Review by New York Times Review
if I were in jail, George Pelecanos would be on my reading list, right up there with James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard, who are also favorites of the inmates in THE MAN WHO CAME UPTOWN (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $27). The guys in the general population at the Washington, D.C., jail also go for lady authors, thanks to Anna Kaplan, a roaming librarian the inmates call "Miss Anna." One loyal client, Michael Hudson, emerges from behind bars as a bona fide bibliophile. ("When he read a book, he was not locked up. He was free.") Back on the outside, Michael resolves to continue his reading habit, applying for his first library card, checking out some books and declaring himself "happy." But he owes people, and in this neighborhood promises and paybacks mean something. So when his major debtor needs a getaway driver for a robbery, Michael is his go-to guy. This is the way good people often get corrupted in Pelecanos's novels, paying their dues for favors received. They're also caught when they get greedy - like a private investigator named Phil Ornazian. Phil has a promising assignment tracking down the wild kids from D.C. who crashed a party in Potomac, Md., raped the teenage hostess and stole her mother's $50,000 bracelet. But then he gets tired of working for chump change and thinks he could be a big-time crook. Pelecanos's characters are prone to that kind of mistake, which is what makes them so human and so doomed. This is an author who writes with the steady hand of a man who knows he's driving a cool set of wheels and respects his own mechanical skills. And that reminds us of another thing about a Pelecanos novel: You'll never get lost. His precise descriptions of Washington neighborhoods read as if they were being dictated by someone driving a fast car, maybe a muscle car, something a teenager would look twice at. Or steal. even IN peacetime, Bess Crawford, the intrepid battlefield nurse in Charles Todd's World War I-era mysteries, finds herself in situations as dire as those in any combat zone. "The war had ended, but not the suffering," she reflects, thinking of the wounded veterans now in her care. "No conquering heroes, these men. No victory parades for them." Rather, a 24-hour suicide watch. In A FORGOTTEN PLACE (Morrow, $27.99), Bess travels to a Godforsaken Welsh mining village on the Bristol Channel to check on one such veteran, Capt. Hugh Williams, an amputee racked by anger and despair. There she encounters yet another disaster, a rock slide that buries three cottages and their inhabitants under a wave of stones and mud. Stranded, Bess is put up by the captain and his attractive widowed sister-in-law, only to find herself confronted with the noxious atmosphere of a town that suspects Williams of having murdered his own brother. Lest readers succumb to the thick aura of calamity that clings to this sad story, Todd offers up charming scenes of focal life, including the spring lambing. Things in the village get a bit bloody, but, as far as I can tell, none of the little lambs is murdered. time was, the searches in many mystery novels involved lost or stolen items like emerald necklaces and state secrets. These days, sleuths all seem to be in pursuit of their identities. One such is Jessie Sloane, the neurasthenic heroine of Mary Kubica's WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT (Park Row, $26.99), who hasn't been able to sleep for eight days - or is it nine? As she keeps a tense death watch on her mother, Eden, Jessie fears that Eden might die without revealing who Jessie's father was. Eden's own story, told in chapters set 20 years in the past, focuses on her obsessive attempts to have a child and is far more moving than the alternating chapters devoted to her daughter's selfabsorbed quest. "I'm nothing," Eden berates herself, "if not a mother." What will happen when she realizes "I've become an addict really" and that children "are my fix"? CHRISTOPHER (KIT) COBB is an American war correspondent on assignment in France in 1915. In Robert Olen Butler's taut new thriller, PARIS IN THE DARK (Mysterious Press, $26), Kit is researching a feature about American civilians who volunteered to drive ambulances. That's a dangerous job in itself, taking him close to the front lines, but Kit is also a government agent, on the lookout for saboteurs among the ranks of refugees returning to Paris. Kit isn't infallible, wasting all kinds of time following a suspicious gent who turns out to be a betrayed husband in pursuit of his wife and her lover. Yet his adventures ensnare us in that cobwebbed state of mind when even the most innocent exchanges between strangers can acquire an ominous tone. Consider that boy talking about the pigs and chickens on his father's farm: Could he be stockpiling dynamite? Kit is given his orders - "Go find him and quietly kill him" - and sees plenty of action. Best, though, is Butler's feel for the black-andwhite-movie atmospherics of a war zone after hours: It's a thrill to follow Kit to German hangouts like Le Rouge et le Noir, where a password will get you in, but there's no guarantee you'll get out. 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 [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Butler returns to his outstanding historical-mystery series starring Christopher ""Kit"" Marlowe Cobb with WWI in full swing, though still without the participation of the U.S. An American spy posing as a journalist, Cobb is in Paris, ostensibly writing about American ambulance drivers but actually tracking German agents (Cobb's superiors recognize that eventually Woodrow Wilson will be forced to join the fray). When hand-set bombs (rather than those falling from zeppelins) begin exploding in Paris, it's clear that the espionage threat has intensified dramatically. But is it German agents setting the bombs or some form of homegrown terrorist? It's up to Cobb to find out, but along the way he falls into a passionate affair with an American nurse, who worries that her capacity for intimacy with men may have been spoiled by all the broken male bodies victims of the ""random tumble of metal through torsos"" whom she tends every day. There are strong echoes of Hemingway in this relationship its tenderness and its fragility and in the melancholy and sense of tragic inevitability that hangs over the book. Beneath the frame story, this is a surprisingly introspective and quite moving novel about love and war.--Bill Ott Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Butler's flawed fifth outing for Christopher "Kit" Cobb (after 2014's The Empire of Night), the Chicago newspaperman who doubles as an American spy, investigates a series of seemingly random bombings in Paris in the autumn of 1915. Kit, who's in Paris to write a feature story on American ambulance drivers, suspects the culprits could be among the many refugees flooding into the city to avoid the war in the countryside. Slowly, however, his focus shifts to a different group of saboteurs: American terrorists seeking to coax the U.S. into the conflict. Though Butler effectively captures the social flavor and visuals of WWI-era Paris, thriller readers accustomed to logic and procedure will be frustrated. Kit, for instance, never visits the scene of a bombing or interviews witnesses, and the finale takes place in that old chestnut, the Catacombs, where the bombers have inexplicably holed up to build their next explosive device. Series fans who don't mind melodrama and the sometimes lead-footed tempo will be satisfied. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
November 1915 finds Butler's durable war correspondent/secret agent Christopher Marlowe Cobb expecting some time away from cloak and dagger. Fate, the Germans, and his boss have other plans.Despite the pleas of the Foreign Office and the manifest inability of the British and French to win the Great War on their own, Woodrow Wilson is stubbornly keeping the U.S. on the sidelines. But of course there's nothing to prevent Kit (The Empire of Night, 2014, etc.) from sending the Chicago Post-Express inspiring tales of Americans like John Barrington Lacey, Cyrus Parsons, and Jefferson Jones, who've volunteered to serve as ambulance drivers. Kit's relatively sedate plans of riding along with these drivers and getting them to pour their hearts out are upended by a bombing at the Terminus Htel and the promise of more. James Polk Trask, the head of the American Secret Service, thinks Kit would be the perfect candidate to infiltrate the ranks of recent German immigrants who may secretly be saboteurs. It's hard to share his confidence, since the first person Kit suspects of heading the saboteurs is vindicated in a spectacularly abrupt way, and his second suspect disappears while Kit is supposed to be keeping an eye on him. Luckily for Kit, he's far more successful at romancing Louise Pickering, a New England-born nurse who's just as wary of strangers as he is and just as susceptible to high-flown sentiments. As for the rest, readers who don't know how World War I turned out will find no spoilers and precious little espionage. Paris isn't the only thing in the dark here.Sensitive but unimpressive. The early paranoid previsions of all-too-contemporary fears about immigrants just aren't enough to lift Butler's latest above the crowd of stiff-upper-lip period tales of the War to End All Wars. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
