Wild Prey by Brian Klingborg

Published by Minotaur Books on May 17, 2022

Inspector Lu Fei of Raven Valley Township is incorruptible which, in China, is bad for a career as a government employee. Lu has thus been relegated to a small community where his talents are wasted. Lu begins Wild Prey in a marketplace, watching for a man who is wanted for selling black market products. The man has violated Chinese laws that protect wildlife by prohibiting the sale of animal products that, according to ancient superstitions, improve heath or virility.

Lu next deals with a young woman who reports a missing sister. The sister went missing outside of Lu’s jurisdiction, but Lu’s efforts to encourage an investigation by the correct authorities are unsuccessful. Lu travels to the city where the sister, Tan Meixiang, was last working. Coincidentally, she was employed in a restaurant that is suspected of serving dishes made from black market animals. The restaurant has a reputation for delivering other shady services to its exclusive clientele, but the owner’s connection with powerful people shields him from prosecution. The owner, Wilson Fang, flees from the premises during a shootout for which Lu will inevitably be blamed.

Lu’s unorthodox investigation of the restaurant leads to his suspension. At the same time, it attracts the attention of a well-placed individual in a shadowy government agency. He recruits Lu to act as an undercover operative, posing as a buyer of exotic bushmeat to infiltrate the seller’s facility in Myanmar. The assignment is dangerous; more than one person will become lunch for a tiger before the story ends. Fu believes that the assignment will lead him to Wilson Fang and might therefore help him discover Meixiang’s fate, so he accepts — not that he has much choice. The plot elements and many of the crooked characters come together deep the Myanmar jungle.

Wild Prey is the second Lu Fei novel. Lu is a likable character, a classic crime novel cop who refuses to play the game and whose career suffers because he places justice ahead of the career aspirations of his superiors. While Wild Prey treats the reader to a series of action scenes, Lu is also likable because he’s nonviolent by nature, preferring wits to weapons as problem-solving tools. Lu is nevertheless capable of holding his own in a fight, particularly when his life depends on the outcome.

Lu is pursuing a woman who operates a local bar. In his undercover role, he is expected to drink excessively and sleep with prostitutes. Avoiding the latter obligation is another test of Lu’s character. In the end, Lu’s character serves him well.

The familiar elements of police-based crime novels are freshened by the Asian setting and an atmosphere that emphasizes the customs and cuisine of both China and Myanmar. Brian Klingborn’s descriptive prose transports the reader to fascinating lands while he delivers the excitement and characterization that crime novel fans admire.

RECOMMENDED

The Island by Adrian McKinty

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 17, 2022

The Island is an uncomplicated mix of thriller and horror elements. A widower named Tom has traveled to Australia for a medical conference. He’s taken his new wife and his two kids. The kids don’t like their stepmom, who is half their dad’s age, but they’re more upset that they haven’t seen any cool animals. Tom spends a few hundred bucks to buy a few hours of time on a private island, ignoring obvious warnings that invading the island’s privacy will be a bad idea. After another couple joins the tour, a ferry brings the six people and their two cars to Dutch Island.

Adrian McKinty signals that Dr. Tom is a disagreeable character when Tom complains that the car rental company gave him a lesser Porsche SUV than the one he reserved. McKinty signals that the reader should have sympathy for Tom’s wife, Heather, when she struggles to do her best in her unfamiliar parental role. Those signals alert the reader to the likelihood that things will not go well for Tom but that Heather will show her mettle. Just to make sure the reader doesn’t dwell on Tom’s unpleasant encounter with the island's residents, McKinty provides more tidbits about Tom’s past to suggest that that his eventual fate is only the product of karma.

Tom does something stupid that gets Tom and his family in trouble with the island’s inhabitants, a family of misfits named O’Neill, led by a woman they call Ma. The O’Neill family decides that vengeance requires them to kill Tom’s family, apart from the 14-year-old girl who will become a replacement wife for one of the O’Neills. For good measure, the O’Neill family tortures the tag-along couple so that the reader will have no doubt that the O’Neills are evil. This sets an action story in motion, as Heather and the kids use a combination of wits and luck to turn themselves from prey to hunter.

The story makes interesting use of Australia’s history of oppressing Aboriginal people. The plot is otherwise predictable, but the story moves quickly and generates the excitement that McKinty intended. The traditional season of beach reads is approaching. The Island falls neatly into that category — entertaining but no great loss if the reader leaves it buried in the sand.

RECOMMENDED

Overboard by Sara Paretsky

Published by William Morrow on May 10, 2022

I always enjoy the plot complexity of V.I. Warshawski novels, but there’s a little too much going on in Overboard. The primary story involves the mystery of a young woman who is running from a danger she won’t articulate. Subplots involve art theft, blackmail, Chicago land development shenanigans, elder abuse, vandalism of a synagogue, a drone that supposedly sucks everyone’s data from the air, and a kid who is trying to survive bad parenting. Sara Paretsky depends on unconvincing coincidences to bind the subplots together. Trimming a subplot or two might have added some urgency to an uncharacteristically slow story. Still, any Warshawski novel is worth a reader’s time, if only for the rich Chicago atmosphere.

Overboard begins with Warshawski’s dogs finding an injured teenage girl near the river. Of all the millions who inhabit Chicago, it’s an amazing coincidence that Warshawski finds the girl, but that’s a forgivable contrivance because it sets the story in motion. The girl (Julia) speaks only one word to Warshawski, a word that might be Hungarian. Warshawski takes her to a hospital that she trusts. A janitor who speaks some Hungarian makes an unsuccessful attempt to communicate with Julia. The police visit and soon the janitor is dead, Julia disappears, and the woman sharing Julia’s hospital room suffers misfortune.

Warshawski spends most of the novel eluding a corrupt police officer who is convinced that the girl gave something to Warshawski. After Warshawski is in the news for finding Julia, a teenage boy (Brad) wants her to help him discover whether his father is in trouble. Warshawski has a history with Brad’s family that does not endear his quarreling parents to Warshawski. Eventually Warshawski will need to hide Brad and Julia, both of whom possess knowledge that might endanger their lives. Part of Warshawski’s quest involves learning what the two kids have that the cops and their gangster pals are trying to make them surrender.

The story follows Warshawski as she pounds the pavement to find Julia (although the manner in which they reconnect depends on another unlikely coincidence) and pounds it some more to figure out why Julia and Brad and an elderly woman are in so much danger. Warshawski is twice taken to the Chicago Police Department’s version of Gitmo, from which she makes an extraordinarily unlikely escape. A final action scene has Warshawski playing a daring but stupidly dangerous role. None of this quite added up to a believable story.

Key plot points hinge on a small drone doing impossible things, like causing a blackout and blocking all cellphone coverage in a building. (The drone also magically absorbs all digital data contained within a building, but the plot doesn’t depend on that remarkable feature to save the heroine.) The drone’s conventional ability to take pictures is a more believable plot driver, although the picture it happened to take is — yes, once more — an unlikely coincidence.

The corruption and brutality of the Chicago Police Department is legendary. Paretsky makes it central to the plot. It is also part of the novel’s Chicago atmosphere, along with crooked real estate deals, a polluted river, and the city’s ethnic diversity. Paretsky’s novels are a joy to read for anyone who has explored Chicago. Paretsky’s prose and atmospheric writing give the novel its value, but the story is a bit ho-hum compared to other books in the series.

RECOMMENDED

With Prejudice by Robin Peguero

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 17, 2022

It isn’t unusual for a courtroom drama to explore the private lives of the lawyers and the defendant who are the novel’s key characters. With Prejudice, set in Miami in 2011, moves beyond the usual. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at the judge and at the jurors who are deciding guilt in a sexual assault case. On occasion, the novel tracks the truth after a witness lies on the stand (such as the cop who recalls the truth as he denies ever using a pejorative term to describe a gay man).

Nor is it unusual for a courtroom drama to offer the “Inside Baseball” of criminal trials — the strategies employed by prosecutors and defense attorneys to work the angles and sway juries. With Prejudice does that, but it also takes a deep, honest dive into the dependence of prosecutors and defense attorneys on prejudice as they try to influence outcomes. The lead prosecutor in the trial, for example, while thinking of herself as a liberal feminist, wants a jury of white conservative males because they are demographically more likely to judge a nonwhite defendant harshly in a sexual assault case. The novel portrays, albeit superficially, the impact of race and ethnicity on trials and jury deliberations, from the impact of race on witness identifications to the interaction of jurors of different races.

The inner workings of the system are exposed in other ways. The novel features a medical examiner who is willing to slant ambiguous results to favor law enforcement when honesty would require ambiguity to remain unresolved. It recognizes that judges consider reelection when they think about making a legally correct ruling that the public might view as “soft on crime.” And it reminds readers that the rules governing police conduct — rules that allow the police to induce confessions by lying about nonexistent evidence and by claiming they are on the defendant’s side — make it easy to convict the innocent.

The crime involves the disappearance, alleged rape, and death of Melina Morris. Her body was evidently cremated in the medical examiner’s morgue. An anonymous tip alerts the authorities to look for bone fragments that the police eventually match to Melina’s DNA. Skull fragments suggest Melina sustained a blow to the head. Hairline fractures to the pelvis suggest she was “possibly maybe” the victim of a sexual assault. Oddly, while the body’s other bones were pulverized after cremation, the bones with evidentiary value were left intact.

Suspicion falls on Gabriel Soto, once of the body handlers in the morgue. He’s a quiet loner and regarded as a bit odd, so he’s immediately pegged as the culprit. After the police decide he’s guilty, they focus their investigation on proving that they are right. Is Soto guilty? Well, the question is answered at the story’s end, but that’s not really the point, is it? The question is whether guilt can be established beyond a reasonable doubt. The question is whether Soto can receive a fair trial. As the novel points out, defense lawyers are willfully ignorant of their client’s guilt or innocence, and rightly so; their focus is on the evidence and the process, not the truth.

But even those questions are not the point of With Prejudice. “With prejudice” is a legal term that refers to finality. A decision made “with prejudice” means a party won’t be given a do-over. The double meaning in the title refers to prejudice that pervades the legal system. That’s what the novel is about. The clever story Robin Peguero tells simply frames the larger issues.

The jurors violate the court’s instructions (as jurors commonly do) by chatting about the case during breaks, many having made up their minds before they hear any evidence at all. But as soon as it appears that they are ready to reach a verdict, the story upends. For a moment I thought the narrative traveled through a portal that transformed the roles of key characters. It soon becomes apparent that a flashback changes the perspective of everything that happened before. Characters, both living and dead, turn out to be connected to each other in surprising ways. I admire novels that can turn the story upside down in an instant and dislike novels that attempt that trick but fail. With Prejudice earned my admiration for pulling off the magic trick, for confronting timely issues of prejudice within and outside the criminal justice system, and for keeping me engaged in a smart story that disguises its intricacy with apparent simplicity.

RECOMMENDED

Storm Rising by Chris Hauty

Published by ‎ Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 3, 2022

The “storm” in Storm Rising is a white separatist conspiracy to carve a whites-only nation out of Texas and other states that fall within the Permian Basin. The conspirators expect to gain power by controlling the nation’s largest oil deposits. A congressman, local politicians, a few military leaders, and some cops are orchestrating the scheme. The Storm movement blends white supremacy, nationalism, and hatred of government, the three pillars of far-right extremism. The congressman doesn’t care about hatred or ideology, but he does care about power. He wants to see his face on the dollars minted by the Free States of America.

The story begins with exploding oil storage tanks near Texas oil wells. The bodies of two Spanish-speaking migrants are found at each site. Ignoring the improbability that terrorists would be so inept, the far right immediately claims that drug cartels, or maybe just migrants in general, have declared war on the US. The Texas governor dispatches the Texas Army National Guard to help score a political victory from the mayhem. The real victory that the conspirators hope to achieve is more sinister, although only as a matter of degree. Stoking racial and ethnic hatred hurts the country even if it is not meant to further a civil war.

Hayley Chill is an operative of the “deeper state.” Trained by the military and a proficient mixed martial arts fighter, Chill works for an ambiguously defined entity called Publius. The organization is tasked with “preserving the nation’s constitutional democracy.” These days, that’s a tall order.

This is the third Hayley Chill novel but the first I’ve read. The story mentions that Hayley saved the nation from a president who was a Russian spy, presumably in one of the earlier novels. I can’t imagine where he got that idea (said the reviewer in a comment that drips sarcasm).

Hayley catches wind of the white supremacist conspiracy while digging into the mystery of her father’s death. Hayley is haunted by the memory of finding her father swinging at the end of a rope. She thought he died in Iraq, but she found him dead in the home of his old buddy Charlie Hicks. Did he come back to the US in secrecy and assume Hicks’ identity? Why did he abandon his family? Her only clues suggest that her father (and/or Charlie Hicks) were involved with something called the Storm that will not be good for democracy. She convinces Publius to send her to Texas to investigate.

The thought that insurrectionists could hold their newly acquired nation is far-fetched, but their “ace in the hole” plan to do so is the final component of the conspiracy that Hayley discovers in her investigation. It is the nature of conspiracy plots to be far-fetched but this one has currency, given the number of Americans who supported the overthrow of democracy by overturning a fair election. I give Chris Hauty credit for plugging obvious plot holes, making the conspiracy sufficiently plausible to encourage my willing suspension of disbelief.

Hauty’s prose gives the story a sense of urgency, making this a “just one more chapter before I sleep” book. The action is relentless, but Hauty does not sacrifice characterization as he speeds the novel to a satisfying conclusion. Hauty adds interest to the story by giving capsule descriptions of the lives that minor characters led before they played a role in the novel and/or the lives they will live after the novel ends. He gives heroic roles to people who, like most Americans, care about democracy and resent the idea that a “civil war” would suddenly make them residents of a new country they neither want nor support. White supremacists won’t like this novel, but the majority of thriller fans should find that its combination of action and characterization pushes all the right buttons.

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