The Crossing & The Burning Room

Two Mavericks

Michael Connelly has created series with two memorable characters, an LAPD cop Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch and his half brother Mickey Haller, a maverick lawyer. Sometimes their paths cross, like in the best-selling author’s new book, The Crossing.

Bosch is a brilliant investigator, even if his methods are unorthodox, for which he is disliked by his senior. Haller has rubbed so many people the wrong way, that he functions out of his car, a Lincoln. Connelly’s thriller titled The Lincoln Lawyer was also turned into a movie starring Matthew McConaughey, a fact that is alluded to in The Crossing. Bosch is also the hero of a TV series starring Titus Welliver, which is not mentioned.

Anyway, Bosch has been suspended, or rather, forced to retire due to events that took place in the last book, The Burning Room. He is fighting a case against the Los Angeles Police Department and that has not endeared him to his former colleagues.  Bosch finds himself at a loose end when Haller offers him the job of investigating one of his clients, a reformed gangster called Da’Quan Foster.

The man has been accused of a particularly savage rape and murder and his DNA found on the crime scene. But he insists that he is innocent and Haller believes him. If Bosch takes the case, it would mean standing up against the LAPD and be considered a traitor. As he says to Haller, “You know what they call a guy who switches sides in homicide? They call him a Jane Fonda, as in hanging with the North Vietnamese. You get it? It’s crossing to the dark side.’ ”

But curiosity and force of habit make him look at the Foster’s file and he can see that the investigation left a lot of loose ends. Against his better judgment he takes on the case and unravels its complicated strands. It takes him to the sleazy side of LA as he keeps a step ahead of the goons who dog his every step.

Connelly gives a hint about who is involved right at the start, but it takes a cop with the intelligence and unerring instinct to pick up a small point and blow the work of the police detectives to bits.  While the pace and the suspense are kept up, Bosch also takes time to listen to jazz, tinker with a vintage Harley, interact with his truculent daughter Maddie. He also takes the help of Lucia ‘Lucy’ Soto, his former partner, and ponders the possibility of an autumn romance.

Never mind the boring title, The Crossing is a terrific thriller—Connelly at his best

The Crossing

By Michael Connelly

Publisher: Little, Brown

Pages: 388

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Anyone who reads The Crossing would want to go back and check out The Burning Room too, if they haven’t already.  This is where some of the groundwork for the later book is laid.

It is in this novel that Bosch teams up with young Lucia Soto, a tireless hardworking cop with her own dark past to deal with. Two cases collide as Bosch and Soto, assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit, try to solve a decade old shooting incident in which a mariachi guitarist, Orlando Merced, was shot; this incident connects in a very convoluted way to a fire, also in the past, in which kids in an unauthorized daycare centre were killed. Lucia was one the kids there who survived, and she cannot rest until she finds who was responsible for that horrible act of arson.

Connelly construct an elaborate scenario, in which complicated forensics, politics, corruption, illicit romance and the squalid world of migrants are wrapped in. The two cases are solved, still, for his painstaking work, Bosch is kicked out of the force.

But then he ponders about how things are not the same… “because the Department was more and more becoming a desk-bound institution. . . . Detectives sat in twelve-hundred dollar chairs and wore sleek designer shoes with tassels. Gone were the days of thick rubber soles and function over form, when a detective’s motto was ‘Get off your ass and go knock on doors.’ ”

Bosch and Soto do exactly that and makes for a very satisfying read for thriller fans.

The Burning Room

By Michael Connelly

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Pages: 388

Tricky Twenty-Two

Sassy Sisterhood

Janet Evanovich, a bestselling author, has created one of the looniest and most lovable characters—Stephanie Plum, a bounty-hunter. Better than her is her sidekick, the Amazonian Lula, former hooker, who drives a red Firebird, thinks incessantly of food and shoes, has atrocious fashion sense, and speaks her mind, whether anyone asks her opinion or not.  Lula deserves a series of her own. Between the two of them, they are a riot.

Like Sue Grafton’s alphabet series (X was out recently)  with smarty detective Kinsey Millhone, Evanovich has a numbers series starring sassy Stephanie, and the new book is Tricky Twenty-Two. (Turbo Twenty-Three is just out, so that is some speedy writing).

For those who haven’t read any books in the series before, Stephanie is of Italian descent and has a crazy gun-toting Grandma Mazur, whose antics have driven her daughter (that is Stephanie’s mother) to despair and alcoholism. She also has a hamster as a pet, a cop boyfriend Joe Morelli and a standby ‘knight’ called Ranger—both of them impossibly hot. Remember this is about a young woman, for young women—that’s the least they would expect. 

When she and Lula have to track down a missing student Ken ‘Gobbles’ Globovic, who has been arrested for beating up the dean of his college and skipped a court date, they stumble onto a bigger conspiracy.  Gobbles belongs to a college fraternity called Zeta and the members close ranks to protect their own. Then the dean gets killed and matters go out of hand.

Meanwhile Morelli dumps Stephanie rather unceremoniously, Ranger is at hand to offer her his shoulder and an assignment to protect the widow of a man who was shot dead outside his own house. Earlier his partner was also gunned down and everything connects, believe it or not, to a mad conspiracy.

The plot hardly matters, Evanovich keeps it sprinting at a brisk pace and gives Stephanie enough to keep busy. Those who have read earlier books in the series have commented that this is too formulaic, that the writer is running out of ideas and has neglected character development.  But a quick read like this one, doesn’t hurt. At least it has many laugh-out-loud bits—mostly provided by Lula.

Tricky Twenty-Two

By Janet Evanovich

Publisher: Bantam

Pages: 305

The Liar

Life Topsy Turvy

Nora Roberts has combined crime, suspense romance and nostalgia for good ol’ Southern family values in The Liar.

As a teenager Shelby had abandoned her family to run off with a rich, and sophisticated older man. A couple of years after the birth of her daughter Callie, she is left a widow, when her husband Richard is killed in a boating accident.

She finds herself loaded with debt, and as she struggles to piece her life together all by herself, she finds her married life was one big lie. Everything Richard told her was untrue—even the fancy diamond engagement ring was fake.

She sells everything she can and heads home to her family in the picturesque small town of Rendezvous Ridge in Tennessee. She is welcomed back without any rancor and starts working in her grandmother’s beauty salon. She is forgiven by her best friend and she also finds true love in Griff, who is a partner in a local construction company.

As much as she tries to put her past behind her and heal in the midst of her loving family, Richard’s deceit follows her around. It is not difficult to guess who the villain is, and how it will all end, but The Liar is a readable, if only for Roberts’s descriptions of small town life and landscapes and Shelby’s courage in a situation no woman should have to go through. Of course, there is a handsome hero around most willing to help, but she does her own fighting. The one big irritant is precocious Callie, who at three is as flirtatious as a teen--her behavior with Griff borders on disturbing.

The Liar

By Nora Roberts

Publisher: Berkley

Pages: 560

The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

Guitar Chronicles

Mitch Albom was a musician (still is) before he became a journalist and then bestselling author. His Tuesdays With Morrie remains a favourite of readers all over the world, a simple, inspirational book about a dying professor teaching his former student how to live better.

His other books have also been successful but not as much as the first.  His new novel The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto has music as the backdrop and his deft journalistic way of blending fiction with reality—the way the book’s protagonist find himself in real life situations (Woodstock, Hurricane  Katrina) has drawn comparisons with Forrest Gump.

The book begins with the funeral of guitar superstar Frankie Presto, who disappeared at the peak of his fame, and is narrated by Music.

In Francisco's life, great tragedy and unbelievable good luck go hand in hand. His mother is killed during the Spanish Civil War savagery, soon after giving birth to him in an abandoned church. He is saved by a nun, who finds it tough to raise him and chucks him into the Mijares River, where he's found by Baffa Rubio’s hairless dog. Rubio, a kindly sardine factory owner, is single and raises Francisco as his own.

He forces a blind guitar genius to take on the boy as a pupil, and the child, at nine, turns out to be a prodigy. But times are bad in Franco’s Spain. Rubio is thrown in jail and to save Francisco, the music teacher gets some sailors to smuggle him to America, where his sister lives. He sends off his ward with a gypsy’s magical guitar, the strings of which turn blue when Francisco helps someone in trouble. By the age of nine, Francisco has already met the girl, Aurora, who will be the love of his life.

He is abandoned in London, where he meets the legendary two-fingered guitarist Django Reinhardt, on his way to play with Duke Ellington in America. Francisco travels with him, and by the time he grows up, his guitar playing and singing make him a star.

Instead of a linear narrative style, Albom has interspersed Music’s story telling with real characters from the world of music, like Roger McGuinn, Burt Bacharach, Tony Bennett, Lyle Lovett, who gamely agreed to become part of the book. Other music legends, like  Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Paul Stanley appear as cameos. In a memorable sequence, Frankie impersonates Presley while the star is away negotiating a movie deal, and fans packing the stadium are none the wiser.

Inspired by the magic realism made so popular by Latin American writers, Albom spins the incredible adventures of Frankie in which Aurora flits in and out, and the hairless dog has a starring part.

There are some hokey bits, but The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto is a feel-good read. If Albom can be accused of anything it is breaking his own spell somewhat by giving prosaic explanations to what Frankie goes through and tying up his life with a neat red ribbon, when the mystery and ragged threads actually gave the book its magic.

The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

By Mitch Albom

Publisher: Harper Collis

Pages: 489

Slade House

Spooky Horror Show

David Mitchell’s last book The Bone Clocks was a richly layered, intricately plotted fantasy novel. In comparison, his Slade House reads like he wrote in vacation mood. Soul-sucking ‘atemporals’? Seriously?

Still, a fine writer can make schlock-y horror very readable.  Mitchell has a character in the book say, “Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by MC Escher and Stephen King in a fever.” That’s exactly what the bookreads like, and it’s not such a bad thing.

Slade House is a collection of interlocking stories that are set in a ghoulish mansion, which is normally invisible, but its gate appears in a back alley when the time is right—for the shape-shifting inhabitants that is; visitors who push that gate and enter the garden, well, they do so at their own risk.

The first story, The Right Sort, sets the tone. It began as a short story on Twitter, and presumably kicked off the rest. Nathan, a valium-addled boy accompanies his mother to Slade House. While his obsequious and embarrassing mother is kowtowing to the Lady of the Manor, Nathan meets, Jonah, a boy his own age. The game of Fox and Hounds that they play ends badly for Nathan.

The reader meets, and is fascinated by, evil twins, Norah and Jonah Grayer, who must ensnare ‘engifted’ human every nine years and replenish their life force by feeding on their souls. In each of the five stories they employ different tactics to get the unsuspecting human in, allow them to see what they want to, and for a short while, even fulfill their wishes. 

How these characters—like the conceited policeman, a sad, fat girl—meet their end, is written with a wicked humour and a dash of sympathy. The reader is also lulled into believing that at least one will escape. And the idea for a sequel is built into the climax.

Mitchell’s imagination never flags; the book that can be read in one long-sitting, is very enjoyable but not much of a mind-twister like Cloud Atlas or The Bone Clocks. He plays with familiar horror tropes and, as another character says, “What I see is the wackometer needle climbing.”  It does climb as high as it can go, but doesn’t burst though the casing.

Slade House

By David Mitchell

Published by: Random House

Pages: 238