The Fall

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Fall (Atria, 2015).


John Lescroart is in the process of trying to do something that's really, really rare in series fiction. He's begun transitioning a second generation character into the lead role in his series of legal thrillers and mysteries. Rebecca Hardy, aka "The Beck," wasn't even born when the series began with Dead Irish in 1989. We've watched the character grow up as the original leads in the series have also aged, in about real time. Dismas Hardy and Abe Giltsky are now in their sixties, and since his series has always had the flexibility to move supporting players up to the spotlight, it feels natural and right for Dismas's daughter to step up.

The Beck is now in her early twenties and an associate in her dad's firm, and she ends up defending her first murder case. Dismas is on hand to provide advice and support, and investigator Wyatt Hunt is there to do some ground work, but otherwise this defense is being undertaken by somebody who's probably not ready for how bad things can get in a Lescroart novel, particularly with a client as unhelpful as this one is.

To be bluntly honest, any author is attempting a real highwire act when they create a client as unsympathetic as The Beck's. They risk alienating the reader. Lescroart did something like this many years ago, when Dismas had a disagreeable, overly-affectionate woman to defend - Hey! You leave Mrs. Hardy's man alone, lady! - but this guy's a real piece of work. He lies, he holds back critical information, he ends up making The Beck look bad in the cops' eyes before his arrest, he questions her strategies, he downright refuses to let her consider finding a way to end the proceedings with a mistrial, and so it's not the easiest read. Is it possible to root for our heroine while simultaneously hoping that her sleazeball client is guilty?

Some of Lescroart's novels keep me riveted and some leave me curious about what will happen while not really able to embrace the situation. Since I couldn't warm to the accused, I found myself more entertained than I sometimes am by all the red herrings, diversions, alternate theories, and more about who threw the young murder victim to her death, and several thrilling sequences as some of these play out. One of these even leads to one of the ongoing cast's many supporting players taking a gunshot wound that leaves him bleeding in the streets of San Francisco. In previous books, I have occasionally, and unfairly, lost patience with some of the detail-heavy side stories that Lescroart employs, waiting on pins and needles to get back to the lawyer and client, but I found them really engrossing this time out, with so many rich characters to meet. Perhaps the next time that The Beck takes on a client, I'll get exasperated with the roadblocks instead of the fellow she defends! Recommended, naturally.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

The Keeper

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Keeper (Atria, 2014).

Can't help but spoil this one a little, friends. It's a doozy.


John Lescroart writes the very best legal mysteries in the business. His characters - a great family of friends centered around attorney Dismas Hardy and retired cop Abe Glitzky - shine like none others in the world of series fiction. I love the way that anybody from the group can take the lead role in an adventure. This time out, it's Abe's turn.

In The Keeper, a deputy at the San Francisco County jail comes to Dismas after five days of his wife being missing. Even though she has not been found, Abe's former colleagues at homicide have come around to begin the interview process, suspecting foul play. Abe has been stagnating since his enforced retirement in an earlier novel, so Dismas hires him to help find the wife and, if indeed she has been murdered, find the actual killer.

You wouldn't be surprised, after twenty-five years writing these characters - who age in real time! - if Lescroart started to rest a little bit and let the trappings of the cozies creep into his stories, like pretty much all his peers in the genre do. But he's constantly surprising readers with new left-field changes in the characters' lives, and still coming up with really terrific plot twists.

Take this one. Indeed, the wife has been murdered, and her death is connected to several others. We know that two characters, call 'em BAD GUYS X and Y, are behind it. The book is fifty pages from its conclusion when BAD GUY X is found dead in a car, victim of a self-inflicted gunshot. So the protagonists start looking into the probability that BAD GUY Y shot his partner and staged a suicide. Round about page 272, I suddenly got a tingle in the spine. I knew BAD GUY Y didn't do it. There were just enough tantalizing clues to make the readers see that FEMALE SUPPORTING PLAYER A did it. I didn't want it to be her. Twelve pages crept by like glaciers. Surely it was me misreading things. Thirteen. Nope. Couldn't have been BAD GUY Y. He has an alibi for the first killing. Had to be the lady. I winced the whole time, and exclaimed aloud. I never do that.

So Abe goes to talk to the lady. And IT IS NOT HER EITHER. It's an absolutely. completely brilliant bit of misdirection and I loved it to pieces. Have you ever seen the Mission: Impossible episode "The Mind of Stefan Miklos," I wonder? It's hailed as one of the best episodes of TV drama ever. In it, the team has to very subtly put clues together so that their target thinks he's put a puzzle together. They have to make him think that he has cleverly uncovered something which does not actually exist. It's unbearably complex and complicated - it makes absolutely no sense in a cut-up syndication copy because there's not thirty seconds of footage not critical to the plot - but anyway, what makes this so darn fun in The Keeper is that Lescroart is simultaneously bluffing the detectives in the narrative and bluffing the reader with asides and clues that they don't have. Double misdirection! I loved it to pieces.

Start with Dead Irish, if you haven't already. Highly, highly recommended.

The Ophelia Cut

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Ophelia Cut (Atria, 2013).


This was a very nice treat. A few weeks ago, I treated myself to the first novel in John Lescroart's series of detective / legal thrillers featuring Dismas Hardy, written back in 1989. In it, Dismas's future wife, Frannie, was pregnant with a baby, later to be named Rebecca and take the nickname "the Beck." Since the books move in nearly-real time, the Beck is in her mid-twenties in Lescroart's newest novel, and first for a new publisher, The Ophelia Cut. She's in law school and attempting to be the conscience for her wild and crazy cousin.

Knowing all the family trees of Lescroart's sprawling cast isn't necessary to enjoy this latest book in the series, because the crime at the center of this one is a universal fear. The Beck's cousin attracts a stalker, and wakes up date-raped at his hands. Her father - Dismas's brother-in-law - had already beaten up the jerk, and so when the guy is found dead two mornings after the assault, it's natural that the police will want to ask him a few questions.

This being a Lescroart novel, there's far, far more than that going on. With all the elegant balancing of a warehouse floor full of dominoes, one little tip results in a spectacular cascade of interrelated drama. There's the jerk's boss - a city supervisor - and there's bribery, and massage parlors, and a fellow in witness protection working in the brother-in-law's bar. There's an accusation of police cover-up, and another shocking surprise in the career of Dismas's cop best friend, Lt. Abe Glitsky. And of course there are the usual darts and ridiculous T-shirts and cast iron skillets and the specials at Lou the Greek's.

But at the end of this one, honestly, things aren't going to be the same. There's a shakeup at the conclusion of this book that will change everything in the weird and wonderful "family tree" of all of Hardy's friends and associates in the biggest way since Abe and Treya had a couple more kids. It's a stunning reminder that the other side of the books aging in real time means that the lead characters are middle-aged now.

It's a huge shame that more people don't know these characters! Some of the books in the series are a little denser than others - another Lescroart hallmark is the extreme attention to detail, even in avenues that will prove less vital to the resolution than their inclusion suggested - and some required a little more patience than others, but overall, I'm extremely pleased to have found Lescroart, and think this is a very welcome addition to the canon. I'm looking forward to the next one, as soon as the author can deliver!

Dead Irish

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Dead Irish (Donald I. Fine, 1989).


When I first started reading John Lescroart's novels a couple of years ago, I wasn't able to find the first of the now 21 books about Dismas Hardy and his friends and associates, nor a couple of others that I'm saving for a rainy day. It's a really fun series, mostly legal thrillers but incorporating detective fiction and melodrama along the way, in which any of the characters can either take the lead role or just make a cameo appearance. Hardy, formerly both a cop and an ADA, had dropped out of life entirely after the accidental death of his infant son and, when I first met him in the second book, 1990's The Vig, he was working as a bartender. In time, he'd put his life back together and go back into private law practice, often putting him at odds with his best friend and former beat partner, homicide detective Abe Glitsky.

In Dead Irish, Lescroart is a long way from the standard tropes of his series, and I found myself glad that I ended up saving it for later. Hardy is still paralyzed by guilt and grief over his son's death and while some of his character quirks are there, including his cast-iron skillet and his talent with darts, he's just a mess of a man with a hollow existence. Proving that much growth was to come in later books, however, this one not only features Abe, who is later known to disapprove strongly of profanity, with an uncommonly foul mouth, and it ends on the optimistic note of Dismas on the verge of reconciling with his ex-wife, mother of his late son. This, fans know, will not be successful.

This story is the first instance of Dismas Hardy acting as an amateur investigator. His boss at the bar offers him an ownership stake for looking into the death of his sister's husband, Eddie Cochran. The coroner has ruled it as "suicide, equivocal," with no strong evidence one way or the other, and the police are in no hurry to add another homicide to their duties. Since an insurance payout rests on the verdict, and since Dismas used to be a cop, maybe he could make certain everything's being done correctly?

Dismas finds a really strange series of events revolving around the community newspaper distributors where Cochran had worked, and a very intense family life, with a longtime friend of the Cochrans, a priest, staying very close to the family. Eddie's widow, Frannie, has told nobody that she is pregnant, and the deceased left a teenage brother who is spectacularly troubled. Then there's a definite murder and huge theft at one of the papers, but nobody's certain it has anything to do with Eddie's death...

Another great hallmark of Lescroart here is that the text is incredibly dense, with very minor supporting characters fleshed out completely and given as much life as the stars, and incidents that end up not directly relating to the course of the mystery are also full of detail and color. The result is a story where everything and everybody in a large cast and not strictly a chain or a series, but an assortment of events is all given equal billing and focus. This can result in an occasionally tough read - I have been known, with Lescroart, to occasionally wish he'd compact episodes a little more and move things along faster - but it's a remarkably vivid one. I was completely fascinated to see the author's own style so established and certain, even while the characters had a great deal more growing to do before they inhabit the versions that are more familiar to me from the later books. Recommended.

The Suspect

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Suspect (Dutton, 2007).


I've really been enjoying John Lescroart's novels more and more as they go on. It looks like I've got five more ahead of me, with a sixth to be published this year, and I hope he's got many more to come. As he increases the number of his characters and expands their world, they become more vivid and real than so many of his peers in the business of series fiction.

One of his secret weapons has been the use of multiple protagonists. High-powered lawyer Dismas Hardy or veteran cop Abe Glitsky are certainly able to carry stories on their own, but with the release of 2005's The Hunt Club, he expanded their world to add a private investigator and his agency, and, in 2007's The Suspect, he gave Gina Roake, one of Hardy's senior partners, the lead role. This isn't at all like how Robert B. Parker had separate series of books that shared supporting characters between them; rather, these books star a community, a family of friends and co-workers, and any of the characters can become the lead.

At this point in the series, Gina Roake is in her fifties, and still devastated by the loss of her unlikely fiancee, the irrepressible gadfly David Freeman who had died a few years previously. Roake finds herself defending a literary hero of hers, a writer named Stuart Gorman. Complicating things - and this being a Lescroart novel, things are already very, very complicated - is the inspector assigned to the crime, Devin Juhle, the close friend of the firm's main investigator, Wyatt Hunt. The Hunt-Juhle friendship echoes the established Hardy-Gltsky relationship, and nobody is ever happy about the possibility that these friendships are being taken for granted, or used for legal advantage.

Roake really needed a turn in the spotlight. Hardy and her other partner Wes Farrell have a little more life to them, and she enters this book somewhat defined and constrained by the loss of David Freeman. But with a past that comes back to haunt her, and a recommendation of her services that turns out to be a lot less flattering than she first thought, she's a real standout character by the end of the book. As always, the mystery and the questions about who is being truthful and who is hiding important secrets will keep readers guessing who to believe, because Lescroart doesn't go in for unreliable narrators so much as entire unreliable casts. Even though this novel doesn't (for the most part) have that lingering sense of danger hanging over everybody in it - and that's actually a welcome break - it is still a very fun and very engaging read. I enjoyed the daylights out of it.

The Motive

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Motive (Dutton, 2004).


While I have consistently enjoyed John Lescroart's novels about lawyer Dismas Hardy and cop Abe Glitzky and all their extended friends and families, they're rarely light reading. Lescroart piles so much detail atop complicated and twisting plots that I often need a break after one before starting the next. Sometimes, things get so dense, I take a breather about three-quarters of the way in. I put down The First Law, the one two before this, midway through a meal at a Hawaiian-themed restaurant a couple of months ago and just watched The Price is Right on TV instead. They can get heavy, in other words.

But man alive, The Motive is a stunner, and, if I may use a cliche, a real "page-turner." I really didn't want to put this down at all, since so blasted much was going on that had me completely baffled and enthralled. I loved this one without reservation.

This one begins with the discovery of two bodies in the fiery wreckage of a multi-million dollar San Francisco home, and winds its way through everything from parking-and-towing contracts for the city, an old girlfriend of Dismas', a new baby boy with a frightening birth defect for Abe, favors for the mayor, and deep cover CIA agents. There's a high profile murder case and a lousy cop who's sexually harassed a prime suspect, and one of the most stunning courtroom twists in a series that's full of them.

Speaking as a father of a boy who was born with a hole in his heart, by the way, that subplot for Abe had me absolutely choking for breath a couple of times. Mine turned out okay - well, mostly - but these aren't books where readers can take anything for granted. Previous stories have shown that anything can happen to our heroes, and that popular supporting characters die. I might have been turning the pages so desperately because if Baby Zachary wasn't going to make it, I needed to know right that minute. Whenever the real world did intrude and I did have to put down this novel, I was mighty perturbed. Very highly recommended.

Nothing But The Truth

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Nothing But The Truth (Delacorte, 1999).


I won't pretend that I was completely sold on Nothing But The Truth, another of John Lescroart's legal thriller mysteries featuring Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky. It certainly starts well. Dismas's wife Frannie has vanished. For several chapters, this is a scary book, punching home how weird and frightening it is when your spouse disappears. Then it gets even more frightening when we learn why: she had been subpoenaed by a grand jury looking into a murder, didn't tell her husband about it, got on the wrong side of a crusading ass of a district attorney who is massively abusing the power of a grand jury, and is finally able to phone home hours later after she's been jailed for contempt.

Frannie has always been shown to be a headstrong troublemaker, but I had a lot of difficulty believing that the Hardys' marriage has hit such a low point that she didn't want to tell Dis about the grand jury, and refuses to give up the murdered woman's husband's secrets. While she hasn't been having an actual affair with him, she's become too close a confidant, and, torn between guilt and loyalty, she clams up completely. Did I just not want to believe that Frannie's actions were that credible, or did I just not want to believe that these wonderful characters' marriage is in this much trouble? I'm not sure, but I didn't like either choice much.

Once Dis and Abe get involved with Bree Beaumont's murder, things get even more convoluted and exciting. The police have not gotten far, because the investigator assigned to it had been killed a month previously, derailing everything, and Beaumont's connection to the probable next governor of California is causing one roadblock after another. It's a wild tale with political shenanigans and domestic terrorists and a complicated business about gasoline additives. It's so well constructed that when an organization poisons San Francisco's water supply, which, in less capable hands, would feel like a contrived invasion from a much sillier book, it doesn't feel like anything more than the next natural step in a escalating sequence of events that is kicking innocents in the head along the way.

These aren't simple reads, and Lescroart's heroes' painful battles against City Hall leave me blinking and reaching for something lighter to chase each book as I finish them, but they're engrossing and thrilling, if not always fun. Recommended with reservations.

Guilt

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Guilt (Delacorte, 1996).


John Lescroart's Guilt opens with two longtime friends, attorneys Wes Farrell and Mark Dooher, ogling a cute girl, as longtime friends might be expected to in any bar as the night grows long. Dooher intends to have her. He'll be successful, and, a few years later, they'll be wed and she'll be expecting his child, but only after Dooher has killed two people, one of whom is his current wife. This isn't spoiling much; the man is clearly shown off as guilty throughout the book, which first asks how the police will catch him, and then how his old pal Farrell will get him acquitted.

It's also not much of a spoiler to say that he will. Farrell had been introduced as a supporting player in Lescroart's previous novel A Certain Justice as a deeply depressed attorney who had lost faith in the law as a result of a really disheartening miscarriage of justice. This is, in part, that story: how Farrell got his old friend off a murder charge, knowing deep down that he had killed at least two people, but never understanding how. That's most of the book; the events of A Certain Justice actually happen, chronologically, about three-quarters of the way through this text. The final act asks whether the restored Farrell, allied with one of the author's regular players, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky, can do anything about it.

I was pleasantly surprised to have enjoyed this as much as I did, as so much of it is a foregone conclusion. Dooher is a fantastic opponent, one who hides his villainy extremely well, and never, ever feels that he's doing the wrong thing. It's a complex and complicated world, and he proves to be an excellent master villain to Abe Glitsky. I enjoy Lescroart for many reasons, but one of the best is the way that he populates such a busy world, full of characters, any of whom can take the spotlight for novels or portions of novels. As this book progresses, both Glitsky and Dooher become widowers. Lescroart doesn't make the resulting symmetry too obvious, but it links them, and the interaction this sparks is fabulous. Recommended, especially in tandem with the earlier book.

The Vig

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Vig (Donald I. Fine, 1991).


Since I enjoyed one of John Lescroart's "son of Holmes" novels featuring a young, and never formally identified, Nero Wolfe, I figured that I owed it to the writer to try some of his other stories. In 1990, he began a long-running series of legal thrillers and detective fiction that feature a pair of protagonists who share friendships and a big pile of recurring characters. Dismas Hardy is a former cop who sometimes works as an attorney and sometimes as a bartender, and Abe Glitsky is a homicide detective in San Francisco.

The 13th Juror and A Certain Justice were both very good books. They were dense and unpredictable and very well written, but each was a little hampered by my personal biases. The woman in Juror who has hired Hardy to get her off a murder rap was so colossally disagreeable and annoying that I stopped caring what would happen to her, and the poor fellow at the center of Justice was caught in such an incredibly horrible situation, much of it, involving the politics down at the DA's office, he's completely ignorant, that I found the experience of reading it really depressing. It has one hell of an ending, mind.

Much more entertaining was The Vig, which preceded those two books and featured Hardy keeping a low profile and serving black-and-tans from the Irish-themed bar that he co-owns with his future brother-in-law. In this one, Rusty Ingraham, an old colleague from the DA's office, stops by to let him know that a killer they'd put away years before and who swore vengeance is out. They plan to arm up and keep an eye out for each other, but Ingraham vanishes almost immediately, his ladyfriend is found dead, and the ex-con, immediately in trouble with the dealers who've moved into his neighborhood, is on the run after one of those thugs gets shot. And then, somehow, the mob gets involved.

I enjoyed this one a lot for its spiraling sense of confusion and Hardy's inability to trust the word of anybody. Hardy believes that Ingraham was using him as an alibi to fake his death and get out of town, but can neither prove it nor find any reason why he would do that, particularly when the bodies keep piling up, and the only one we know for certain that the suspect didn't shoot is one of the dealers.

Overall, I really had fun meeting these characters and seeing Hardy driven to keep looking into a weird situation when it's not at all in his interest to keep digging. The storytelling is clear, even as the plot takes wild left turns, and I was left thinking that Hardy's bar would be a fine place to kick back. Next on my pile from Lescroart is Guilt, which is linked in some way to the characters in A Certain Justice. It's not a situation that I look forward to revisiting, but the characters and the storytelling are so very good that I'm happy to chance it.

Rasputin's Revenge

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Rasputin's Revenge (Donald I. Fine, 1987).

It will be very, very difficult to read this book without spoilers: they are plastered over the front and the back covers. See, I tend to do a little more digging and research than my wife does into our hobbies, learning production trivia for the Stargate TV series, or example, and so I knew about John Lescroart's fun character of Auguste Lupa before she did. He is, effectively, Young Nero Wolfe, but never given that name. He's also, following the speculations of William S. Baring-Gould, the man who invented cross-genre fanfic as we know it in the early '60s, the son of Sherlock Holmes and "the woman," Irene Adler.

I had a great time with this story of Wolfe - I mean "Lupa" - working as an agent provacateur in Imperial Russia in late 1916. The story is told from the POV of a friend from France who has arrived in St. Petersburg on a diplomatic mission, to persuade Czar Nicholas not to sue for a separate peace with Germany. But a series of ugly murders of high-ranking officials in the court make it more likely that Nicholas will withdraw from the Great War. Fortunately, intelligence in Montenegro sent Lupa, one of their top agents, into Russia as soon as they heard of the first death. The soon-to-be-great detective is already showing signs of his future genius, but things go very badly for him after he and Giraud are arrested, and Lupa's reconstruction of the killings is foiled when Giraud unwittingly alibis the killer.

Unfortunately, the idiotic spoilers on the back of the book - I stuck post-it notes over them before giving the book to my wife to read - ruined one element of it. I was reminded of watching the late '70s TV movie The New Maverick, seeing Jack Kelly's name in the opening credits, and spending the entire movie wondering when Brother Bart was going to show up on the other end of the swindle. Suffice it to say that a very satisfactory plot twist would have been made much more so had I not known it was coming.

This was actually Lescroart's second book with Lupa. I passed on the first, Son of Holmes, for the pure amusement value of introducing my wife to Lupa without a word of his origins, as she introduced me to Wolfe himself similarly blind, and letting her learn through the text both that this character would eventually become Wolfe and make such claims to his parentage was great fun. Couldn't easily do that in a book that spells it out in the title. It was also Lescroart's final, to date, bit of fun in the sandbox with other people's classic characters. After these two books, he created his own protagonists in lawyer Dismas Hardy and San Francisco cop Abe Glitsky, who have starred in sixteen novels. The author did such a good job capturing Wolfe that I'm intrigued to see what he's done with his own creations, and will probably check those out after I finish some other series that I am working through. Recommended with the plea to avoid Amazon reviews and the book's back cover!