Don Winslow’s “City of Dreams.” — My Review

This cover image released by William Morrow shows “City of Dreams” by Don Winslow. (William Morrow via AP)

City of Dreams is the middle book in a planned trilogy that began when a stunning woman emerged from the surf at a Rhode Island beach in last year’s “City on Fire” and sparked a war between the state’s Irish and Italian crime families.

Now, as the latest installment opens, Danny Ryan leads what’s left of the defeated Irish mob on an epic, cross-country journey in search of a new home and a measure of safety from the Italian gangsters, the Rhode Island State Police, FBI agents and a growing number of other pursuers dead set on putting them in the ground.

If the story reminds readers of Homer’s “The Iliad” and Virgil’s “Aeneid,” in which jealousy over a beauty named Helen sparked a war between the Greeks and the Trojans, it should. Winslow peppers his yarn with allusions and quotes from the epic Greek poems, casting Ryan in the role of a modern-day warrior at odds with his fate.

With the Danny Ryan trilogy, Winslow seems destined to claim a place beside Mario Puzzo’s “The Godfather” on the Mount Rushmore of American crime fiction.

For the full text of my review for The Associated Press, please click here.

My Review of C.J. Box’s “Treasure State”

Former police officer turned Montana private detective Cassie Dewell has two bizarre mysteries on her hands.

First off, a wealthy matron who’d been bilked by a conman needs her help — not to find the conman but locate the private eye she originally hired to solve the case. The last time the woman heard from him, he was hot on the scammer’s trail, but now he seems to have disappeared.

Next up, hundreds of people are searching for a chest full of gems and gold that has been hidden somewhere in the mountain west. Clues to its location are contained in a poem posted in a local bar. The man behind the game anonymously contacts Dewell and offers her $25,000 if she can discover his identity. His name would all but give away the treasure’s location, he says, and he doesn’t want the game to end that way. He wants to make sure he has covered his tracks.

Author C.J. Box does a fine job of developing his characters, especially the conman whose charm and sex appeal are so irresistible that even Cassie fights the urge to be drawn to him. However, the author’s customary fast pacing and suspenseful plot twists are largely absent this time.

For the full text of my review for the Associated Press, please click here.

New Icelandic Thriller By Ragnar Jonasson — My Review

It’s reunion week in Iceland for Daniel, Armann, Gunnlaugur, and Helena, who were tight in college and like to get together every year or so to drink heavily and catch up.

As “Outside” — Ragnar Jonasson’s ninth thriller translated from Islandic to English — opens, they gather expecting to party in the capital city of Reykjavik. However, Armann, the acknowledged leader of the group, makes a last minute change of plans. They will go ptarmigan hunting on the desolate moors of Iceland, even though most of them have scant experience with guns.

“Somebody,” Helene says prophetically, “is going to end up dead before this trip is over.”

For the full text of my review for The Associated Press, please click here. https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-book-blizzards-499ff08ff15a108701fcf93abd55fc2b

Lee Goldberg’s Movie Land Rocks–My Review

“Movieland,” Lee Goldberg’s fourth novel featuring Ronin, is every bit as good as the first three. The characters, including victims, suspects, and an assortment of lazy, hardworking, honest and corrupt cops, are quirky and well developed. The depiction of police procedures feels authentic. The writing is vivid and precise. And with startling twists around every corner, the suspenseful tale unfolds at a furious pace.

For the full text of my review for The Associated Press, please click here.

Killed by Illegal Abortion: May Burns, My Great Grandmother.

GIVEN THIS WEEK’S EVENTS, I AM REPRISING A PIECE I WROTE SEVERAL YEARS AGO.

Bruce DeSilva's Rogue Island

Before Roe v. Wade, untold numbers of America women died from illegal abortions. One of them was May Burns of Middleboro, Massachusetts, shown here in her only surviving photograph.

She was my great grandmother.

May, an Irish immigrant, was married to William H. Archibald, the son of a Scotsman who crossed the Atlantic to Nova Scotia before taking his family south to find work in Massachusetts in the late 1800s.

When William grew to manhood, he got a job as a steam shovel operator on road projects. He and May had four children together.  John, the oldest, was my maternal grandfather.

After May’s youngest, Anna, was born, she didn’t want more children. Raising four in Middleboro, MA, was difficult enough on her husband’s meager pay. Unable to find anyone to help her, she performed an abortion on herself. John was seven years old when she died in the last…

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Peter Swanson’s New Thriller Riffs On a Mystery Classic

The elderly owner of a decaying hotel in Kennewick, Maine, is shoved to the ground, dragged to a tidal pool, and held there face down until he drowns. When police arrive, they find a crumpled piece of paper clutched in his hand.

On it is a typewritten list of nine names. Nothing more. But the hotel owner’s name is among them.

Meanwhile, in cities and towns scattered the length of the country, eight other people receive the same list in the mail. They include a struggling actor in Los Angeles, a college professor in Michigan and an FBI agent in New York. Some of them are men and some are women. Most, but not all, are middle-aged. They appear to have nothing in common.

The only name any of them recognize is their own.

Before long, another person on the list is murdered. And then another. Realizing it’s a kill list, the FBI scrambles to locate and offer protection to everyone left — no easy task since some of the names are common.

Mystery fans will be quick to recognize that the plot of Peter Swanson’s “Nine Lives” resembles Agatha Christie’s classic novel, “And Then There Were None.”

For the full text of my review for The Associated Press, please click here.

My Review of Phillip Margolin’s Dreary New “Thriller”

Plot elements in The Darkest Place, Phillip Margolin’s fifth legal thriller featuring Portland, Oregon, lawyer Robbin Lockwood, include a bitter divorce, a looted investment firm, a surrogate mother who wants her baby back, a kidnapping, a pair of thuggish debt collectors, two criminal trials, torture and four brutal murders.

Yet the novel is so tedious that reading it is a chore.

The writing is clear but often drab and graceless. Except for Lockwood, the characters are not well developed. Minor characters, including some who appear only once, are pointlessly described in detail. The courtroom scenes are annoyingly repetitious, regurgitating details that were disclosed earlier in the text. The dialogue rarely resembles the way real people talk, the voices of police detectives, lawyers, expert witnesses, and thugs so similar that speakers are indistinguishable without authorial attributions.

The author, whose 25 previous thrillers have sometimes made The New York Times bestseller list, does too much telling and not enough showing. He relates key developments in a ponderous, droning narrative instead of developing scenes that could bring the story alive for the reader. He does this even when revealing the depravity of the villain of the piece in the book’s closing moments.

To read the full text of my review for The Associated Press, please click here.

My Review of Alex Finlay’s “Night Shift”

New Year’s Eve, 1999. Four teenage girls working late at a video store in Linden, New Jersey, are savagely attacked. Only one, Ella Monroe, survives, and she is still haunted by what the killer whispered as he stabbed her.

“Goodnight, pretty girl.”

Thanks to an anonymous tip, police discover the murder weapon in the locker of a high school student named Vince Whitaker. But before he can be brought to justice, he vanishes.

Fifteen years later, four teenagers working late at a Linden ice cream shop are attacked, and once again, only one, Jessica Duval, survives. She, too, heard him whisper as he stabbed her.

“Goodnight, pretty girl.”

So begins “The Night Shift,” the second novel attributed to Alex Finlay, the pen name of a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who has written other thrillers under his real name.

For the full text of my review for the Associated Press, please click here

Joanna Schaffhausen’s “Last Seen Alive.” — My Review

When the police work is finally completed and the plot-points resolved in Joanna Schaffhausen’s “Last Seen Alive,” the author breaks the unwritten rules for such books by writing another 75 pages. In them, writing with empathy and psychological insight, she reveals how FBI Agent Reed Markham and Boston police officer Ellery Hathaway at last come to terms with the nightmare they shared through five fine novels and how they plan to live the rest of their lives.

It works not only because it is beautifully crafted but because, unlike nearly all other serial killer books, these novels were never about the killer and his pursuers.

They were about Reed and Ellery, and by extension, all victims of this brutal brand of violence.

In doing so, Schaffhausen has set a new standard for how such books can, and perhaps often should, be written.

For the full text of my review for The Associated Press, please click here.

My Review of Tim Dorsey’s “Mermaid Confidetial”

Tim Dorsey’s slapstick-noir novels about obsessive-compulsive serial killer Serge Storms are apt to offend those who believe that drug abuse and grisly murders are unfit subjects for humor. However, his fans find an abundance of chuckles and belly laughs in his best books including “The Big Bamboo” and “Hurricane Punch.”

The trouble with humor, however, that it has to be funny, and occasionally, Dorsey’s attempts fall flat. For the most part, “Mermaid Confidential” lacks the hilariously clever observations and satirical pokes at the weirdness of Florida that characterize his best his work.

For the full text of my review for The Associated Press, please click here.