Reprobate - A Katla Novel (Amsterdam Assassin Series) by Martyn V. Halm | LibraryThing

Reprobate - A Katla Novel (Amsterdam Assassin Series) by Martyn V. Halm | LibraryThing:

My appetite for Halm’s Assassin series was whetted by reading his novellas.

Halm skillfully merges several story lines together in this entertaining novel. Unlike his short works,, here he has added several interesting characters: Deborah Stern, a DEA agent coming off a shooting who has been transferred to Amsterdam especially because she speaks fluent Dutch; Bram Merelyn is a blind man whom Katla is watching as he happened upon her in the gallery of a man Katla had just killed. They develop a relationship and there is a great scene where he, the blind man, takes her to a movie. 

Katla is hired by some drug dealers to kill an undercover DEA agent who has wormed his way into their midst. They happen to have a source within the police agency so they dare not kill him themselves and must have the killing look like it was done by a member from a competing gang. 
Books about assassins rarely work well if the character is just a superhuman killing automaton. Even Stark's Parker has a human side in his relationship with his girlfriend and Keller evolves into a father and regular citizen as Block's series evolves. So Halm begun to develop Katla, a professional in a bizarre professional. She nevertheless makes mistakes and has an emotional side. She has her own moral compass. Halm’s world is populated by very grey moral compasses. As he says, “In this world there is always room for smart immoral people.”

I will certainly read the rest of the series, and I’m hoping that the author focuses more on Katla, perhaps developing the relationship with Bram, both interesting characters. A minor gripe is that there were a couple of tidbits I thought to be extraneous. For example the mugging of Deborah Stern, her disabling of the criminal, and then the comments regarding the Dutch legal system ‘s apparent “coddling” of criminals. If the story was intended to be a critique of their system, it was completely defanged by the subsequent prank played on Stern by her colleagues. I’d love to hear a comment from the author regarding my observation on this.

It’s always fun to read novels set in foreign cities. For those interested in more Amsterdam stories, besides Halm’s, I can recommend Baantjer’s Dekok series. Dekok is a sort of Dutch Maigret.



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Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett | LibraryThing

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett | LibraryThing:

This classic starts off with a bang. Henry Faber has two identities. The one in London is a quiet man who keeps to himself on the top floor of a house being sublet by a widow. She takes a fancy to him one evening and with her duplicate key happens to walk in on him just as he's getting the transmitter out to send messages back to the Abwehr. He has to kill her.

Faber (Called Die Nadel for his use of the stiletto) is an elite German spy, inserted into England before the war and now embarked on the most important task of his career, trying to determine the most likely landing point of the Allied invasion.

Follett shifts viewpoints between Faber and the British counter-intelligence team (the trick they used to determine Faber’s identity was quite clever,) and Hitler’s general staff   The book is all about deception:  Faber’s, the turning of German agents into double agents, and the Ghost Army.

Pillars of the Earth was amazingly good, this one not quite so, but well worth the time.



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Dead Giveaway by Simon Brett | LibraryThing

Dead Giveaway by Simon Brett | LibraryThing:

Charming send-up of the television industry. I listened to this as an audiobook and one always wonders whether the book is enhanced by an outstanding reader. In this case, especially, as this edition is read by the Simon Prebble so brilliantly.

Charles Parris is a failed actor whose agent gets him a job as one of the "professions" on a new game show entitled "If the Cap Fits." And so begin the puns and ridicule. (Cap, in addition to being a hat, can also be a diaphragm.) Virtually everyone associated with the industry is gently skewered, not the least of which are the lawyers who wrote "unreasonable" into the contract and then couldn't give a judgment on what unreasonable conditions might be, suggesting only a court could resolve that one.

Funny caricatures abound, and then the emcee drinks a glass of gin that has been poisoned and Charles is forced into playing detective once again as he searches for the killer.  Light, fun, listen.

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A Hard Ticket Home (Mac McKenzie Mysteries) by David Housewright | LibraryThing

A Hard Ticket Home (Mac McKenzie Mysteries) by David Housewright | LibraryThing:

Faced with the possibility of having to turn in an embezzler and come away with nothing or leave the police department and collect a huge finders fee from the insurance company, St. Paul detective Rushmore MacKenzie chooses the latter.  Now he works similar to Lawrence Block’s Scudder:  he has no license but does things to help people. In this story he’s been hired to find the sister of a girl who needs a transplant.  Jamie Carlson had  left home at 18 (never satisfactorily explained)  never to return, after graduating high school, and now they need to see if she’s a match for her younger sister, Stacy who needs a bone marrow transplant.  

MacKenzie finds the sister quickly enough.  She’s married, with a child, TC, to a used car salesman in St. Paul who is involved with a rather shadowy group of elite businessmen who all made their money selling at a discount.  He tells her of the need to be tested for the transplant, and she agrees to go home but is viciously murdered before she can. Mac’s oldest friend is a homicide detective on the St. Paul police force and he’s working on a case that’s soon linked to Jamie’s death, not to mention the involvement of the ATF and FBI.

As with any first book in a series, there are some loose ends and the occasional requirement to suspend credulity (what Mac does with a concussion at the end of the book defies belief despite its explanation).  Nevertheless, a good read.

I discovered Housewright after reading Penance, one of the Holland Taylor series. This new series, featuring Rushmore MacKenzie shows promise, and I’ve already started onTin City, second in the series.

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Kindness Goes Unpunished by Craig Johnson

This book, #3 in the Longmire series, has a marvelous first sentence: “ I should have brought my gun.”  Gradually, it’s revealed that he’s reading a Grimm’s Fairy Tale to some first graders. “My dad thinks you’re a butthole,” chimes in one. “You shoulda brought your gun,” says another.

Walt and Henry (and Dog) travel to Philadelphia to meet Walt’s daughter Kate’s boyfriend and his family. Since Vic is also from Philadelphia, Walt uses the opportunity to visit with her mother. Henry is participating in a Native American art exhibit at the Art Museum.  Before he gets a chance to see her, Katie is badly injured in a fight with her boyfriend who seems to be disliked by virtually everyone.  Then the boyfriend takes a flying leap off the Benjamin Franklin bridge. And the bodies begin to pile up.

One little tidbit I picked up was that American Indians intensely dislike the white name for them:  “Native Americans,” since they don’t consider themselves American.  At least according to Craig Johnson who should know, I guess.

George Guidall does his usual fine job of narration. EXCEPT for one HUGE mispronunciation that I have heard from other readers of books that take place in Philadelphia.  The Schuylkill River is pronounced “schoo-kill” although the official pronunciation is “school-kill” but definitely *not* “sky-kill,” as anyone who grew up in the area knows full well.  

Couple problems I had with this book that made it less interesting than the others of the series I’ve read. Moving characters out of their home territory into an alien environment is always tricky. Walt is smart, granted, but on occasion he outsmarts the Philadelphia cops without even knowing the city.  The business with Vic in front of her mother was a bit ridiculous. The Indian medicine ceremony in the ICU was absurd.  Still, Johnson’s books have a nice mix of humor and character interaction.

I would recommend reading this series in order.  In this title particularly, if you don’t know the characters and some of their backstory, you might be a little flummoxed.