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
The Great War has ended. The Armistice has been signed. But the suffering continues, as soldiers come home physically and mentally scarred. Battlefield nurse Bess Crawford is working in a clinic for recuperating amputees, where she becomes involved in the efforts of the captain of a group of Welsh soldiers who is desperate to keep his men from falling into depression and suicide. After the soldiers are sent home, the captain writes to Bess, telling her that the situation has grown worse. Regular readers of this satisfyingly rich historical mystery series (this is the tenth) know that Bess Crawford is simply unable to turn away from someone who needs her help. So she travels to Wales, where she soon finds herself stranded in a remote village where the residents seem to be keeping dark secrets, and where a killer lurks. The novel has a distinctly gothic feel to it: remote locale, harsh landscape, stormy weather, mysterious villagers and the sense that something truly evil is hiding, perhaps in plain sight. Followers of the Crawford series will find much to like here.--David Pitt Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
WWI has finally ended in Mary Higgins Clark Award-winner Todd's memorable 10th mystery featuring British nurse Bess Crawford (after 2017's A Casualty of War). Despite the conclusion of the fighting, Bess still has plenty of soldiers to tend to at a hospital in France-in particular, a group of Welsh soldiers, whose serious injuries make their future employment doubtful. When she's reassigned to a clinic back in England, Bess is reunited with the Welshmen, only to find several of them suicidal. Following their discharge, their leader, Capt. Hugh Williams, writes to inform her that one of the privates took his own life, and to ask for help to avert future suicides. She uses some leave to seek Williams out, ending up in a desolate and isolated town on the Welsh coast, where he's suspected of his own brother's murder. His warning that it's not safe for Bess to remain there proves prescient. The atmosphere of the claustrophobic community Bess is trapped in is palpable as Todd (the mother-and-son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd) expertly ratchets up the suspense. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, DeFiore & Co. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bess Crawford's tenth adventure has her once again doing her best to rehabilitate injured soldiers. This time she's nursing a group of suicidally depressed men from a remote Welsh mining village. She decides to use her precious leave to follow them home, hoping to intervene and convince their captain to put on a brave face for his men. Once she's tracked down the captain, Bess gets stranded and can only hope the ever-faithful Simon Brandon will discover where she is and rescue her. And maybe he'll help figure out why people are disappearing and what momentous secret the villagers are hiding. VERDICT A typical entry in this World War I mystery series, filled with period detail but rather light on character development. Readers may become impatient with Bess's impulsive behavior, as her compassion so often gets her into trouble. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]-Laurel Bliss, San Diego State Univ. Lib. © 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
Nursing sister Bess Crawford's errand of mercy to a seemingly innocuous village in the Gower Peninsula of South Wales turns slowly into a waking nightmare.A year after the Great War has ended, Bess (A Casualty of War, 2017, etc.) is still working with veterans who lost limbs after being wounded on the front when she's called away from Gloucestershire by an entreaty from Capt. Hugh Williams, who's recovered sufficiently from his depression after the amputation of a leg to become thoroughly alarmed that he and the men formerly under his command are at a high risk for suicide. Taking advantage of some vacation time, Bess follows Hugh's trail to Swansea, then to the village of Caudle, where Rachel, his brother Tom's farm widow, has taken him in. Trouble starts almost the moment Bess arrives. The driver who's brought her to the village vanishes mysteriously the first night she's there, leaving her with no obvious way to leave. As she does her best to strengthen Hugh's own resolve to live amid his sorrows, a slow wave of violence washes over the village. Even though Hugh insists he fell down, someone's clearly attacked him. Then Oliver Martin, who arrived in the company of Ellen Marshall, a well-to-do Cardiff woman who's returned to Caudle, where she used to summer with her grandfather, is beaten more thoroughly, and Edward Stephenson is found clubbed to death on the strand. What's even more disturbing to Bess is her dawning sense that the villagers have united to keep a secret so dreadful that they can't afford to let her leave to share her suspicions with any outsiders. Will the intervention of Sgt. Maj. Simon Brandon, her father's old batman, be sufficient to rescue Bess from the worst vacation ever?Todd patiently, decorously evokes a sense of suffocating unease before the inevitably anticlimactic conclusion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
