Switchback
Matthew Klein
Severn House, $28.95 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-7278-8051-2
A finalist for the International Thriller Writers Award for best first novel, Switchback is a dark thriller about a man caught in his own trap. Timothy Van Bender, an ivy-league graduate and hedge fund manager living in Palo Alto, has the perfect life. His business mints money. His wife Katherine is beautiful and charming. His secretary, Tricia, is young, sexy, and greets him each morning with a smile. But one Tuesday everything changes. Timothy hedge fund loses $24 million on a bad bet against the Japanese Yen. He decides to double down and bets again. But the Yen keeps climbing, and his business investors begin asking questions. With his company on the brink of collapse, Timothy gets a phone call from his wife, telling him goodbye. She then jumps off a cliff at Big Sur to her death. Timothy can’t believe it, nor do the local police. That’s when the trouble starts. As the police investigate Timothy, he digs into his dead wife’s secrets. And when Tricia shows up one morning on Timothy’s doorstep, mysteriously claiming to be his dead wife, and knowing secrets only Katherine could know- he’s not sure what, or who, to believe. Has Timothy been given a second chance at happiness or is he being played for a fool in an elaborate scam that could cost him his life?
A Killing in China Basin
Severn House, $28.95 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-7278-8054-3
Many consider homicide detective Ben Raveneau to be at the tail-end of his career. Not least his ambitious young partner, Elizabeth la Rosa. But Raveneau’s long experience comes into its own during the pair’s investigation of a murder in San Francisco’s China Basin district. The body of a young, mixed race woman has been found in a derelict building, her ankles and wrists tied, ligature marks at her neck. Who was she and what was she doing there? With no clues to the victim’s identity, the case is proving tough to crack. At the same time, Raveneau’s colleague Ted Whitacre is convinced he’s being stalked by Cody Stoltz, a criminal he arrested years before for murdering his lover’s husband. Although sceptical, Raveneau agrees to warn off Stoltz. When a second corpse is found with a gunshot wound to the head, Raveneau is convinced there’s a link to the China Basin killing.
The Fifth Witness
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company, $27.99
ISBN: 978 -0316069359
From Booklist: *Starred Review*
Crime-fiction megastar Connelly can always be counted on to try something a little different. In The Reversal (2010), his last Mickey Haller novel, starring the L.A. lawyer who prefers to work out of his Lincoln Town Car, Connelly offered a tour de force of plotting on multiple levels. Here, he narrows the focus considerably, concentrating almost exclusively on what happens inside the courtroom but bringing to the traditional give-and-take of prosecutor, defender, judge, and jury an altogether more complex commingling of personality and legal strategy than is typically on view in legal thrillers. He accomplishes this with a particularly rich first-person narration in which Haller takes us through the courtroom drama as it happens, noting his blunders and praising himself for quick-thinking improvisations. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the plot is meaty: a woman whom Haller was representing in a suit against the bank attempting to foreclose on her mortgage is accused of killing the bank official in charge of foreclosures. Combining ripped-from-the-headlines information on the mortgage crisis with a cast of characters that defies stereotypes at every turn of the plot, Connelly shows once again that he will never simply ride the wave of past success. And, neither, apparently, will Mickey Haller, as he reveals a shocking change of direction in the novel’s final pages.
Connelly’s latest Mickey Haller novel benefited from the release in March of a movie version of The Lincoln Lawyer, the first Haller novel, starring Matthew McConaughey.
Black Orchid Blues
Persia Walker
Akashic Books, $15.95 (320p)
ISBN: 978-1936070909
“I fell in love with this book when I saw the cover. The gorgeous black dame with the gat in her hand harks back to the best of pulp fiction, but Black Orchid Blues, a historical novel set in 1920s Harlem, is better than any pulp I ever read … it’s simply terrific.” —The Globe and Mail
Lanie Price, a 1920s Harlem society columnist, witnesses the brutal nightclub kidnapping of the “Black Orchid,” a sultry, seductive singer with a mysterious past. When hours pass without word from the kidnapper, puzzlement grows as to his motive. Then a gruesome package arrives at Price’s doorstep, and the questions change. Just what does this kidnapper want—and how many people is he willing to kill in order to get it?
Evil hides behind the genteel façades of affluent Strivers’ Row and stalks the ballroom of one of Harlem’s most famous gay parties. In a complex plot that keeps you tied to the page, Black Orchid Blues explores the depths of human depravity and the desperation of its victims.
Kind of Blue
Miles Corwin
Oceanview, $14.95 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-6080-9007-5
From Publishers Weekly:
Former L.A. Times crime reporter Miles Corwin (Homicide Special: A Year with the LAPD’s Elite Detective Unit) introduces an engaging Jewish police detective in his first novel, a grittily realistic story of murder, stupidity, and redemption. Ash Levine, the LAPD’s top detective, resigns after his suspension for failing to prevent the death of a key witness he was supposed to protect. A year later, Ash’s former boss invites him to lead the investigation into an ex-cop’s murder. Levine returns to the force, hoping to reopen the case that cost him his job, though not everyone in the department is thrilled to see him back. A jazz lover (hence the Miles Davis–inspired title), the son of a concentration camp survivor, and a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, Ash battles through departmental interference, corruption, and misdirection. Given his strong debut, Ash should be back on the job for further assignments.
The Reversal
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company (October 5, 2010), $27.99 (416p)
ISBN 978-0-316-06948-9
Longtime defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to change stripes and prosecute the high-profile retrial of a brutal child murder. After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller is convinced Jessup is guilty, and he takes the case on the condition that he gets to choose his investigator, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch.Together, Bosch and Haller set off on a case fraught with political and personal danger. Opposing them is Jessup, now out on bail, a defense attorney who excels at manipulating the media, and a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years.With the odds and the evidence against them, Bosch and Haller must nail a sadistic killer once and for all. If Bosch is sure of anything, it is that Jason Jessup plans to kill again.
The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster, $25.99 (448p)
ISBN 978-1-4391-2829-9
Starred review in Publisher’s Weekly: MWA Grand Master Burke offers everything his readers expect–brilliant prose, prosaic situations that suddenly become mystic experiences, and a complex plot that repeatedly plumbs the depths of human depravity and the heights of nobility–in his superlative 18th novel featuring Iberia, La., deputy sheriff Dave Robicheaux (after Swan Peak). Robicheaux finds himself dealing with adopted daughter Alafair’s attraction to novelist Kermit Abelard of the degenerate Abelard clan (who echo Faulkner’s Snopses), as well as trying to avenge the sadistic murders of two young women, aided by best friend Clete Purcel. Evil comes in many forms, from the psychotic interloper Vidor Perkins to Robert Weingart, a convict turned author, whom Kermit has championed. The sights, smells, and sounds of the Louisiana bayous become sensory experiences in Burke’s novels, and death is a constant presence that threatens to overwhelm his angels with “tarnished wings.”
The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage
Anthony Brandt
Knopf, $28.95 (448p)
ISBN 978-0-307-26392-6
In this engrossing chronicle of arctic exploration, Brandt (Reality Police: The Experience of Insanity in America) follows the many expeditions launched by the British navy in the 19th century to find a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the maze of islands north of the Canadian mainland. He treats the story as an exercise in majestic futility: ship after ship became trapped in the region’s labyrinthine, perpetually ice-clogged waters, dispatched by naval officials who believed that the Arctic Ocean was ice-free beyond its frozen rim. Sailors braved immense ice floes that squeezed and crushed their ships; summer overland treks featured mosquito swarms that blotted out the sun; everyone faced the likelihood of frostbite, scurvy, and starvation. Brandt pens a colorful narrative full of gothic horrors, quiet daring, and petty personality clashes, and probes the social meaning of these odysseys: to the explorers and the public that idolized them, the tacit point, he suggests, was to court danger as a proof of British grit and resolve. The result is a gripping—and sometimes appalling—tale of heroism and hubris. (Mar.)
212
Alafair Burke.
Harper, $24.99 (368p)
ISBN 978-0-06-156122-1
Alafair Burke’s third white-knuckle thriller finds NYPD Det. Ellie Hatcher (after Angel’s Tip) and her partner, J.J. Rogan, investigating the murder of NYU student Megan Gunther, who’s the target of threatening posts on a college gossip Web site. The death of bodyguard Robert “Robo” Mancini, whose bullet-ridden corpse turns up in a swanky new building, the 212, built by Sam Sparks, the high-powered Manhattan real-estate developer Robo worked for, ups the ante. When Sam makes it clear that the police won’t have access to any company records, Ellie’s interest is piqued. As she and J.J. try to piece together Megan’s life, they discover a link between the student and a recently murdered real estate agent. With her usual tenacity, Ellie pursues leads that put both her career and her life at risk. Burke expertly weaves real-life headlines into her plot—particularly the Craig’s List Killer and the slew of recent political scandals—without ever sacrificing originality.
Cemetery Road
Gar Anthony Haywood.
Severn, $28.95 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-7278-6851-0
Reverberations from a crime committed in their youth follow three grown men with the tenacity and inevitability of Greek tragedy in Haywood’s beautifully crafted novel of unintended consequences. The gunning down in Los Angeles 26 years later of one of the three, R.J. Burrow, prompts Errol “Handy” White to return to L.A. from St. Paul, Minn., to say good-bye and to discover if R.J.’s death was related to their crime. Handy reconnects with O’Neal Holden, the third member of the trio, who’s now mayor of nearby Bellwood. Haywood (All the Lucky Ones Are Dead) reaches new heights as he peels back the layers of a well-planned robbery to reveal its devastating ripple effects. These ripples spread like a hidden cancer that only reveals itself as Handy cautiously probes R.J.’s murder and the life that preceded it. Each of the three men feels the burden of guilt; each tries in some way to atone; but some wrongs can’t be righted.
