California

UNNATURAL HISTORY . . . Between the covers

Guilty pleasures? At my time of life, there should be no guilt involved. I have no intention of troubling the funeral director just yet, but I am nearly six years over my biblically allotted span and I will take every opportunity to enjoy my reading on my terms, and I do love a good series. Yes, I know the analogies – comfortable slippers, well-worn cardigan and all the rest. But why not? When time is not on one’s side, what is the point of enduring the pain of breaking in new shoes? Other metaphors are available, but here are a few of my favourite series by authors who are still with us.

With that heartfelt (not) apology out of the way, here’s my take on the latest Alex Delaware novel from Jonathan Kellerman, Unnatural History. Quick bio. of Dr Alex Delaware (who first appeared in 1985, so he is one of those characters for whom time stands still). He is a Los Angeles forensic psychologist, his live-in girlfriend is a builder/restorer of high end guitars and stringed instruments, and he is involved in crime due to his friendship with Detective Milo Sturgis who is gay, very smart, and a man who, if eating were an Olympic event, would be a multiple gold medal winner.

Adonis ‘Donny’ Klement, an artist who specialises in photography, has been found shot dead in his converted warehouse studio. Three bullets to the chest, bang, bang bang – a concise equilateral triangle. Donny is a member of a very unusual family. His father Viktor is an elusive and secretive billionaire businessman, so careful to escape publicity that not a single photograph of him exists. He has a strange habit. He marries, fathers a child, and then moves on. Donny was the latest progeny, but he had several half-siblings.

By all accounts, Donny was gentle, talented, but rather naive. His most recent project was called The Wishers. He recruited several homeless down-and-outs, dressed them in exotic and fantastical costumes,and photographed them. They were well paid, but was one of them deranged enough to come back and murder the man who, if only for a brief hour, had enabled them to act out their fantasies?

Delaware and Sturgis are convinced that the murder of Klement is connected with the street people he brought into his studio, and when one of them – a deaf mute woman called Jangles – is found strangled, it begins to look as if they are right. Or are they? There is an elegant and clever plot twist which confirms that they were, but not quite in the way they were expecting.

As well as Kellerman’s taut dialogue and plotting, we should not forget that he is up there with the best writers (including his contemporary Michael Connolly and the Master himself, Raymond Chandler) in bringing to life the dramatic contrasts of the LA landscape, with its beaches, grim neon strip-malls, spectacular hills and – more recently – the horrific shanty cities full of homeless down-and-outs. Yes, of course this is ‘formula fiction’, but it is also CriFi of the highest quality. Delaware and Sturgis are perfect partners; they are a long way from being ‘two peas in a pod’, but each feeds off the other’s strengths and abilities. Unnatural History is a riveting read, and will be available from Century/Penguin Random House from 16th February. Click the image below to read more reviews of books by Jonathan Kellerman.

February 13, 2023 0

HOT HOUSE . . . Between the covers

Mari E is an LA private investigator, distinctly low-rent to judge by her business premises, a converted container in a down-at-heel part of the city. Her premises neighbours are mostly scammers and grifters of one kind or another. She is a former government agent. She has been hired by an federal appellate judge to find out who is blackmailing him. Whoever it is wants her off the case and has been threatening her with anonymous notes. She is also certain she is being followed. For back-up she hires a partner, former LAPD detective, and now a PI himself, Derek Abernathy. He is very smart, though, and soon works out that Mari E leads a double life.

“So I have two jobs, what’s the big deal? A girl’s gotta make a living, right?”
“Jobs? More like lives,” he hissed back, pointing outside towards the parking lot.
“Mari E, as you call yourself, drives a fifteen year-old dented Honda and wears a weathered hoodie artificially inseminated with the smell of smoke and vanilla cologne. Mar-ISSA, on the other hand, drives a freaking Porsche and buys her eight-hundred-dollar Ferragamo shoes in Beverly Hills, which she wears to her Culver City art gallery!”

That is just a quick sample of the whip-crack dialogue in the book, which fizzles and sparks like electricity across terminals. Very soon Mari and Derek realise that the blackmailed judge is also connected to the unsolved murder of a French duel-passport student, Sophie Michaud, and the fate of two women journalists who investigated the case, one of whom is dead and the other missing.

Mari has her own crusade, which is related to her being shot while on a case twelve months or so previously. Her father resolved to take his own revenge on the European crime boss responsible, but neither has been seen since. She realises that if she can discover who killed Sophie, the rest of house of cards will come tumbling down. Big problem, though. She discovers that Sophie was not just one person. Yes, physically she was one body, but psychologically two separate beings lived under that particular roof, and were even known by different names – Sophie and Sasha. One was a dreamy and talented creative artist, while the other was a calculating sexual schemer who used information about potential blackmail victims with the ruthless logic of a criminal Marie Kondo.

Good crime writers can be lyrical when they need to be, and if there were any doubt that LIsa Towles is a genuine California Girl, this passage dispels it.

“There were some places where the quality of the light is always good, and others where it’s never quite right. Too bright to see an incoming text, too dark to find your keys in the bottom of your bag. Besides California, I’d lived in three other states, and somehow the light in LA had a quality that didn’t exist anywhere else. Sometimes the sun was so high and bright, it bled out all detail leaving a luminous silvery cloak over the sand and surf. Then at dusk, that same beachfront hides in climbing shadows, with only small details visible beneath the streetlamps. It was the unsinkable promise of light and dark that anchored me to this place, this stretch of rugged coastline with its seagulls and secrets.”

In the end, the blackmailer of the judge is located, and the killer of Sophie/Sasha is brought to justice, but with literally the last sentence, Lisa Towles poses another puzzle which will presumably be addressed in the next book. Hot House is everything a California PI novel should be. It has pace, great dialogue, totally credible characters and a pass-the-parcel mystery where Lisa Towles (right) has great fun describing how Ellwyn and Abernathy peel back the layers to get to the truth. Sure, the pair might not yet stand shoulder to shoulder with Marlowe, Spade and Archer, or even more modern characters like Bosch and Cole, but they have arrived, and something tells me they are here to stay.

Hot House is published by ‎ Indies United Publishing House, LLC, and will be available in the UK as a Kindle, audiobook and hardback from 15th June. The paperback was published in March. For my reviews of three earlier novels by Lisa Towles, just click on the cover images

June 2, 2022 0

CITY OF THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

This is another case for psychologist Professor Alex Delware and his buddy, LAPD cop Lieutenant Milo Sturgis. As ever, the book is brimming with all the joys of Californication – fake lifestyle gurus, washed-up former pop stars, bent lawyers, damaged families and dead bodies – always plenty of dead bodies. The first of these is of a young man, stark naked, who – in an apparent psychotic episode – runs out from a house in a smart district in the LA suburbs, at 4.00am – and straight into the side of a moving truck. Instant fatality.

When the cops investigate the house from which the young man ran, they find the second corpse of the morning, with her throat slit. She is – or rather was – Cordi Gannet. She made a decent living producing lifestyle videos for YouTube, full of cod psychology and trite advice about life improvement strategies. Her psychology degree was apparently bought mail-order from an on-line university, and when Alex Delaware gets to the scene with Milo, he remembers that he was once involved in a child custody case where Cordi Gannet was introduced as an expert witness – with disastrous consequences.

They soon find that Cordi Gannet’s family background was suitably California Chaotic – no known father, a mother who scraped by waiting tables until she got lucky and married an affluent surgeon. As for the young man, after much tail-chasing they learn that he was a harmless and affable young hairdresser who had something of a ‘gay-crush’ on Ms Gannet with all her pan flutes and whale songs, but had no obvious enemies.

The investigation meanders, slows – and then grinds to a halt. Delaware and Sturgis are sidetracked by another murder – the killing of a violent testosterone-fueled bodybuilder whose onetime business partner was a former adversary of Delaware’s in the family courts. This one they manage to crack, but it is not until Delaware goes back to the day job and begins consultation sessions with another pair of warring parents – one of whom was a near neighbour of Cordi Gannet, that the breakthrough comes.

Watching the Delaware-Sturgis partnership work on a case is fascinating. Yes, by my reckoning this is the 37th in the series. No, that’s not a typo. Thirty seven since their debut in When The Bough Breaks (1985). 1985. Blimey. Amongst other ground-breaking events in that year, I read that Playboy stopped stapling its centrefolds, the first episode of Eastenders was broadcast, and Freddie Mercury stole the show at Live Aid. But I digress.

There are no surprises in City of The Dead, at least in terms of the personal dynamics between the investigators. Delaware is super-cool, Sturgis has zero dress sense and is inveterate fridge raider, and the pair never really get ‘down and dirty’ with the criminals they hunt. In spite of the familiar formula, this is still a cracking read and cleverly plotted, with Kellerman (right) setting several snares for the unwary reader. City of The Dead is published by Century, and will be available from 17th February.

January 19, 2022 1

LOST SOULS . . . Between the covers

Lost Souls is something of an oddity, and no mistake. There’s nothing at all wrong with the novel itself apart from something of an identity crisis. Search for it on Amazon UK, and up it comes, but the page URL contains the title Half Moon Bay. Search for Half Moon Bay and up comes the same novel, but with a different cover. It looks as though Half Moon Bay is the Penguin Random House American title, while on this side of the Atlantic Century are going with Lost Souls.

Deputy US Coroner Clay Edison first appeared in Crime Scene (2017). That was followed by A Measure of Darkness in 2018, and now Edison returns but this time with baby Charlotte to look after when his wife is out on shift in her hospital. The Edisons live in that eternal bastion of West Coast sensibilities, Berkeley, and it is in the infamous People’s Park that the case begins.

Clay Edison is called to the park, scene of decades of hippy protest. Two bodies have been found during building excavation. The first is neither human nor animal. It is a stuffed blue teddy bear, missing an eye. The second is the skeleton of a baby, and the glare of the pathologist’s strip lights reveal that it was once a little boy. Edison is drawn into an investigation to see if the teddy bear and the boy are connected, and this means he has to visit a truly terrifying settlement of biker red-necks:

“I bounced along the tracks, wheels spitting gravel. Slowly the smudge began to resolve like a body surfacing in swamp water. Structures, then vehicles, then living things: gaunt dogs and children chasing one another, their roles as hunter or prey in constant flux. Bare feet raised a dusty haze. ….. Amid a weedy patch a woman slouched in a lawn chair. Pustulant acne ravaged her face; she could have been eighteen or forty. A slack-limbed toddler slept on her chest.”

As Edison tries to link the skeleton of the baby with the abandoned cuddly toy, he accepts an ‘off-the-books’ job. A wealthy businessman, Peter Franchette, asks him to try to find the truth about his missing sister. Possibly abducted, perhaps murdered, she has disappeared into a complexity of disfunctional family events – deaths, walkouts, divorces, remarriages and rejections.

The Kellermans clearly have an ambivalent view of Berkeley. A place perhaps, where a seventy-something former revolutionary might wake up and imagine, for a fleeting moment, before old age and reality kick in, that it is 1966, and everything is still possible. The reality is more sobering, however:

” … and the countless others, men and women alike, who’d found their way to the Pacific, only to find that it was not the golden bath they’d expected but a terrifying force of nature, immense and violent and indifferent.”

I’ll be blunt and say that I have never understood the concept of writing partnerships in fiction. Over many years I enjoyed Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware books. They are slick and formulaic, but never less than gripping, and it is obvious that Kellerman is a gifted writer. Why he should want to want to pair up with someone else – even if it is his son – is for him to know and me to be left wondering. Lost Souls reads as if it has been written by one person, so I suppose that is all that matters.

Lost Souls is cleverly written and has a plot which is, like Chandler’s immortal The Big Sleep, deeply complex. Rather like the anecdote which has Chandler being asked who killed the chauffeur, and him replying that he wasn’t sure, I couldn’t put my hand on my heart and say that Edison finds Peter Franchette’s missing sister. I think he does, but you must judge for yourselves.

Lost Souls and/or Half Moon Bay are out now, and available here.

August 10, 2020 1

WE CAN SEE YOU … Between the covers

Whatever your view on lifestyle coaches, they certainly have a market, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the ever-so-socially-aware state of California. Brook Connor may not have cornered that market, but she has a best-selling ‘how to come out on top’ guide to her name, as well as wealthy clients and a regular spot on TV. She may not have absolutely everything – after all, her husband is a failed movie actor-cum-tennis coach with a roving eye, but her bank balance is healthy, her home is valued in the millions, and she has an adorable five year-old daughter.

Correction. She did have an adorable five year-old daughter. She returns home after work one day to find both daughter Paige,and nanny Rosa gone, and a chilling note explaining that they have been taken. A severed finger inside a prettily decorated gift box persuades Brook that these people are not fooling around.

As ever in kidnap cases both real and fictional, the bad guys caution against any police involvement, and so Brook and husband Logan get the ransom money together and set off to make the exchange. Of course, the exchange doesn’t go to plan, and Brook is left concussed at the bottom of a gully out in the sticks, the money has gone, and there is the inconvenient matter of a body in the trunk of her SUV, lifeless mainly because of one of her own kitchen knives sticking out of his ribs.

Brook goes on the run, confounded by her initial decision not to involve the police, and also the discovery of the body in the trunk of her car. There is nothing the media loves more than a celebrity criminal, and soon her face is plastered over every news channel. Armed only with her own automatic sidearm and a blazing desire to find her daughter, she leads the law enforcement agencies a merry dance until her race against time comes to an abrupt and bloody end in the personal gym of a notorious ‘businessman’ with links to the infamous cartels from south of the border, down Mexico way.

Kernick very cleverly uses a split time narrative, with one showing Brook in custody facing multiple murder raps, and another detailing the events which have led to her arrest. He is not done with us, though; a seismic plot shift leads to a dramatic conclusion which even Nostradamus would not have seen coming.

This is breaking-the-sound-barrier thriller fiction at its very best; Kernick doesn’t miss a trick, and gives us the works – crooked cops, a body in the freezer, an embittered PI, an omnipotent and sadistic drug overlord (Mexican,of course), a kidnapped child and that most dangerous of creatures, a powerful female determined to protect her young. We Can See You is published by Century and is out today, 29^thNovember.

November 28, 2018 0

AT WHAT COST … Between the Covers

Sacramento. Capital city of California. Named after its river, which was in turn named after the most holy offering in the Catholic liturgy. But there is nothing sacred and everything profane about the butchered corpse found on the river levee. Maybe ‘corpse’ is the wrong word for what lies at Detective John Penley’s feet. The pouring rain, caught in the glare of the crime scene halogen lights, patters remorselessly on a headless, limbless trunk. It had been a man. And that man, judging by the Aztec inspired tattoo spreading over what is left of the chest, was a member of a Latino gang, The West Block Norteños.

The remains of Daniel Cardozo are hauled off to the city morgue to join those of several of his professional associates who have met a similar fate in recent months. Penley and his new partner Detective Paula Newberry know only that the killer is also a butcher, perhaps not by trade, but certainly by intent. They also become aware that the human remains are minus their soft tissue organs – hearts, livers, kidneys.

Newberry and Penley make an uneasy pair. Newberry, because she is treated like a leper by fellow officers ever since she orchestrated a surveillance sting that ended the careers of a couple of corrupt cops in the department. And Penley? His mind is forever straying to thoughts about his young son Tommy whose life is slowly but inexorably drifting away as he waits his turn for a kidney transplant.

As the tale unfolds, there are echoes of England’s infamous and unsolved Whitechapel Murders. As with the person who slaughtered prostitutes in that fateful London autumn of 1888, Penley’s killer seems to have more than a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy. And, like the detectives in Victorian London, Penley is actually sent a kidney as a taunt, but unlike the Ripper’s handiwork, the one Penley receives is most definitely human.

L’Etoile’s story rapidly adds an extra dimension to the standard hunt for a ruthless serial murderer, as it become a medical thriller, too. The villain is, we soon learn, harvesting organs for the lucrative international trade in spare body parts. Like so many other aspects of life, the search for viable organs operates on two levels; the first is, of course, the regular – and highly regulated – world of transplant waiting lists; the second operates within the freemasonry of hard cash, and the opportunities afforded to unscrupulous traders – and their desperate customers – by The Dark Web.

It all too quickly becomes horribly personal for Penley and his family. His son narrowly avoids being given an intentionally damaged kidney, and it is clear that the detective’s personal anguish has handed the killer an invaluable tool with which he can torment the man whose professional job it has become to unmask him and bring him to justice. With someone hacking into hospital records and falsifying clinical data, Penley runs out of people he can trust, and is forced to play a dangerous game of deception with the killer, his colleagues and – worst of all – his own family.

The author (right) certainly knows his way around the American justice system, with his background in probation, parole, investigation and prison operation. An experienced Associate Warden, Chief of Institution Operations, Hostage Negotiator and Director of Parole, he has also done extensive homework on the medical background to the complex world of organ donation and transplants. The plot rattles along with scarcely a breath being drawn, and in Penley and Newberry, L’Etoile has created a partnership which is complex and attractive enough to feature in more adventures further down the line.