Booked (and Printed): September 2024

 

I love September. The beginning of autumn, the cooling temps, and the first rush of green leaves turning gold, copper, and crimson. A marvelous month that is second only to October in my book of favorite things. Speaking of books (which is why we’re here, right?), my September reading life ended up embarrassingly small—three books and five short stories—due, mostly, to a late month skirmish with Covid that wiped out my pleasure reading for more than a week. Quitting two novels halfway through didn’t help either, but we’ll get to those later. The month started strong with David Housewright’s tenth Rushmore McKenzie mystery, The Last Kind Word (2013). I’ve said before how much I enjoy McKenzie’s adventures and The Last Kind Word is one of the best in the series so far. McKenzie reluctantly goes undercover as a professional thief in Northern Minnesota when an AK-47 that went missing during the ATF’s botched Operation Fast and Furious—a real-life ATF sting operation gone sour on the U.S.-Mexico border—shows up in an amateurish robbery in rural Minnesota.   The bungling robbers turn out to be a down-on-their-luck family. McKenzie worms his way into their circle and, while he is trying to get a line on where they purchased the AK-47, he plans a complicated heist for them. Things get sticky when McKenzie begins sympathizing with the hard luck criminals and a local gangster and a couple crooked cops arrive on the scene. The Last Kind Word has a Richard Stark vibe, great characterization, and a sizzling plot. Hemingway’s Notebook, by Bill Granger (1986), is the seventh (of fourteen) November Man thrillers; it’s my favorite of the four series’ titles I’ve read, too. After faking his death years earlier, November is called back from retirement when an acquaintance from the intelligence community threatens to tell the KGB he’s still breathing—an organization that would love to change November’s status to cold and dead. So November agrees to help with a niggling little revolution on the tiny Caribbean Island of St. Michel. Of course, nothing is as it seems and November is hard-pressed to peel away the layers of deceit and stay alive at the same time. And it’s done with Granger’s usual irony and distrust of secrecy and authority. The annual short story anthology, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year—2024, edited by Otto Penzler and Anthony Horowitz, is something I look forward to every year. This entry is good, but below the standards I’ve come to expect since a few of the stories made me wonder why they had been selected for its august pages. The good, and even a few great tales, made me forget the mediocre stuff without incident. I’m planning a detailed review of this one later in October and so I’ll leave it at that.

While my book length reading was pathetic, the number of individual short stories I read, five all together, was pretty okay. And every one of those tales were varying shades of good. C. J. Box’s “One-Car Bridge,” which features Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett, is about a greedy and flat-out mean landowner that may, or maybe won’t, get his just desserts. It was part of Box’s collection, Shots Fired (2015). “The Two-Percent Solution,” by Jack Ritchie, is a silly and dishonest (read that as impossible for the reader to solve) puzzler featuring Harry Turnbuckle unmasking an arsonist and murderer. Ritchie hit every bad note he could, but somehow its conclusion still elicited a smile. It appeared in the June 1984 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Al Sarrantonio’s clever horror story, “Last”—which was published in the anthology Shivers VI (2010)—is a hardboiled and stylish play on humanity’s longstanding fear of technology. And it, unlike Ritchie’s tale, hit every note with a maestro’s touch. “Doom of the Dark Delta,” by James Reasoner (2024), is good pulpy fun. When sailor and soldier Jorras Trevayle is washed ashore after a shipwreck, he finds an evil sorcerer, a battery of wicked soldiers, a naked woman running for her life, and a species of freakishly large snakes. And all of them are an obstacle to Trevayle’s survival. Reading “Doom of the Dark Delta”—which is the first novella in Reasoner’s new Snakehaven series—is like cracking the pages of an old Weird Tales. But its zesty spirit, cracker-jack plotting, and splendid adventure are all James Reasoner. Finally, Alan Orloff’s gritty and hardboiled flash story, “Once” (2024), is an irony-laced crime story with a surprise begin enough for a much longer tale. You can read “Once” here at Shotgun Honey. Now, for those two books mentioned earlier where the pages quit turning before the story did. Between you and me, both DNFs (did not finish) were likely caused by me and Covid more than to any deficiencies in the books themselves. Although read ahead and I’ll mention a few anyway. Sam Llewellyn’s Riptide (1992). Llewellyn is a favorite suspense writer of mine and I’ve always enjoyed his novels set around the ocean and yachting. I’ve tried reading Riptide before and failed, so maybe it’s less Covid than…something else. The narrative is flabby and uneven, which is unusual for Llewellyn, and damned if I could get into it. Again. Maybe I’ll wait another ten years and read it with different results. The other was Phillip Thompson’s first Colt Harper novel, Outside the Law (2017). The hardboiled style, sweltering rural Mississippi backdrop, and gritty plot are right up my ally, but the narrative never spoke to me and seemed a little flat, for no reason I can point to, which makes me think my perception of Outside the Law was influenced more by a foggy head and a cough than any real problems with the story. Maybe I’ll try it again with fresher eyes. Fin— Now on to next month…