Annals of New Jersey Crime

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The Trenton, N.J., Times, recently devoted several pages to a true-crime mystery from the Garden State. Reporter Rebecca Everett detailed the investigation and failed prosecutions of the murder of 77-year-old John Kingsbury. Kingsbury died on Super Bowl Sunday 2012 at his home in Mullica, a rural township in New Jersey’s Pinelands area. His son Glenn, who returned home and discovered the body, as well as first responders, thought a fall or stroke accounted for the blood on and around the elderly man’s head. None of them saw the bullet holes from a gun described as “small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.”

Glenn and his girlfriend, Karen Drew, cleaning up, found two spent .380 shell casings and called emergency services immediately. Too late. John died before reaching the hospital, and they had just cleaned up a murder scene. Now, eleven years later, no one has been convicted of John Kingsbury’s murder. Reporter Everett says the cold case is “filled with enough shocking twists, shadowy characters and law enforcement bungling to fill a ‘Knives Out’ sequel.”

Who are John and Glenn Kingsbury?

John Kingsbury was a retired RCA electronics specialist, a member of Mensa, and Korean War veteran who trained K-9s. In shaky health, he’d moved to New Jersey a few months before his death to live with his son. Glenn and Karen own lucrative cheerleading event companies Cheer Tech and Spirit Brands. When they return home after a typical event, they’re holding tens of thousands of dollars in cash. “Anyone who worked with them would know that,” Everett wrote, “Including Michael Castro.”

Robbery seemed the likely motive.

The Crime

John Kingsbury was at home alone when the killer or killers arrived at the family home. There was no weekend’s worth of event receipts, Karen Drew had already taken them to the bank.

Police found no indication of a break-in, and nothing appeared to be missing, but, unexpectedly, the video surveillance system had been disabled. Karen’s suspicion immediately fell on Castro, who she said had been pestering her that afternoon with cell phone calls about her and family members’ whereabouts. What’s more, Castro owed Glenn several thousand dollars, some of which he’d used to set up a mixed martial arts studio.

After the lead detective, Michael Mattioli, interviewed Castro four days after the killing, Castro immediately called a Camden County Sheriff’s Officer he knew, Lauren Kohl. It wasn’t until after she was contacted by Mattioli that Kohl reported two handguns missing from her home.

An Investigation Botched from the Start

The Atlantic County prosecutors worked on the case against Michael Castro for more than a year, in an investigation “torpedoed by errors and oversights,” Everett was told. Among them:

  • Investigators lost track of John’s cellphone, so it couldn’t be analyzed for years
  • They had a warrant to search Castro’s vehicle, but didn’t do it
  • They didn’t ask the medical examiner to estimate the time of the shooting
  • They didn’t collect surveillance footage from area stores that might have confirmed whether Castro (or other possible suspects) were in the area
  • They didn’t subpoena the cellphones of other possible suspects to confirm their locations
  • And, when it appeared one of Lauren Kohl’s missing handguns might be the murder weapon (and eventually was proved to be, on what basis is unclear, as the gun is apparently still missing), it was months before investigators actually followed up with her.

During this period, the prosecutor’s office had internal organizational problems, handing off the Kingsbury murder to three separate lead investigators in just over a year. Months passed between any investigatory actions they logged, with much not logged at all. The cellphone evidence fell apart. Stories changed. New suspects emerged, fogging the investigatory lenses.

Tomorrow: Michael Castro’s Day—Make that Decade—in Court

Thanks, Ellery Queen!

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As always, the Jan-Feb issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine is packed with good reading. Here are some of the standout stories for me:

“The Killing of Henry Davenport” by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan – Admittedly, this story, set in London in 1924, was bound to be a hit with me, as it involves both Sherlock Holmes and my favorite detective, Dee Goong An (hearkening back to a real-life personage from the Tang Dynasty). Holmes, Watson, Dee, and the narrator, Lao She (another real-life character), set out to solve an English murder in which a Chinese man stands accused. The story is a foretaste of a new project Rozan is working on that fans (me!) eagerly await.

“The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow” by Sean McCluskey – It’s always fun to see a nicely crafted story in the mag’s Department of First Stories. A hint of more good stuff to come. And I’m easily seduced by a con job where the question of who’s being conned is up for grabs. Nice!

“The Bowser Boys Are Back in Town” by Hal Charles – You can expect some humor in a story that begins, “Like a loud rooster, the bomb in Beverly Dezarn Memorial Park awoke the entire town of Woodhole . . .” The bad-luck Bowser duo is on what turns out to be an all-too-brief (for them) return home from jail, but it looks like they’re headed back to the slammer.

“Can the Cat Catch the Rat” by Steve Hockensmith – This is another in his entertaining series about Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer, tyro detectives in an Old West where the frequent shenanigans offers steady employment. The surprise in this episode is that Old Red has finally agreed to let Big Red teach him to read. However, identifying the counterfeit coins someone’s producing requires nothing more than a healthy set of teeth.

Read these and more good stories in EQMM. Subscribe here!

Newman and Woodward: Acting Up!

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This week in New Plaza Cinema’s entertaining lecture series on the movies and the people who made them, film historian and author Max Alvarez talked about the 50-year creative partnership between Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, illustrated with numerous film clips. More than half a century ago (can this be true?) Paul Newman became my favorite actor with his portrayal of Ari Ben Canaan in Exodus, a status he cemented the next year in The Hustler.

So many of his great roles, were in the late 1950s and 60s (Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [1958], Hud in Hud, Luke in Cool Hand Luke, Butch in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Henry Gondorff in The Sting, Frank Galvin in The Verdict [1982]). Just the films mentioned garnered him twenty-five major award nominations, including seven Academy Award Best Actor nominations. Yet he didn’t receive an Oscar until 1986, for reprising his Hustler role as Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money.

While Newman was a dominant screen presence in those years, Woodward stayed more in the background, keeping her career secondary to her family role. (The couple has three daughters.) Nevertheless, accolades came early for Woodward. She won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her performance in The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Over his career, Newman acted in 57 feature films, and she in 27. They worked together—as actors, or with him directing—on 14 projects.

Newman and Woodward both arrived in New York in 1951, and, two years later, they met as understudies in Josh Logan’s Picnic, which gave Newman his Broadway debut. He arrived after Yale Drama School, and she, five years younger, studied in New York with Sanford Meisner in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. She never completely lost her Georgia accent. Though they both worked on Broadway, they’re best known for films. As Alvarez emphasized, in that era, Hollywood was willing to produce a fair amount of serious adult drama, many based on literary works, which was lucky for them.

Alvarez found screen tests of each of them with James Dean for the 1955 film, East of Eden, based on the John Steinbeck novel. Judging by their tests, either or both of them might have been at least as good as Elia Kazan’s ultimate picks, Richard Davalos and Julie Harris. (Commentators frequently note that Dean’s untimely death opened up roles for Newman that otherwise might have gone to the then better-known actor.)

Newman and Woodward’s first film together was The Long, Hot Summer (1958)(trailer), based on William Faulkner’s stories. During filming, they became a couple. Newman, already married with three children, needed a divorce before he and Woodward could wed.

Other notable collaborations for the pair were 1959’s From the Terrace (trailer), based on a John O’Hara novel. It was filmed mostly in New York to accommodate Newman’s Broadway acting schedule for Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. In 1961, they appeared together in Paris Blues (trailer), with Newman on the trombone and Sidney Poitier on the saxophone. A jazz aficionado says Newman faked it pretty well. Newman directed Woodward in the low-budget Rachel, Rachel (1968)(interview with Newman and trailer), based on a novel by Margaret Laurence. The movie turned out to be both an artistic and surprise financial success. It was Newman’s directorial debut and led to his winning the Golden Globe and NY Film Critics Circle Award. Woodward also won those two awards. He also directed her in a 1986 film version of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (full movie), which features a young John Malkovich (worth seeing for that alone!).

Their final film together was the 1990 Merchant/Ivory production, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (trailer), about a sheltered Kansas City couple who must grapple with the profound social changes surrounding World War II. To keep costs down, the film was shot in real locations in Kansas City and received donations of costumes and props, modest and not-so: 100 gallons of paint from Benjamin Moore and a dozen Tiffany lamps and 1930s paintings from a local law firm, for example. Woodward’s performance was especially praised. The New York Times said “there is a reserve, humor and desperation in their characterizations that enrich the very self-conscious flatness of the narrative terrain around them.”

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Binge or Nibble? Watching Slow Horses

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A new season of the wildly (and deservedly) popular British TV series Slow Horses puts fans like me in a quandary (trailer). Do watch the whole thing in can’t-get-enough mode, or do I parcel it out, one or two episodes a week, to make the experience last longer? I did wait until the distractions of the December holidays were over before starting the new season, and so far, I’m taking it slow. But when an episode’s closing credits roll, it isn’t easy to turn away.

If you’re a fan of British crime/spy/mystery dramas, you probably already know that Slow Horses is based on the Slough House novels of Mick Herron. The first season aired on Apple TV+ last spring (6 episodes) and the current season began in December (6 more).

The premise is that MI5 agents who’ve messed up in some way are transferred to Slough House, where the “slow horses” are put out to pasture. There, under the harassing oversight of profane and obnoxious Jackson Lamb, they receive mind-numbingly dull assignments in the hope they will quit the service altogether. With everything going on in the world and in the U.K., MI5 faces innumerable internal security challenges. Even agents on the far fringes of the security establishment can find work to do.

New Yorker staff writer and historian Jill Lepore spent time with Herron recently and her article on Herron appears in the December 5 edition of the magazine.

Apparently the books were a bit of a hard sell in the beginning. Publishers didn’t know what to make of it. Too much humor. “Is this a thriller or is it comedy?” In fact, the audio narrators say they have to stop recording occasionally, so they can laugh off-mike. The Daily Telegraph has called Slow Horses one of the best spy novels ever written and Herron is widely considered the heir-apparent to the late John le Carré. Heavy burden, that.

What makes the books and the tv show so irresistible are the great characters. And, in the tv version, the cast is absolutely up to it. Lepore says Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman, who makes Colombo look like a fashion plate) is “an old joe who’s straight out of Dickens, if Dickens had ever invented a character who used the word ‘twat’ all the time.” A decade ago, Oldman received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of George Smiley in le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. According to Lepore, Oldman believes Jackson Lamb “is Smiley if everything had gone wrong, although arguably, everything has.” In the age of Brexit, she says, Lamb is like Britain—“angry, embarrassed, and coming apart at the seams.”

If you’ve missed the books or tv series so far, do yourself a favor and get acquainted. And don’t miss the show’s theme music sung by Herron fan Mick Jagger. Just the right notes of discord and the impression everything is going off the rails.

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Travel Tips: Central Michigan’s Cops & Doughnuts

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Are you interested in crime, policing, food, or colorful roadside attractions? You’ll want to know about Cops & Doughnuts bakery in Clare, Michigan. Yes, it’s for real!

For many years, the bakery was a favorite stop for the members of the Clare Police Department. But, in 2009, after 113 years in business, the bakery was within weeks of shutting down. And it would have closed, if all nine members of the Clare Police Department hadn’t come to the rescue. They saved it, expanding the business to a second store-front, The Cop Shop, and now a third, with outposts in Gaylord, Bay City, Mt. Pleasant, and Midland, Michigan.

Named after Ireland’s County Clare, the town contains Lake Shamrock, as well as a branch of the less salubrious-sounding Tobacco River. The town (population 3,254) is pretty near the geographic center of Michigan’s lower peninsula. The largest nearby city is Mt. Pleasant, 15 miles south. As it’s located on a main route to the popular year-round Michigan vacation spot, Houghton Lake, Clare seems like it would be an attractive stop for a leg-stretch, bathroom break, and chocolate glazed.

Even more to the point, Clare has underworld connections. Reportedly, Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang occasionally hung out there once upon a time. In the Prohibition era, this criminal mob of mostly Jewish bootleggers and gangsters was the principal gang in the city of Detroit. Some 25,000 illegal saloons in the city created a large market for bootleg liquor. Rumor has it, gang members would hide in the bakery’s basement coal bin when the heat was on.

Cops & Doughnuts today? It’s reportedly very safe.

The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave

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What I like about the two Paul Cleave thrillers I’ve read is how he ties social behavior into the story of a crime and investigation. In his work, Internet frenzies make bad situations worse, leaving me thinking, “Oh, yeah. I can see that happening.”

In the first book of his I read, The Quiet People, a couple suspected of harming their child is besieged by angry would-be vigilantes camping out in front of their home. Suspicions inflamed by social media are enough to produce a crowd edging toward violence. The Pain Tourist touches on people’s fascination with true-crime stories and their willingness to believe they are competent and informed enough to become investigators themselves. You’ve seen this in action if you watched the discovery+ channel’s 2021 series Citizen P.I. In the official confusion and near-vacuum of information after the recent killings at the University of Idaho, the amateurs stepped in.

Amateurs have provided helpful information in a number of instances. They’re good at code-cracking, occasionally find missing persons, and willing to delve into cold cases. But more ambitious self-assigned tasks, such as identifying pedophiles and targeting presumed perpetrators can get dangerous for both the citizen and the accused, who may, in fact, be innocent. This is particularly so when accusers decide to take action.

Authorities worry they can jam up an investigation, overwhelming police with “tips” that need to be checked out (more than 6,000 in the Idaho case in the first three weeks after the crimes). In Cleave’s writing, these true crime devotees are pain tourists.

Taut. Twisty. Propulsive. You can trot out all the cliches regularly used to describe thriller fiction and use them with abandon for The Pain Tourist.

A home invasion leaves Frank and Avah Garrett dead. Nine years later, their 19-year-old son, James, remains in a coma with a bullet wound to the brain, and their 14-year-old daughter, Hazel, is trying to piece a life together. The three men seen running from the Garrett home have never been identified.

While Christchurch Detective Rebecca Kent investigates a serial murderer case, alternating chapters provide insight into what’s going on inside James’s head. A lot, and it’s fascinating. His mind is constructing an alternative reality – one in which his parents don’t die and he and Hazel carry on their lives as they would have been. Eight years and 10 months after the attack, in the now of the novel, James wakes up.

As he describes his memories during those years, Hazel and his doctor see correlations with real-life events. James calls what’s in his head Coma World. In Coma World, he had adventures that drew from the books Hazel read to him. The dates he believes certain events occurred match reality. Naturally, the police want to talk to him to find out whether this amazing memory contains clues from that fatal night. He agrees to try. It’s an intriguing possibility, with loads of implications.

Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent is assigned to James’s case, and because her old friend, retired Detective Inspector Theodore Tate, worked the original case, she gets in touch. He’s now working as a technical advisor for true crime television shows, and Cleave nicely portrays the rise in true crime ‘entertainments’, the dark side of the audience obsession and the shamelessness of the media.

Cleave has a special talent for misdirection, which you don’t fully appreciate until near the book’s end, when several investigations start to come together most satisfactorily. Kent and Tate share one serious concern, that the men who killed James’s parents will come back to finish the job.

Rebecca Kent and Theodore Tate are solidly written characters. Hazel and James’s relationship is especially close, a cup of kindness in a vat of cruelty. James and his prodigious abilities form a completely believable, highly sympathetic character. And, along the way, numerous minor characters are given enough detail for plausibility. Maybe the bad guys are a bit too irredeemable, though that merely raises the stakes. This is a fast-moving, engaging story that has something to say and is hard to put down.

Read more:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases, by Deborah Halber – “Part whodunit, part sociological study . . . The result is eminently entertaining.”

The Lie Detector’s Big Lie

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The fascinating American Experience documentary on the checkered history of the lie detector reveals that three separate men figure in the development of this flawed technology—ubiquitous in mid-century crime stories, television dramas, and still a staple of law enforcement and the intelligence community. Nevertheless, the physiological measures the polygraph records have not proved to demonstrate untruthfulness, the technology is easily defeated, it has failed in numerous significant cases, and it never met the objectivity test, either, as the behavior and skill of the examiner also influence the results.

Like so many disastrous inventions, the development of a machine that could tell truth from falsehood began with a laudable purpose. In the early 20th century, the brutal methods the police used to get information, known as the 3d degree, made a safe, “scientific,” and presumably objective way to obtain information seem like a good idea. Certain physiological measures (breathing and heart rate, blood pressure, etc.) had been put forward as markers of truth-telling, and medical student John Larson created a machine that would combine them. Each might be weak by itself, but together, they could create a powerful tool. Working for the Berkeley, California, Police Department, along with a high school student, Leonarde Keeler, Larson developed his prototype.

Larson’s first case revealed what would turn out to be his invention’s biggest flaw. Valuables were disappearing from a women’s dormitory on the Berkeley campus. Larson tested all of the residents, identified the culprit, and she left campus. Later she wrote Larson saying she was innocent, but had been abused as a child and feared his machine would betray her secret.

A second researcher, William Marston of American University, created a cruder machine, but convinced prosecutors to use it during a trial. Even today, some jurisdictions allow polygraph results to be used in the courtroom, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1998 conclusion that they are “little better than could be obtained by the toss of a coin.”

Interestingly, both Larson and Marston ended up in Hollywood, where motion picture moguls wanted to measure how their films affected audience emotions. Neither lasted there. Today, Marston is best remembered as the creator of the comic book character Wonder Woman, who readily solved her creator’s shortcomings with her golden Lasso of Truth.

Later, Larson’s former assistant, Keeler, promoted his own machine, which he called the polygraph. He touted its infallibility to banks and retail outlets, who grabbed the opportunity to screen their employees on a regular basis. Eventually, hundreds of thousands of American workers were subjected to polygraphs, until most private employer screening was outlawed. Screening of national security and public safety personnel continues in some jurisdictions. (Note that polygraph use, certainly on such a widespread basis, is an almost wholly American phenomenon.)

When Congressman Richard Nixon challenged Alger Hiss to take a lie detector test, it wasn’t because Nixon believed in the technology, it was because he knew the public did. Hiss’s refusal sealed his fate and helped launch an era of using the polygraph as a tool for intimidation. With this development, Larson believed his invention had become a “Frankenstein’s monster.” This scene from The Wire, perfectly demonstrates how the unquestioning faith in “lie detectors” can be a tool for manipulation.

The truth is that, even though the polygraph is next-to useless in detecting lies, people harbor secrets. And they fear the technology will reveal them.

Art by George Pérez

Favorite Literary Detectives–Who’s Yours?

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Last month The Guardian asked a number of today’s best crime writers to ID their favorite literary detectives. This is what they said:

John Banville became a crime novel devotee when he met Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the pages of The Big Sleep. He admits Marlowe is “his creator’s dream version of himself: tough, but tender too, wised up but not cynical, a private eye who has read a book.” Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, favorite of author Dreda Say Mitchell, seems to me to similarly represent authorial wish-fulfillment.

Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder—ex New York cop cum private eye—was the choice of Ian Rankin. He says Scudder is a detective with all of the conventional baggage, yet achieving “the perfect hardboiled mix of grit and poetry: cool jazz with surface noise.” Rankin’s own protagonist John Rebus would get this.

Mark Billingham credits Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade with launching the American hardboiled private eye genre in The Maltese Falcon. Yet, the book’s “most enduring mystery” is Spade himself, a character with much more going on than what is revealed on the page. Perhaps this contributes to the perennial appeal of Sherlock Holmes, too (what is going on in that head of his?), the choice of author Saima Mir.

Australian author Chris Hammer’s detective Nell Buchanan is the pick of Ann Cleeves, while Val McDermid’s favorite is Scottish writer Josephine Tey’s chameleonlike Inspector Alan Grant, who appeared in six novels from 1929 to 1952. He’s featured in Tey’s 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time, selected by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time. OK, I’m ordering it.

Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and even Jessica Fletcher were cited by several of the authors and are beloved by readers of all ages. I most resonated with Stella Duffy’s choice, Trixie Belden, a pre-teen favorite at my house. “almost always fierce and brave, confronting what she saw as injustice.”

David Baldacci picked Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, popular heir to the Los Angeles mean streets of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He says “Archer brought to the table a heart and a soul, and a way of making sense of the world that was deeply, viscerally connected to the reader.”

In general, these were safe choices. Mostly they represented series—that is, a body of work. Ten years from now, who’d be your nominees? I’d hope to see Joe Ide’s Isaiah Quintabe, Nick Petrie’s Peter Ash, and Mick Herron’s Slough House team in the mix.

Winter Tales

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Maybe you think the best books to read in January are set in the South Seas or maybe Australia where it’s high summer.

But if a book which a chilly setting or subject is more your cup of tea, here are a few good ones.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – I just got around to reading this last month and while it probably has lost a bit of its shock value in the sixty-plus years since it was published, it is still full of chills. A group of would-be paranormal investigators plans to spend a week at the notorious, isolated Hill House. It seems, at least to the psychologically vulnerable among them, that the house has other plans, . Most delightful is the lead investigator’s oblivious wife. The link is to the book. I did not see the TV series.

The Surfacing by Cormac James – In 1850, the ship Impetus sailed north of Greenland to rescue men lost while searching for the Northwest Passage. The dangers of the expedition are apparent to the Impetus’s second-in-command, yet the Captain is determined to push on. This literary fiction tale is an adventure story and one, in which every character is tested to the limit. If your personal heroes include Admiral Richard Byrd and Ernest Shackleton, you’ll love this! And you’ll need a sweater.

Five Decembers by James Kestrel – No surprise that a book with this title leads you into an epic snow-filled journey. This award-winner starts out pleasantly enough, in Hawai`i, but, alas it is 1941. The life of Honolulu police detective Joe McGrady is upended when a murder investigation takes him to Hong Kong right at the time Pearl Harbor is attacked. Captured by the Japanese, he must figure out how to survive in extraordinary circumstances. A 2022 best book of the year.

If you’re looking to warm yourself in front of the electronic fire with a good movie, you might like 2017’s Wind River. It tracks the investigation into the strange death of a young woman from Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation (Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes)—the same part of the country as the Longmire series, another favorite. DVD from Amazon.

Great Listens of 2022

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The UK website CrimeFictionLover.com recently published my report of the five books I reviewed for them in 2022 that I liked best. The pool from which these excellent books were selected has some idiosyncracies. CFL covers new (more or less time-of-publication) crime fiction. A review of a book that’s a few months old is rarely accepted, which unfortunately is often when I get around to listening to the audio version. As a result, while I reviewed about 30 books for CFL in 2020, I read almost 80. I troll the list of award finalists for audio suggestions and find many good ones like:

Razorblade Tears: A Novel – by SA Cosby – Not only an action-packed thriller full of story and steeped in compassion, but a remarkable narration by Adam Lazarre-White. Two men come to terms with their dead sons’ gay lives and with each other across America’s racial divide (nominated for multiple awards).

The Diamond Eye: A Novel by Kate Quinn – A fascinating WWII story, inspired by true events, of an unforgettable young woman: eagle-eyed Russian sniper, emissary of the Soviet government in its quest for US military support, and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Lots of interesting detail about how snipers work. Nicely narrated by Saskia Maarleveld.

Deer Season by Erin Flanagan – an intellectually disabled farmhand is suspected of a gruesome crime, and the couple who employs and looks out for him faces painful dilemmas (award nominee).

Trouble Is What I Do by Walter Mosley – Need I say more? Interesting people, good plot, fantastic narration by Dion Graham.

We Are All the Same in the Dark: A Novel by Julia Heaberlin – A cold case heats up in a small Texas town when an abandoned teenager is discovered. Lots of secrets. Lots of atmosphere. Solid female characters. I always enjoy Heaberlin. Multiple narrators, all good.

Black Hills by Nora Roberts – For me, the main character’s involvement with a large animal sanctuary was irresistible. Even if the romance was predictable, the big cats rarely were.

Joe Country by Mick Herron – The Slow Horses team is back in book 6, and in my opinion, Herron hasn’t put a foot wrong yet. Narrated by Gerard Doyle, a pleasure in itself.