them. If any of the women should have an abortion, he punishes them in vile ways. And if any of them should bring a child to term, "the Fiance," as he's known, appears in the delivery room to "assist" in the birth. While Finne's intervention at the hospital is disturbing, it provides this weirdo with an ironclad alibi for the killings being investigated by Harry Hole, the rogue police detective in Nesbo's bleak noir series. Harry is at a low point in his unstable life. He's drinking much of the time - to the point of sucking up the last drop of whiskey from a filthy floor - and when his wife leaves him, this time for good, he completely falls apart. But this is what readers expect of Harry, whose weaknesses somehow contribute to his manly appeal. And whenever he does fall flat, there always seems to be a good woman around to pick him up. "He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot and he had a liver-colored scar running across one side of his face," according to one such woman, upon meeting him for the first time. "But even if his face had something of the same brutality as Svein Finne, there was something that softened it, something that made it almost handsome." In an unexpected move, Nesbo resolves the business of the psycho flaneé rather early in the story, which necessitates the introduction of another slippery killer, as well as a chilling flashback to a military mission in Afghanistan. There's an explicit description of that reliable old method of execution, "drawing and quartering," if that's your thing, plus many other throwaway delights, including a list of the eight categories of killers, of which No. 8 is "just plain bad and angry." They play great music in Ace Atkins's down-home mystery, THE SHAMELESS (Putnam, 446 pp., $27). Fine country tunes like Waylon Jennings's "Rainy Day Woman" ("Woke up this mornin' to the sunshine / It sure as hell looks just like rain"). They also throw superior shindigs, like the annual Good Ole Boy, "a big gathering of every swindler, huckster and elected official in north Mississippi." They're just a little sloppy about observing the laws of the land. A long time ago, the sheriff of Tibbehah County, Miss., ruled Brandon Taylor's death a suicide; but 20 years later, two Brooklynites hope to prove otherwise on their true-crime podcast. The two reporters are bland white bread compared with the hell-raising locals they encounter down South - folks like Old Man Skinner, who thinks it's a fine idea to build a 60-foot cross on the highway, and Fannie Hathcock, whose brothel sign would be hidden by the cross. There's a plot in here somewhere, but it doesn't intrude on the real fun, like catching up with the boys in the barbershop watching "Days of Our Lives." If you think of cozy mysteries as palate cleansers, the body in the WAKE (Morrow/HarperCollins, 219 pp., $25.95) is your kind of book. Katherine Hall Page's latest Faith Fairchild mystery (the 25 th in a long-running series) sends her beloved amateur sleuth on a rare solo vacation to the family's summer cottage in Maine. Her minister husband, Tom, is fine, as are their two grown children, so series fans need not worry. Faith, a professional caterer, plans to relax and help a bit in the kitchen of a friend whose daughter is getting married. (There's a recipe for old-fashioned blueberry buckle at the back of the book that seems easy to make and sounds delicious - except you really need wild Maine blueberries, which are hellish to gather.) Given her sleuthing history, it's not surprising that Faith's detective skills are called on when a body with goth tattoos is found floating in the lily pond. Murder, if murder it is, is a grave business, but the next-door neighbors are committing a more serious crime by cutting down the old-growth pines on their property, which had provided much-needed privacy. In the country, some people would happily fight to the death over such an offense. The question is: Will Faith find the villain in time to save the wedding? DAVID GORDON'S sequel to "The Bouncer," THE HARD STUFF (Mysterious Press, 311 pp., $26), opens with Joe Brody in a car with three strangers, on their way to New Jersey to kill a man. On most work nights, Joe can be found arming the door at a Mafiaowned strip joint, the Club Rendezvous, "talking down drunks, extracting gropers and defusing fights." But when he was in the military, Joe specialized in killing people, and he's managed to hang onto that skill set, which occasionally comes in handy. Like now, when a coalition of mob bosses makes him their unofficial "sheriff" and directs him to make some shady heroin suppliers disappear. For no good reason except the fun of it, that assignment somehow necessitates pulling off a complicated diamond heist. Gordon's quirky characters and offbeat humor take the sting out of some action scenes of horrific violence. 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 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A too-little-known writer who, for the last several years, has been turning out delightfully offbeat tales of fringe crooks with plenty of pizzazz (The Serialist, 2010; Mystery Girl, 2013) now stakes his claim as a major player in the comic-thriller world. Joe Brody is a Dostoevsky-reading bouncer at a strip club in Queens run by his high-school pal and now Mob higher-up Gio Caprisi. When the FBI closes down the strip club in a search for terrorists, Joe is at loose ends and reluctantly agrees to participate in a holdup designed to relieve some redneck gun enthusiasts of a shipment of their wares. This piece-of-cake job naturally turns out to be anything but, and soon Joe is dodging the feds (including agent Donna Zamora, with whom he shares a mutual attraction), sundry mobsters, and a pair of rich-kid terrorists who have set their sights on a vial of perfume with some deadly characteristics. The supporting players, from the cross-dressing Mob don to agent Zamora to the other members of Joe's ill-fated gang that couldn't shoot straight, are almost as endearing as Joe himself. Thomas Perry fans should catch up on Gordon's oeuvre as quickly as possible. This jewel of a book is as close as a devotee of comic caper novels can come to the sublime quirkiness of Perry's classic Metzger's Dog (1983).--Ott, Bill Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
One night at Club Rendezvous ("Queens' finest gentleman's club, conveniently close to the airport"), the NYPD, a SWAT team, and the Feds roll in as part of a coordinated citywide sweep for anyone with even remote terror connections and arrest several people, including bouncer Joe Brody, the hero of this impressive crime novel from Edgar-finalist Gordon (Mystery Girl). During his temporary detainment in a crowded holding cell, Joe runs across an acquaintance who persuades him to take part in a weapons heist. The job goes wrong, but Joe survives and ends up in a much more complicated situation. Meanwhile, frustrated FBI agent Donna Zamora keeps running across Joe as she tries to move from receiving tips to actual field work. Joe, "a hard-luck kid from Queens whose file read like a roller coaster of comebacks and blown chances," proves his mettle in the quest to bring down the terrorists. Gordon's sharply drawn supporting cast adds a nice balance to all the action. Cinematic writing makes this an obvious candidate for graphic novel or film adaptation. Agent: Douglas Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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