Dialing it a bit back from his last book, MCGRAVE, Lee Goldberg starts a new series in KING CITY, also police-themed, but very much a modern-day Western. Tom Wade is an honest cop who took down the whole Major Crimes Unit, of which he was a part. This did not sit well with the department, so they give him a new assignment they think will either get him to quit or be killed.
The job in question is running a police substation in the part of town called Darwin Gardens, where — as you might figure — only the strong survive. Wade is also given the help of two rookie police officers fresh from the academy. One is a headstrong African-American woman, while the other is a clueless wonder who is just thrilled to be in the action. This is all the help Wade gets.
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Crissa Stone, the career criminal introduced last year in COLD SHOT TO THE HEART, is back in Wallace Stroby’s latest novel, KINGS OF MIDNIGHT. Not much has changed for her … and that is pretty much the main problem with this new work: Not much has changed.
Still desperate for enough money to assure her lover’s parole from a Texas prison, Crissa leads a two-man team on what should be a quick and easy heist. It all goes wrong afterward, however, when her partners argue about their take. Crissa ends up on the run and is further frustrated when she loses a big chunk of her stolen cash to a crooked money launderer.
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Hey, I’ve never heard of GENTRY magazine, either, but between 1951 and 1957, it apparently published 22 issues. This paperback collects dozens of articles from the forgotten periodical, chosen by Hal Rubenstein, who created the short-lived but much-loved, square-shaped magazine EGG in the late ’80s. If you at all remember that one, it will make perfect sense why he undertook this project.
THE GENTRY MAN works because it reprints the actual articles as they appeared, all monochrome color scheme, god-awful fonts and antiquated layout intact. Rubenstein has separated them thematically, from style and sports to food and culture.
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“It’s good to be back.” That chilling sentence is sets RED, WHITE, AND BLOOD in motion. In the latest from Christopher Farnsworth, Nathaniel Cade is back, showing what a real vampire is like. Here’s a hint: They don’t sparkle or mope around.
This third book builds upon the foundation of the two previous novels. It’s been three years since the events of BLOOD OATH. The president is on the campaign trail and an enemy Cade thought he got rid of years ago has reappeared, much to his chagrin. Those tales of the boogeyman are true, but we only know a fantasy compared to the truth, which here is a savage killer who takes over a person to feed his blood lust. He has his sights on revenge, striking the one thing closet to Cade: the President of the United States.
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Åke Edwardson seems to have found himself yet another translator for his recently released SAIL OF STONE. This time, it’s Rachel Wilson-Broyles doing the work, and while I don’t think it’s as smooth as Per Carlsson’s previous effort, the plot seems to be a bit tighter.
While Edwardson is known for taking off on tangents and artificially increasing the length of his books, SAIL OF STONE is his most interesting book to date and shows that he is indeed one of that renowned group of Scandinavian mystery writers who now seem to clog our bookshelves.
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