{"id":7210,"date":"2018-04-18T07:56:59","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T11:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7210"},"modified":"2018-04-18T08:15:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T12:15:25","slug":"a-trio-of-notable-crime-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7210","title":{"rendered":"A Trio of Notable Crime Novels"},"content":{"rendered":"
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photo: Stew Dean, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

Exciting plots, award-winning authors, worthy protagonists. Three crime thrillers for spring!<\/p>\n

****Slow Horses<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

By Mick Herron<\/a> \u2013 In Britain\u2019s MI5, the slow horses are the agents whose incompetence, outrageous errors, or general unlikeability cause them to slip off the fast track. They\u2019re stabled at the aptly-named Slough House, far from Regent\u2019s Park, the energized center of important decisions and brisk walking. With luck, sheer boredom will move them to seek some different pasture.<\/p>\n

The slow horses work under the benign supervision of Jackson Lamb, who may be more wolf than lamb, and you\u2019d be forgiven for anticipating that the luckless occupants of Slough House are not without tradecraft tools and the wit to use them.<\/p>\n

When a young man is abducted by people threatening to behead him live on the Internet, the political complexities of the situation quickly escalate. Slough House has reason to be involved, but HQ won\u2019t hear of it. Worse, a violent attack on one of them suggests any means possible will be used to prevent their sticking their noses in. Slow horses or no, the race is on. Against the kidnappers and against their own superiors.<\/p>\n

Herron has written a page-turner of a novel, with many laugh-out-loud moments. This first in an award-winning series was thoroughly enjoyable.<\/p>\n

***Night Life<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

By David C. Taylor<\/a>, narrated by Keith Szarabajka \u2013 In 1954 New York City, police detective Michael Cassidy\u2014who could have inspired Sinatra\u2019s \u201cMy Way\u201d\u2014becomes embroiled in a mystery that will require all his detecting skills and a great deal of political savvy to unravel. A young gay man is found tortured to death. The killer was apparently looking for something. Cassidy must look for it too.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not sure what he\u2019ll find when he starts turning over rocks in these early Cold War days, with paranoia about Communism and Communists on the rise, with the hearings of Senator Joe McCarthy\u2019s witch hunt in the news, with the CIA and the FBI competing for scraps of information. Cassidy is a straight-up cop, but he\u2019s unaware of his own vulnerabilities. He\u2019s about to discover them, and they will put the people he cares about most at risk.<\/p>\n

Screenwriter Taylor creates a powerful noir atmosphere that evokes not only the streets of New York some sixty years ago but also the psychic atmosphere, with its fear-mongering about the Red Menace and its rampant homophobia. In this novel, both of these caused people to kill and be killed. Nice narration from Keith Szarabajka.<\/p>\n

This book won the 2016 Nero Wolfe Award for Best American Mystery, and was a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award nominee.<\/p>\n

***Shutter Man<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

By Richard Montanari<\/a>, narrated by Scott Brick \u2013 Another good cop story, this one intergenerational. It\u2019s set in Philadelphia, and the early scenes take place in 1976 in an Irish neighborhood called Devil\u2019s Pocket. Back then, a group of teenage friends from the Pocket were involved somehow in the death of a mentally disabled young man who was a member of the powerful Irish crime family, the Farrens.<\/p>\n

Today, one of those young men is police detective Kevin Byrne, another is DA candidate Jimmy Doyle, and the Farrens are still operating outside the law. Byrne and his friend, Assistant DA Jessica Balzano (teamed up in several of Montanari\u2019s books) are working on a set of bizarre killings that seem to be linked, but how? And do they reach all the way back to those Devil\u2019s Pocket days?<\/p>\n

Montanari\u2019s characters are interesting and well-rounded and he creates considerable narrative tension. While Scott Brick provided a fine narration, the multitude of characters and the switching between time periods make this a better candidate for enjoying in print.<\/p>\n

One of The New York Times<\/em>‘s 10 Best Crime Novels of 2016.
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Exciting plots, award-winning authors, worthy protagonists. Three crime thrillers for spring! ****Slow Horses By Mick Herron \u2013 In Britain\u2019s MI5, the slow horses are the agents whose incompetence, outrageous errors, or general unlikeability cause them to slip off the fast … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Trio of Notable Crime Novels - excellent choices for page-turning reading!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[77,52,54,40,632,126],"tags":[1301,333,1303,1300,91,435,1302],"class_list":["post-7210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-books","category-crime","category-detective","category-fiction","category-police","category-reading-2","tag-david-c-taylor","tag-london","tag-mi5","tag-mick-herron","tag-new-york","tag-philadelphia","tag-richard-montanari"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Si","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7210"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7213,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7210\/revisions\/7213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}