STREETS ON FIRE, by John Shannon (Otto Penzler/Carroll & Graf)
Apocalypses of all sorts—from earthquakes to toxic clouds—frame the vision of Los Angeles shown in the blunt and brilliant crime novels of John Shannon, so when his Jack Liffey notices “dark columns of smoke rising up and then shearing off westward at several points in South Central, offerings unacceptable to the gods” quite early in this fifth book in the series, you know that fiery hell is soon to break loose. Michael Connelly’s best-selling L.A. cop is named after the painter Hieronymus Bosch, but Shannon’s backgrounds are straight out of Goya—savagely sardonic comments on the quirks of life. Watching a parade of African-Americans protesting police brutality, Liffey is amazed to see the marchers suddenly break step and execute a perfect pair of Zulu war kicks. “Even here in the world of cell phones and MTV, the Zulu strut carried a kind of bizarre menace, as if thrusting onlookers into a dimension where ordinary defenses might not work.”
Liffey, who specializes in finding missing children, knows from the start that the pair of lost young people he has been hired to trace this time are almost certainly dead: the black boy and his white girlfriend have disappeared after a run-in with a racist motorcycle gang called the Bone Losers—so far down on the mental food chain that they can’t even spell their chosen name right. But the boy is the adopted, much-loved son of a famous activist couple in South Central, and his detective friend Ivan Monk (on loan from Gary Phillips’s excellent series) recommends Liffey for the job.
As it turns out, the search is anything but straightforward, especially when another adopted child—heartbreakingly lonely and articulate—points out to Jack that the missing white girl might be the key. Shannon steers his detective through minefields of Christian white supremacists and black nationalists with a great deal of angst but also a surprising amount of wry humor. “He didn’t think he had ever before gotten himself into a situation quite as ludicrous as this: a white man in old VW with Rustoleum red fenders parked in the heart of a full-bore riot in a black area to defend a black man from other white men who were—perhaps—sneaking up on the neighborhood. It was like zebras trying to slip into the middle of a high school prom to stage a duel…”
SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI, by Naomi Hirahara (Delta)
Talk about an unlikely hero for a mystery: Mas Arai is a hard-headed 69-year-old Japanese-American gardener living alone in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena. His income and his health are failing; his beloved wife (who kept him mostly on the straight and narrow by discouraging his worst habits) is dead; his estranged daughter is living in New York where she’s about to have a baby—a fact that Mas has to discover from a family friend.
But Mas has hidden strengths and a terrifying past: born in California, he was one of many who went back to live in Japan during the Great Depression—and the city where his family settled was Hiroshima. When Mas returned to California as a young man, his scars were not on the surface (unlike those of his best friend, Haruo, who still wears his hair long to hide the burns from what the Japanese call the
pikadon—
the 1945 atomic bomb which leveled the city), but more than 50 years later his soul is still tortured by the event.
Arai’s summer of the big
bachi
(a blast of really bad karma) begins when two visitors from Japan—a sleek and dangerous private detective and an appealing young journalist—show up at his door, looking for another friend who survived the Hiroshima bomb. Mas hasn’t seen or heard from Joji Haneda, who owns a plant nursery in Ventura, for many years, but the mention of his name brings back many bad memories and one frightful shared secret.
In her first novel, Naomi Hirahara uses a wealth of fascinating historic and social details (Mas’s mixed feelings about another friend who still takes pride in having fought as an American soldier against Japan in World War II, for example) to create an original and exciting mystery. But her real strength is the way she keeps the background from taking over a poignant story of loyalty and betrayal, full of real people who could be ourselves.
THE ENEMY, by Lee Child (Delacorte)
When did it begin, this fascination among writers of mysteries and thrillers with prequels—taking their main characters back to earlier parts of their lives? Did the “Star Wars” phenomenon have something to do with it? The high-flying and justifiably lauded Lee Child is the latest to succumb to this trend: his eighth book about former military policeman Jack Reacher happens in the first few days of 1990—when Major Reacher is still a top Army cop, abruptly and apparently randomly yanked back from Panama and the anti-Noriega Operation Just Cause to thankless duty at Fort Bird, in North Carolina.
The death by heart attack of a two-star general in a nearby motel sets Reacher off on a beautifully-structured and increasingly exciting search for enemies—most of them inside the U.S. military hierarchy, men who are twisting and struggling to become top dogs in a changing world. Jack finds out that he was one of 20 similarly high-ranked MPs who were shuffled around the globe at the same time—but that it’s his own transfer which holds the key to the puzzle.
As Child builds suspense in a deceptively spare, wiry prose style that doesn’t waste a word or miss a trick, we learn more about his older brother, Joe—a mysterious government official who played a vital part in the Reacher series’ first outing, “Killing Floor.” We also find out much more about the Reacher boys’ French mother—mentioned in passing in previous books, now seen bravely dying in Paris. “All my life I had assumed I was what I was because of my father, the career Marine,” Jack says. “Now I felt different genes stirring… [My mother] had lived through desperate times and she had stepped up and done what was necessary. At that moment I started to miss her more than I would have thought possible…”
In the end, “The Enemy” is a book about loss, not a slick explanation of future behavior. Aided in great measure by a very interesting young black female MP named Summer, Reacher does his job and puts together the pieces of a puzzle linking the dead general and the murder of a tough veteran Special Ops officer who had to hide his sexuality. But there is no glory for Jack in the victory, because his life as a soldier is effectively over. “Both of my families were disappearing out from under me, one because of simple relentless chronology, and the other because its reliable old values seemed suddenly to be evaporating. I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night…”
THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA, by Jamie Metzl (St. Martin’s)
Not to burden Jamie Metzl’s first book with too heavy a load of literary ancestors, but the political power and poetry of Graham Greene (“The Quiet American”) and Charles McCarry (“The Tears of Autumn”) pervade this superlative thriller set in the chaos of Vietnam and Cambodia. There’s also a strong sense of “The Death and Life of Dith Pran ,” by Sydney Schanberg, which became the film “The Killing Fields.” Add to this a rare talent for making characters determined to change the world quickly win our sympathies in spite of their occasionally irritating self-righteousness, and you have a potent package indeed.
Metzl, who worked as a United Nations Human Rights Officer in Cambodia and is now running for a Missouri Congressional seat, introduces us to a young CIA desk officer named Morgan O’Reilly. In 1971, Morgan—whose own early family life was strained and stiff—is put in charge of an unusual project: to round up a gang of Cambodian street orphans living rough in Phnom Penh and turn them into useful spies against the increasingly powerful communist forces known as the Khmer Rouge. Four years later, as Vietnam and Cambodia crumble, O’Reilly is forced to leave the boys behind, using his remaining influence to get them out of the capital to a city nearer to the Thai border—where they might at least have a small chance of escaping.
But Morgan has formed a strong bond with one of the boys, a 14-year-old expert pickpocket named Sophal, and at the moment of departure he gives the boy his own American passport, doctored with a new picture and a changed name. Then O’Reilly goes through a hellish escape of his own, finally getting out of Cambodia and returning to his increasingly depressing intelligence job in Washington.
What sends Morgan back to Cambodia in 1979 makes up the rest of Metzl’s imaginative, heartbreaking story: political manipulation at a very high level; the search for a surrogate son thought lost forever; the presence of young Americans committed to helping correct what they see as the wrongs of history. Once again, this sounds like a heavy load for a thriller to carry. It is, but Metzl adds enough old-fashioned excitement to pull it off.
TERMINAL ISLAND, by John Shannon (Otto Penzler/Carroll & Graf)
How much punishment can Jack Liffey take? John Shannon’s morose, fussily introspective, absolutely riveting private detective is already having trouble recovering from the collapsed lung and mental breakdown he suffered in his last outing, “City of Strangers”—not to mention the reminders of such previous injuries as “a metal plate in his head, a rib with a titanium peg in it, a star-shaped scar on his shoulder, and a bad Frankenstein stitch down one leg”—when he goes against his doctor’s (and his shrink’s) orders to take on a new case which starts, like all of Liffey’s bad trips, with a child in trouble.
Fortunately for us, the boy in question—kidnapped and bound by a mysterious ninja, who leaves cute Japanese playing cards as warnings—lives in San Pedro, that spiky working class Los Angeles neighborhood which is the city’s last bastion of 1930s radicalism. Jack grew up there with the boy’s father as well as with the disgruntled cop on the case (whose prized model railway is soon destroyed by the ninja), and Liffey’s racist father
Declan still lives there, cursing anyone who isn’t white.
San Pedro and its blighted seaside industrial offshoot called Terminal Island are the real stars of the story, bringing back some memories which Jack would prefer to leave behind as well as some of the supremely gifted author’s most telling descriptions of a city whose past history is short but grim. “Then there were the shipyards and the dark glamour of Beacon Street, the tattoo parlors and mission hotels and a bar named Shanghai Red’s, where men had once actually been shanghaied,” Liffey muses with remorseful affection.
Shannon in his seven books about Jack Liffey has created a truly unique vision of Los Angeles. It’s a place where strange, never fully explained visual images roll across the landscape: a pair of giant, escaped pigs elude cops and shut down a freeway offramp; a Rose Bowl-type float turns out to be a tribute to dead gang members. His eye is as dark as any writer’s, but it’s also one tinged with a wry chuckle of constant amazement.
ECHO BAY, by Richard Barre (Capra Press)
The wounded hero—physically, mentally, spiritually—has become such a cliché of the mystery/thriller genre that it takes a brave and talented writer to keep us reading. Luckily, Richard Barre has both qualities to spare. And his first stand-alone novel—a break in his splendid, Shamus Award-winning Wil Hardesty series—has another great advantage. It’s set in and around Lake Tahoe, that magical body of water which straddles the California-Nevada border and is dark and deep enough to make it the perfect breeding spot for Loch Ness-type legends.
Was there really a luxurious lakeboat called the Constance, which after 40 years of delight and decay was scuttled in Tahoe’s Echo Bay by its lumber tycoon owner in 1940? Barre certainly makes us believe there was, dropping his Shawn Rainey into a pitched battle to finally raise the boat using new deepwater techniques.
Rainey is an unwillingly returned Tahoe native, once a prodigiously talented skier who blew out his knee just before the Sarajevo Olympic trials, now a failed father whose children are being held hostage by his former slimeball public relations employer in return for Shawn’s involvement in the scheme to raise the Constance. Against him stand a larger collection of formidable opponents than anyone outside a video game should be expected to handle: the lumber tycoon’s powerful daughter, who wants the secrets of the past to remain several hundred feet underwater; a drunken old friend now married to Rainey’s increasingly desperate childhood lover; a local cop who can never forgive Shawn’s involvement in the death of Rainey’s much-admired older brother who was the cop’s best friend. Fortunately for Shawn and readers who might find all this angst too much to swallow, his working class father offers terse support while a sexy bartender signs on for other kinds of succor.
But the heart of the book is Lake Tahoe itself. “At the base of the slope ending at North Lake, Tahoe stretched on its 22-by-12-mile axis toward South Shore,” Barre writes with the sense of wonder that captures almost everyone the first time they see it. “Even at this distance, Harrah’s and Harvey’s and Caesar’s and whoever else by now had convinced the powers that tall was better reflected back at him. And, in between, the most impossible water he’d seen before or since, a shifting palette of emerald sliding over into blue and, finally, indigo where the real depths, the 1600s, began.”
EARTHQUAKE WEATHER, by Terrill Lee Lankford (Ballantine)
Terrill Lee Lankford’s sharp and subtle new mystery is marinated in the brine of the movie business. It’s no coincidence that the screenplay for Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” is one of the literary sorbets which “development boy” Mark Hayes uses to cleanse his palate after workdays spent reading garbage for his boss—a nasty, successful producer of action shlock named Dexter Morton. “Sunset Boulevard” has the same kind of sinuous love-hate relationship with moviemaking as Lankford’s book: Hayes knows he’s up to his shoulders in a very distasteful enterprise, and can’t wait to get in even deeper.
“Earthquake Weather” begins explosively with a gripping account of the deadly 1994 Northridge quake: Hayes’s apartment in the San Fernando Valley is badly damaged, so he joins a hitherto unmet neighbor for a pot of coffee. This caffeine samaritan turns out to be a former hotshot film and TV writer named Clyde McCoy, who plays an important part in the ensuing action. The vicious, easily recognizable Morton winds up dead in his own swimming pool after a big birthday party, and McCoy—who knows where several of the producer’s shadier deals are buried—becomes a leading suspect.