Hit and Run by Lawrence Block (Morrow) 304 pagesOver the years, I’ve made no secret of the fact that
Lawrence Block is my favorite writer. I’m deeply in love with his
Matt Scudder novels, so smart and sad and rich with character and grit. I discovered
Eight Million Ways to Die when I was 19 and it made me love the genre and take it very seriously. Block was my gateway drug to George Pelecanos, Richard Price and so many other great novelists. Creative bastard that he is, Block has also reinvented the hit man novel. Although I love
Barry Eisler’s John Rain series about an assassin searching for his soul, afraid that he might not even have one, Block’s
John Keller is even more realistic -- and far scarier because of it. I keep going

back to actor John Cusack’s line in
Grosse Point Blank, when he says to a victim: “It’s not personal! Why does everyone always ask that?” That’s Keller in a nutshell. He’s a regular guy. He watches baseball and collects stamps. He’s the quiet neighbor everyone likes because he never bothers them. Killing just happens to be his job. And unlike most fictional hit men, Keller will kill a simple housewife just as easily as he would a mobster. He’s good at it too. Pure pro, all the way. He’ll get a call from his agent, Dot, catch a plane to wherever the hit is supposed to happen, stay in a cheap motel fighting boredom, and then after he’s finished, he will go back home to his simple life until the next call comes. In
Hit and Run, though, he’s gotten it into his head to retire. Not because he’s growing a conscience about killing all those people, but because he’s getting old and he thinks this one last hit will set him up financially for the rest of his days. Of course his last hit goes wrong. While watching television in his room, he sees a special report about the governor

of Ohio, a rising star, being assassinated in the same city where he’s gone to make his hit. Then bad turns to worse, when a picture of the suspected assassin is shown on the news --
and it’s a picture of Keller. Out of money, having spent most of its on expensive stamps, Keller sets off on the run with very few resources. But you don’t want to attack a savage beast without knowing what you’re going up against, do you? It’s not long before Keller stops running defensive drills and goes on the offense, trying to figure out who set him up for the crime, and why. Block’s third-person narration immerses you in his story, but with a curious detachment, the same sort of detachment Keller must feel while assassinating his targets. It’s a subtle technique, but once you get it, the story becomes horrific. You suddenly find yourself cheering on a really bad guy who should probably be put down like a mad dog or else imprisoned for life. This is why I idolize Block’s writing. What Keller does feel is often loneliness, where what he craves most is to be able to talk with someone and be completely honest. Who doesn’t want that? --
Cameron HughesThe King of Swords by Nick Stone (Harper) 576 pagesThis prequel to
Nick Stone’s astonishing and award-winning first novel,
Mr. Clarinet (2006), finds Miami cops Max Mingus and Joe Liston investigating the escape of some monkeys from a primate park. But that’s small potatoes compared with the larger, deeper and more disturbing focus of this book, which comes into relief as these cops are embroiled in a brutal series of murders. All the cards seem to lead them back to a man in the darkness, the epitome of evil, his name heard only in whispers -- Solomon Boukman. The only solution is for Mingus and Liston to navigate the Miami underworld looking for a fortune teller as well as a slimy pimp, who together may hold the key. But confronted with corrupt cops and black magic, Mingus and Liston realize that Boukman is far worse than the rumors that circle his existence. A book not to be missed. --
Ali Karim
The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics edited by Paul Gravett (Running Press/Robinson) 480 pagesHmm. Crime comics. I love ’em. But there’s never really been a decent, affordable collection. Oh, there have been reference books about them, full of teasing references and tantalizing glimpses of a panel or two, but a true selection, that will give you a real taste? Nope. Until now.
The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, edited by Paul Gravett, is by far the richest reading experience I’ve had all year -- grim, vital, thrilling and alive. Within its almost 500 pages, there’s a veritable who’s who of some of the most regarded and respected comic-book writers and artists ever assembled, from all over the world, from past to present, all in glorious, no-holds-barred black and white. And there’s not a dog in the bunch. There are excerpts from comic strips, comic books and even a healthy smattering of
bandes dessinées from Europe, where comics are taken a lot more seriously than they are in spandex-obsessed North America. Alan Moore’s “Old Gangsters Never Die” is a surreal bit of business, but an appropriate kick-off to an amazing lineup of well-known classics and bold new discoveries. Will Eisner’s
The Spirit gets his heart broken; El Borbah, the Mexican professional wrestler and private eye, breaks into a sperm bank; and
Max Allan Collins’ very pregnant
Ms. Tree’s water breaks. There’s a “true crime” story here from the legendary team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond are represented by an arc from their
Secret Agent X-9 newspaper strip, and France’s Jacques Tardi (who, alas, doesn’t contribute one of his masterful
Nestor Burma adaptations) illustrates a sobering tale of post-Vietnam New York.
Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer shows up twice in this collection, once in a 1942 story that actually predates
I, the Jury, where he’s known as Mike Lancer, and once under his own name in a string of little-seen 1954 strips. There’s a story from the extremely rare 1962
87th Precinct comic book (a tie-in to a TV show already cancelled), and Argentinean refugees Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz’s still-astonishingly bleak
Alack Sinner appears in a noirish vignette. And even so, Gravett barely scratches the surface. More, please. --
Kevin Burton SmithNothing to Lose by Lee Child (Delacorte Press) 416 pagesFormer military cop
Jack Reacher is drifting through Colorado, when he stumbles upon two small towns, Despair and Hope, both of which will ultimately live up to their names. He soon finds himself run out of Despair by the local constabulary for vagrancy.

As any veteran reader of
Lee Child’s phenomenally popular series could predict, Reacher decides to return to the town, sensing that something is not quite right there. After befriending a shapely cop from Hope named Vaughan, he starts an investigation, only to turn up a dead body found on the side of a road separating the two towns. After that corpse vanishes, Reacher realizes there are larger and darker forces at work around him. All of this leads to a bare-knuckles barroom brawl pitting the 6-foot-5 Reacher against Despair’s sheriff and deputies, a sequence that it is as vivid as it is violent. And amid all of this, Reacher discovers that Despair is very much a company town, dominated by one powerful employer, a giant metal-recycling plant from which trucks roll in and out at all hours. He’s also intrigued by a mysterious plane that flies over Despair at night, questions surrounding a covert army base, and Thurman, an evangelical mayor. Thurman is actually kept offstage until the middle of this book, just when Reacher and Vaughan are getting intimate. But action fans need not fear, as plenty of bad guys get their jaws broken in these pages. What’s most interesting about
Nothing to Lose may be Reacher’s musings on the madness that lurks at the heart of the road separating his two fictional Colorado towns. Although this book follows Child’s debut novel,
Killing Floor (1997), in terms of plotting, the peep we get into Reacher’s understanding of the Iraq war and his distaste of fanatical religion make for compelling reading. This is what I love about the Jack Reacher novels -- the thought-provoking information that peppers the narrative and makes one question apparent reality. --
Ali KarimPavel & I by Daniel Vyleta (Bloomsbury) 352 pagesIn a year that it seemed impossible to keep up with Cold War novels,
Pavel & I stood head and shoulders above the pack. Unfortunately, it’s also quite likely that the book entirely escaped your notice. Although Daniel Vyleta’s debut work possesses strong literary merit, with a twisty plot featuring espionage, marauding gangs of displaced youths and a dead dwarf who keeps cropping up in the most unlikely places, the book would have done much better had it been marketed as a thriller, which it most clearly is. (It certainly kept this reader perched on the edge of her seat.) Set in Berlin immediately following World War II, the period detail here is wonderful, as is Vyleta’s ability to bring it all to life. I shivered under a blanket for most of my reading of the book, which is set entirely in the meanest Berlin winter in memory. --
Linda L. RichardsPaying for It by Tony Black (Preface Publishing/
Random House) 272 pagesA keen journalistic eye is evident in Black’s debut novel, set in the dark heart of Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh. The story features Gus Dury, who like Black is a journalist; but unlike Black, Dury’s career is imploding in the wake of an incident involving a government minister and the hot topic of immigration. Dury, who now lives in a flat above a pub, gets involved in finding out what happened to Billy, the son of his landlord and only friend. The trail leads deep into the malicious business of people-trafficking, where can be found Russian and East European gangsters, cops on the take and innocents trapped in the linkages between those worlds. At first I was a little skeptical about this story, due to its all-too-familiar genre trappings, such as Dury’s failed marriage, his love for the bottle and criminal gangs from the east. However, within a few pages, I was captivated by Black’s command of the English language, his sense of pace and the narrative marbled with humor pulled right off the gallows. Black’s debut is a superb effort -- and a good pick for readers lamenting the passing of Ian Rankin’s sardonic Detective Inspector
John Rebus. Dury’s Edinburgh is as interesting, if not more interesting than Rebus’. --
Ali KarimA Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr (Quercus Publishing) 368 pagesUntil two years ago, when British writer
Philip Kerr brought
Bernie Gunther back in
The One from the Other, most readers -- myself included -- thought that his World War II-era Berlin cop turned private eye had been left behind in a trilogy of wonderfully atmospheric mysteries:
March Violets (1989),
The Pale Criminal (1990) and
German Requiem (1991). But
The One from the Other showed Gunther still endowed with cynicism and ingenuity,

and that novel was so fondly received, that Kerr has put his man back on the payroll. In
A Quiet Flame, we find Gunther posing as a Nazi war criminal (read the previous book to find out why) and escaping to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1950. Everywhere he goes in South America’s most European city, he seems to come across some former Hitler henchman, now living behind an assumed name and innocent occupation, benefiting from President Juan Perón’s interest in permanently retired Nazis -- and their ill-gotten gains. Gunther might have liked to disappear among the metropolis’ late-night eateries and broad boulevards, too. But instead he’s called on by the local chief of police, who knows something of his sordid background, to help investigate the gruesome slaying of a young girl -- a case that bears similarities to another, unsolved case that Gunther worked on during his days with the Berlin police. The assumption is that an ex-Nazi is behind this homicide, and who could be better prepared to suss out malevolent Nazis than Bernie Gunther? There are lots of flashbacks here, placing a more hopeful Gunther in Berlin in 1932, where he delves into the “lust murder” of
Anita Schwarz, a disabled part-time prostitute and the daughter of a prominent “
brown shirt.” Far from distracting, these back-stories give us both more knowledge about Bernie Gunther and a captivating portrait of Berlin during its often wild, Weimar Republic days. In this sometimes chilling yarn, Kerr does an exceedingly good job of bringing to life such characters as Perón and his wife, Eva, as well as Adolf Eichmann and Otto Skorzeny. And he mixes them with fictional figures no less able to win attention, notably Anna Yagubsky, a beautiful young Jewish woman (“Her figure was all right if you liked them built like expensive thoroughbreds. I happened to like them built that way just fine.”), who wants the older Gunther’s help in finding her lost relatives, and in return assists him in the Schwarz probe, no matter the dangers involved -- and the bed sheets they must tangle along the way. Questions about Argentina’s collaboration with the Nazis and its anti-Semitism only add further spice to
A Quiet Flame. There are just enough loose ends in the last chapter to suggest that Kerr has a sixth Bernie Gunther book in the works. Thank goodness. --
J. Kingston PierceRobbie’s Wife by Russell Hill (Hard Case Crime) 256 pagesJack Stone, a 60-year-old screenwriter quits Los Angeles after his second failed marriage, matched by a career on the slide. He packs his laptop and his life savings into a duffel bag and heads to Dorset, a sleepy little agricultural backwater in England’s southwest, to compose the killer screenplay he believes will get him back on professional track. His precarious financial situation is the ticking clock that is marbled throughout this narrative. Finding himself a lodger in the Barlow household’s spare room, he struggles to get a handle on his screenplay. But then he meets Maggie, “a tall woman with long auburn hair” and the eponymous Robbie Barlow’s wife. Robbie is a rugged sheep farmer, but with a university education, who befriends Stone, taking him in after his car has been vandalized. Robbie is in his early 40s and handsome, contrasting with the aging Stone, who at three score years considers himself on the losing side of his career as well as his life. Stone soon finds himself falling in love with Maggie, who is more than 20 years his junior, and as he does so, he discovers his lust expressing itself in his writing. As his fevered mind senses the attraction of this comely farmer’s spouse, his screenplay starts to take shape -- a dark shape. Due to this novel’s trajectory, the first three-quarters build up the tension until it becomes unbearable, both from a sexual and character-development perspective. Once all of that build-up is released, and the crime committed,
Robbie’s Wife seems to go into a downward spiral, as Stone discovers the high price he must pay for his actions, both morally and criminally. As a cautionary tale,
Robbie’s Wife works with a real erotic charge, but it’s the novel’s atmosphere, location and players that elevate it from the pulp tradition it so wants to emulate, and make it a very absorbing and insightful read. You’ll be thinking about this book for a lot longer than it takes to read. --
Ali KarimRough Weather by Robert B. Parker (Putnam) 304 pagesHo-hum. Another year, another
Spenser novel. But once more, Parker delivers the goods, and makes it look effortless. Although actually, the first few chapters didn’t bode particularly well. Yet another of Parker’s pastiche/rip-offs of
Dashiell Hammett’s “
The Gutting of Couffignal”? He’s been there, done that (most notably in 1998’s Jesse Stone novel,
Trouble in Paradise), each time with diminishing returns. On this occasion, private eye Spenser is hired by
über-rich Heidi Bradshaw to serve as her bodyguard/escort at her daughter’s swank wedding on a private island. And he’s told he can bring his girlfriend, Susan Silverman! Oh, joy! By now, those of you who gave up on this Boston wise-ass years ago will be rolling your eyes, and I’ll admit that the arrival of Spenser’s nemesis as one of the wedding guests, the deadly and apparently superhuman hit man Rugar (never one of my favorite characters), had me wondering myself. Was Parker once again lighting out for the territory of misguided, self-indulgent self-mythology (cf.:
A Catskill Eagle,
Small Vices)? And yet, somehow, the love affair Parker has with his own character is put aside long enough for him to crank out yet another winner. Once the ball starts rolling, it becomes obvious why Parker’s still a champ after all these years. Simply put,

the dude can write. The dialogue snaps, the pace never slackens (the confrontation between Spenser and a gang of kidnappers on the storm-tossed island could double as a how-to on writing action scenes), the characters reveal surprising depths and the stakes are mortal indeed. And once again, Parker’s preoccupation with the bounds of friendship and family, of honor and courage, are challenged. No, there are no great revelations here, but it’s always refreshing to see Spenser root around in the murk of his own moral code. Make no mistake: Spenser is a man of conscience, someone who understands that every action has consequences. But in a genre that too often resorts to glib cynicism of the cheapest and most prurient kind, it’s sorta nice to see someone pandering to the notion of doing the right thing. Call it the audacity of heroism. --
Kevin Burton Smith
Salvation Boulevard by Larry Beinhart (Nation Books) 368 pagesYou hardly ever see this in these days of brain-dead, self-perpetuating culture wars: an honest-to-god intelligent mystery written for people whose thirst for ideas extends further than some snake-oil salesman’s spiel or the 24-hour “news” networks. The divisive issues of faith and belief -- and the increasingly cynical exploitation of that chasm by believers and non-believers alike -- is tackled with verve, style and surprising fair-mindedness in Beinhart’s
Salvation Boulevard. Born-again gumshoe Carl Van Wagener is a devoted member of a huge fundamentalist church; a clean-living man who’s run a gauntlet of addictions and broken marriages to finally find salvation and redemption through Christ and the love of a good woman. But he’s also a well-respected and much-in-demand professional with a questioning nature. Which means he’s no slack-jawed drooler or squeaky-clean Bible humper -- the way believers are too often depicted in crime fiction -- but an intelligent and caring man whose beliefs are as human as he is. And those bedrock beliefs are challenged when he’s summoned by one of his best clients, Manny Goldfarb, a high-flying Jewish defense attorney and sucker for lost causes and big headlines, to work on the case of Ahmad Nazami, a young Muslim student charged with the murder of Nathaniel MacLeod, a controversial atheist professor. This book should be an unholy mash-up of pretentious polemics and cynical stereotypes, or a mean-spirited snoozefest taking potshots at easy targets. But it’s neither. Rather, it’s that rare crime novel that wears both its heart and its brain on its sleeve and manages to ask hard questions without sacrificing one single thrill. --
Kevin Burton Smith
Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski (St. Martin’s
Minotaur) 288 pagesIn
Severance Package, the Pole with Soul offers up his latest loose sequel to
The Wheelman (2005). PR hack Jamie DeBroux is summoned to work one morning for a “management meeting.” For Jamie, it’s his first day back after the birth of his baby. He kisses his wife good-bye, heads for work, and is promptly informed that the company is a front for a super-secret government organization. The operation is being shut down, and they’ve all been ordered to commit suicide, even Jamie, who thought he was just writing copy for some vague investment firm. The elevators are rigged with nerve gas, and bombs will destroy that floor of the building once it’s all done. Jamie is soon fighting for his life as sweet, corn-fed Molly Lewis proceeds to slaughter everyone. What follows is a combination of
The Terminator and
Die Hard, except this is written by Duane Swierczynski, whose debut novel,
Secret Dead Men, centered on a schizophrenic zombie. So this is really
Terminator and
Die Hard on acid. As a bonus, the novel shows some influence from Swierczynski’s comic-book work. This book makes the list on its weird factor alone. --
Jim WinterSins of the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno (Scribner) 400 pagesYou know, once I realized that this was a creative take on Ian Fleming’s
James Bond stories by way of Islam,
Robert Ferrigno’s satirical thriller really opened up for me.
Sins of the Assassin has all the trappings of a Bond yarn. The protagonist, Rakkim Epps, is little more than a highly trained thug for his government, only this time it’s an Islamic government rather than a British one. The novel has two colorful villains, the Colonel and his femme fatale lover, Baby. He’s a warlord in the Bible Belt (the old Southern confederacy), which vies with the Islamic Republic for dominance in what had been the

United States, but was conquered dozens of years ago using a brilliantly executed attack involving suitcase nukes. Even more colorful is the rich, radical Islamist known as the Old One, who lives on a large, well-populated yacht that can be hidden with ease, become no one thinks it really exists. This book even has a major doomsday weapon hidden in the mountains that everyone wants. Sound familiar yet? It’s the questions that author Ferrigno asks in
Sins that make it an interesting read. Can a theocracy survive without eventually devouring itself as people with different belief levels clash for power? Is it acceptable to be a killer in the name of patriotism? Do we need religion in a world where science is advancing at such a quick rate that many previously unanswerable questions about existence and life are finally being answered? And can somebody still be a good person without the assurance that only such behavior will lead him to Paradise?
Sins is pulpish in the best ways, without feeling retro and insulting the reader’s intelligence. It’s the second book of a trilogy (following 2006’s
Prayers for the Assassin), but would also work as a standalone novel. Ferrigno’s series plumbs the anxieties kicked up by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after which many people who’d been politically liberal on 9/10 were scared out of their minds and became right-wing conservatives on 9/12. While
Sins of the Assassin shows clear Bond influences, the action is more Jason Bourne caliber. Political intrigue is deep and layered here, and the action is often quick and vicious; it left me breathless, and the book’s climax left me speechless. Rakkim Epps is Daniel Craig’s James Bond -- quiet and tortured, with a soul that he won’t let us see for fear that the revelation would leave him unable to carry out what he views as his patriotic duties. This is a great and unique thriller. You’ll love it. --
Cameron HughesSiren of the Waters by Michael Genelin (Soho Crime) 336 pagesOlen Steinhauer has written
many fine books about the police in a country very much like Romania. Now comes Genelin, whose protagonist, Jana Matinova, has climbed to the rank of commander in the police force of Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Her rise to her present position has cost her a lot, though, and she’s currently in charge of an investigation into a deadly human-trafficking ring. She’s a tremendously interesting character, totally believable (and with the same aura of sad determination as the hero of
Child 44), facing a truly frightening villain named Koba. --
Dick AdlerThe Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin (Picador) 320 pagesThe sequel to Goodwin’s
Edgar Award-winning The Janissary Tree (2006),