Well, May has come in big-time. We haven't had much rain and we've had some really summer-like days. Also, the pollen counts have been very high so I've been really itchy lately. It's a good thing I have a stack of books to take my mind off things.
Series
The Price of Blood - Declan Hughes ($13.99/ $.50, copyright 2008, 312 pages, Trade Paperback)
This is, I think, the third of Hughes' Ed Loy series. Loy was a private investigator in L. A., who came home to Dublin to deal with his mother's passing and wound up staying. In this one, Loy is asked by Father Vincent Tyrell to solve the disappearance of a jockey who worked for the prominent racehorse trainer, F. X. Tyrell - the priest's brother. He also takes on a case, assisting Joe Leonard in catching some vandals. As Ed Loy pursues the Leonard case, he discovers a body dumped, a body with some shocking details and a piece of paper that might relate to his jockey case. When Loy looks closer into the history of the jockey, the body count increases. Hughes takes the reader into the midst of contemporary Irish life in Dublin during the Christmas Season and introduces a cast of interesting characters - and you can practically hear the Dublin accent in his dialogs. I enjoyed it.
Retribution - Stuart M. Kaminsky ($6.99/$.50, copyright 2001, 227 pages, Paperback)
I wrote about one of Kamisky's Tobey Peters series last month and was pleasantly surprised to come across this book. The protagonist is Lew Fonseca - a one-time investigator in Chicago who lost his wife and, sinking into depression, dropped everything and moved to Sarasota where he works as a process server for a law firm and just wants to be left alone. Of course, that doesn't happen. This time around, he's trying to find out what happened to a young runaway named Adele. She is somehow connected to a very solitary and eccentric bestselling author and the loss of some valuable manuscripts. Kaminsky's style is lean and taut, with no wasted words and he's created a compelling mystery. My complaint is that this is the second book in the series and most of the recurring characters were introduced in the first so, when they appear here, Kaminsky doesn't give any back-story - which would have been helpful. And I didn't really find any of them to be very sympathetic either. It was OK.
Miscellaneous
Shame The Devil - George Pelecanos ($7.50/$.50, copyright 2000, 374 pages, Paperback)
In 1995, two crooks hit a pizza place in Washington, D. C. which they know is a front for a gambling ring. They're after the money but things go wrong and they wind up killing everyone there and running over a small boy while they get away. Now it's three years later and the killers are coming back. Pelecanos gives us how the surviving family members are doing by having them get together on a regular basis to help each other out. Nick Stefanos - bartender and part-time investigator - gets pulled in and has to deal with all of it. Pelecanos has created some great characters and they interact well. He moves the story along by jumping between several of the characters - including the killers - in each chapter and he knows how to throw in some surprises. I enjoyed it.
Up next - June and Father's Day. My first as a Grandfather.
Till then, enjoy yourselves and ....
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