Turn to Stone: A Jonathan Stride Novella by Brian Freeman | LibraryThing

I have enjoyed previous entries in the Jonathan Stride series and it was a pleasure to return to another.  Lt. Stride of the Duluth Detective Unit decided to pause on his way back home at the small town where his mother was buried, to briefly visit her gravesite.  Just as he finished, a sheriff’s car pulled up to the cemetery.  Thinking someone in town had seen his flashlight and called the police, he headed over toward the car only to watch in horror as the deputy stands in front of the car and blows his brains out.

Turns out the dead deputy, Percy Andrews, was a local hero, having rescued a woman he subsequently married from a particularly vicious man after being kidnapped and tortured for a week..

Stride, being Stride, can’t leave well enough alone. Despite the Sheriff’s unequivocal request to leave the investigation alone, Stride is a bit taken by Percy’s widow who is soon charged with the murder of Greg Hamlin. Percy had been investigating Hamlin’s disappearance. His body is soon found in Percy’s RV out in the woods.  He, too, had been tortured.  Stride is soon unraveling a tangled web of interconnections leading to murder that had their genesis decades earlier. The victims had the word Teufel carved on their chests. Was the Devil involved?  Very enjoyable read that lead in an unexpected direction.

One thing.  The last paragraph leads directly into the next book, Cold Nowhere. I sometimes find that irritating.

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Gun Street Girl: A Detective Sean Duffy Novel by Adrian Mckinty | LibraryThing

I’ve read several McKinty books, but the Sean Duffy series is the best. Originally billed as a trilogy, I was delighted to see a fourth appear. Set during the Troubles, Sean is a Catholic cop in a Protestant world who makes sure to check the bottom of his car every day for bombs that might have been planted while he was away. He watches as his superiors fuck up capturing a boatload of arms from America, then bails out his Chief Inspector in a brothel where a local pro has just whacked an American movie star on the head when he got a little rough after she refused to partake in his substantial stash of cocaine. Sean then gets involved in the investigation of the murder of two prominent people, apparently a hit that’s first blamed on their son who left an apology and a suicide note before jumping off a cliff. But when his girl-friend is also found dead, with a suicide note and the motor running in her car, the coincidence seems forced and the autopsy reveals signs of murder. The new Jewish detective in the squad, a very bright Oxford grad manages to sniff out a connection with another death at a party in Oxford. Couple that with the return of MI5 agent Kate who wants to enlist Sean in the security service, and you have the makings of a nifty mystery. I really like McKinty’s writing of Sean’s voice, melancholy mixed with humor. For example a scene at a church-sponsored dating social dance. All the girls make excuses when they discover he's a cop: "I fought a strong urge to flee and introduced myself to a girl called Sandra who looked a bit like Janice from The Muppet Show band. She was an estate agent who sold houses all over East Antrim. “We’ve got something in common. I’m a peeler,”I said. “What do we have in common?” “Well, uh, both of us are at home to a certain amount of moral ambiguity in our work.” No hesitant buyer ever got up Sandra’s nose the way I instantly did, and she told me coldly that she had to mingle. Later I saw her dancing with a very tall man whose face was like a Landsat image of the Mojave. " "The word went round and none of the other women came close. I didn’t blame them. If you were a single lady, getting on in years, or worse, a widow, the last thing you wanted to do was marry a policeman who could be killed next week. It certainly didn’t help that I was a Catholic. A Catholic in Carrickfergus was bad enough, but a Catholic policeman? My life expectancy could be measured in dog years."  And for some reason, perhaps my antipathy to B&B’s, this passage had me laughing out loud. Sean and Lawson are sent to Oxford where they are put up in a Victorian B&B run by a couple of eccentrics. She hands them their keys with the warning, “Now, Mr. Duffy, it’s the off-season at present, of course, so I can let you have the two rooms overlooking the garden—213, 214,” she said. “Keep the windows closed, mind. The squirrels will come in. We had a shocking incident two years ago with a gentleman from Norway.” That shocking incident with the squirrel…. One interesting note given some current political events in Ireland. Gerry Adams makes an appearance as an IRA leader in the book. Make of that what you will. Excellent story.

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Triangle by Teri White | LibraryThing

This book was offered to me by the publisher in hopes I might write a review. It’s apparently a reissue of a book  originally published in 1982. Kudos to Open Media for resurrecting some of these titles. I gave it a couple of pages and was hooked.  It was excellent.  It could be described as part meditation on friendship, part noir novel a la Jim Thomson or James Cain, part police procedural, but all about obsession.

Alexander McCarthy (“Mac”) grew up in an orphanage so when his patrol stumbled across a shell-shocked kid who had been witness to, and perhaps participated in, the massacre at Tan Pret, “Johnny”, it became difficult to abandon the kid who now obviously had latched onto and needed Mac’s company.

Now out of the army, Johnny can’t survive on his own and is very protective of Mac who has a terrible gambling problem and finds himself owing thousands to the mob.  Johnny kills two of the them after they beat up Mac.

But the boss knows who did it and Johnny are forced to become hitmen for the mob.  One of the men killed happens to be an undercover cop.

In part two, Simon, the dead cop’s partner, vows to find the killer of his friend. (Simon’s euology for his dead friend is amazing.)  He becomes obsessed with it to the point where it starts to destroy his marriage and his life. Everything takes a backseat to his obsession at finding the killer.

The third part brings them all together.  But it’s not what you think. One thing to remember:  “There are no good guys.”

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What's the Worst That Could Happen? (Dortmunder Novels) by Donald E. Westlake | LibraryThing

Dortmunder is another fine creation of Donald Westlake.  He occasionally appears in the Parker stories, but this one is devoted to Dortmunder himself.  Things always seem to go wrong and the beginning is no exception. They attempt to burgle a house on Long Island that’s supposed to be empty but it’s a house being used as a trysting place for Fairbanks (pun perhaps?) a thieving executive millionaire and his mistress.  He calls the cops and then has the temerity to steal a “lucky” ring off Dortmunder’s finger before he gets hauled off to jail. Dortmunder escapes the police car (a humorous event in itself) and vows to get the ring back and make the guy sorry for his humiliation.

The plot then revolves around Dortmunders extraordinary capers to get the ring back.  And in the process, they decide to rob a Las Vegas casino.  After conducting a little third-rate burglary at the Watergate.  A little third-rate burglary at the Watergate?” Andy said, “I already tried that on him, and it didn’t work. John isn’t much of a history buff.”... Herman paused to take a roll of duct tape from inside his tuxedo jacket, tear off a length, and attach it to the edge of the door over the striker to keep it from locking. Spies, political agents, and other amateurs put such tape on a door horizontally, so that it shows on both front and back, and can be noticed by a passing security person.  (There is a risk here that anyone under the age of forty will not get this reference at all.)

What makes these books are the little side comments Westlake throws in a social criticism. For example: “On the TV, people covered with blood were being carried to ambulances. Wherever it was, it looked like a real mess. Then, as Dortmunder watched, the people and the ambulances faded away and some candy bars began to dance.”  and “The thing is,” Andy explained, “when I feel I need a car, good transportation, something very special, I look for a vehicle with MD plates. This is one place where you can trust doctors. They understand discomfort, and they understand comfort, and they got the money to back up their opinions.”

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For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago by Simon Baatz | LibraryThing

I suppose that anyone who has read about the career of Clarence Darrow is familiar with his famous defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. In short, a little Jewish boy (Richard’s cousin!) from a wealthy Chicago family, Bobby Franks, was kidnapped after school and murdered by two intelligent and wealthy college students, both also Jewish. Suspicion initially fell on teachers at the school Bobby attended, the Harvard School, and despite lots of exculpatory evidence several of them were held by the police and beaten severely to try to get them to confess.  They didn’t and finally their lawyers convinced a judge to release them

Then there was an eyewitness who saw a gray Winton car right by the school at the time Bobby was kidnapped. Soon every person in Chicago with a gray Winton was being reported to the police.  One owner parked his car in the garage and walked to work rather than having to face the police almost every day as people reported seeing him in his gray Winton.  (The car they actually used was a dark green Willys-Knight.)

Pedophiles, homosexuals, anyone the police considered a “sexual deviant” were rounded up for questioning, although even the district attorney noted that it would be a rare event indeed for a pedophile to ask for a ransom and set up such an elaborate mechanism to collect it.

The story is horrifying in its depiction of the two psychopaths.  Convinced they were smarter than everyone else (Richard was the youngest graduate of the University of Michigan,) they had successfully embarked on a series of petty vandalism before deciding to commit the “perfect murder.”  They almost succeeded, except for Nathan’s glasses.

There was no question as to their guilt.  They had confessed and revealed all the details to the police. They were perhaps lucky that they committed their crimes at a time when research in genetics and animal instinct was being popularized. Darrow, who had engaged in a “lifelong campaign on behalf of the defenseless” had read Altgeld’s book, Our Penal Machinery, which argued that “criminal behavior... was less a consequence of free will and deliberation and more a matter of education, upbringing, and environment. The majority of criminals—the overwhelming majority, Altgeld stressed—had grown up in circumstances of dire poverty, in families where one or both parents were absent, and without the benefits of education, schooling, or discipline.”   

Darrow was also determined to rid society of capital punishment. He had defended numerous people who faced the death penalty.   The Loeb/Leopold case was perfect  “not because the defendants were deserving...  the trial of Leopold and Loeb would capture the attention of the nation. … "The importance of instinct in the animal world, Darrow stated, provided a clue to its significance in higher forms of life. Human beings believe that they act rationally, but might they not also be subject to instinctual drives? …”human beings were no more capable of free agency than the mason bee or the red ant."

The trial provided a forum for the relatively new field of psychiatry (even then occasionally called “alienists”)  that wanted to impress upon the rapt audience their “belief that criminal behavior was a medical phenomenon best interpreted by scientific experts.”   That is, if they could avoid an adversarial battle between experts (each getting $1,000 a day - a huge amount of money in those days,) which would require the cooperation of the state’s attorney.  The facts might not be at issue but the interpretations could very well be, and that would be embarrassing to the new profession.  Darrow countered with the argument that no one wanted to see the boys freed by claiming insanity; they were trying to avoid the death penalty.  Interestingly, efforts to broadcast the trial --a first -- were nixed after opposition from religious and social groups worried about their children being exposed to the filth (homosexuality) that would come out during testimony.

To explain Darrow’s brilliant strategy would be to reveal too much.  Excellent read for anyone interested in Darrow, criminal motivations, and the justice system not to mention early nineteenth century culture.

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