Telegraph Avenue

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 Telegraph Avenue (Harper, 2012).


I'd been intending to read Michael Chabon for many years, and finally succumbed to the siren's song of Telegraph Avenue, or, more accurately, its wonderful cover design, suggesting an LP pressed on red vinyl. Set in 2004, it's set around a used record store in Oakland facing the impending threat of a huge development coming up down the street that promises to have a fairly amazing music department as well, but there is so much more going on than just that.

Chabon mixes several stories of old friendships, marriages, and families all hitting rough waters at the same time. The big new mega-store that wants to move in is just the catalyst for a lot of old heartbreak and poor decisions resurfacing at once. I had to wince a few times reading this.

However, I laughed out loud much more often. I love Chabon's style, which assumes a great deal of popular culture literacy of his readers, and breezes through everything from Rudy van Gelder to blaxploitation cinema and 1970s Marvel Comics. Some of these are important to the narrative, and others, including more off-kilter references to Black Bolt and the Inhumans than anything that I've ever read before, are just perfectly timed and flawlessly judged. It takes a good eye and a good mind to match specific emotions by analogy to some four-color spectacle that most readers might have forgotten, and have it work every time.

It's not a quick read, and the author does get pretty weighed down with detail, and I had more than one complaint about some of the Jaffees' parenting choices, but I really enjoyed this book and have two more by the author on my shelf to follow it. Recommended for older readers.

LSH Reread, part fourteen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 41-47, 1987-1988)

Major developments:

*The Legion tracks their mysterious foe Starfinger to a satellite. They battle him, his army, and his strange "Bond girl" bodyguards Starlight and Starbright. Starfinger self-destructs the station after badly injuring Colossal Boy and is presumed to have been killed.
*Longtime supporting player Laurel Kent reveals that she is not actually a descendant of Superman at all, but one of the immortal robot Manhunters (as in "No man escapes the...").
*Cham signs out on one of his Espionage Squad missions.
*The weird anti-energy lifeforms from Quislet's home universe abduct him and Wildfire through a black hole and attempt to punish him for stealing his exploration/survival vessel, but they escape.
*The egotistical blowhard Atmos, from Star Boy's home planet of Xanthu, applies for membership in the team. Chuck and Luorno recommend him for the Academy; he brashly turns them down.
*Three weird (and ponderous) aliens called the Lords of Luck reveal that they have been manipulating events in Garth, Ayla, and Mekt's lives, including the accident that gave them their lightning powers. They arrange for Mekt's escape from prison. Garth recaptures him.
*Brainy has been at work in his lab, but it's revealed that he and three others are quietly working on something on their own. Mon-El, distant and cold to Shady, is likely among them. Tellus unwittingly learns that Saturn Girl is also involved, and he coins it a "conspiracy." He confides in both Magnetic Kid and in his former teacher Luorno, not realizing that she is the fourth conspirator.
*Over the course of several identities and assignments, Cham works his way up Starfinger's criminal organization, confirming that he has survived and is still working his schemes.


Here's another run of the comic that doesn't really invite a great deal of comment. These are mostly pretty solid comics, and have aged well, but nothing in them really stands out as transcendent, either.

Well, there is Starfinger, I suppose. Good grief. I somehow remembered him as a powerful and entertaining villain. He isn't. He's ridiculous. He doesn't even begin to appear as though he's a scheming, dangerous planner, but rather a spoiled child. He is prone to utterly childish temper tantrums and fits of ego, and his whole position of "how dare the Legion interfere with my plans?!" is the sort of thing that somebody who grew up in a vacuum and never heard of superheroes would take. The "killing his underlings who fail him" angle is so overplayed that he appears less like Darth Vader and more like the sort of boss that no criminal would bother working for. There's got to be an easier way to make a dishonest living than working for this lunatic in his carnival costume!

Worse, Paul Levitz makes one of his very few letters page mistakes with Starfinger. Now, for years, Levitz has been one of the most entertaining figures in all of comics fandom when replying to reader input. He's been thoughtful, humble, honest, and accepting of fan praise and of criticism. He's defended his work in a professional and tactful way, and accepted the blame when things didn't work as well as he'd hoped. Somehow, though, he let one clue too many slip through the net. If Starfinger doesn't turn out to be the criminal whom Colossal Boy had captured in issue # 39's flashback issue, I'll be very surprised, because Levitz darn near spells it right out in neon.

The oversized episode with the Luck Lords is published as LSH's 30th Anniversary issue. Like some previous collections along the same lines, it features guest work by artists from earlier days, including some fine work by Dave Cockrum. I remember this issue very fondly and very particularly, because, when I came back to LSH in the 1990s, I bought this back issue, along with thirteen or fourteen others, from the quarter bin at a shop in Athens, Georgia, and enjoyed the heck out of it. One of the other issues came from about three years into the controversial 1990s run spearheaded by fans-turned-pros Tom and Mary Bierbaum.

Anyway, this anniversary issue showed that three bizarre, all-seeing aliens called the Lords of Luck had overseen and manipulated every event in Garth Ranzz's life. The other issue, which I read the same evening, showed that the Lords blinked and missed the fairly major event of Garth actually staying dead; the Bierbaums decided to claim that Garth had never been resurrected, and that all this time it had been the shapeshifting Legion of Super-Pets blob Proty masquerading as Garth. Uh-huh. I understand that this, and some of the other, shall we say, eyebrow-raising retcons endorsed by the Bierbaums were subsequently erased from contemporary continuity and canon. GOOD.

Split Image

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free (but not this week), 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 Split Image (Putnam, 2010).


Split Image was the ninth Jesse Stone novel in fourteen years, and was released a month after author Robert B. Parker had passed away. Clearly then, I am very nearly to the end of his bibliography; the two final Spenser novels are still waiting for me, and then I'm moving on to Michael Chabon.

It's one of quite a few books in the second half of his career where one of our red-blooded he-man heroes is confronted with some exceptionally outre sexual deviancy. It isn't quite as ridiculous as the TV show CSI was, early in its run, but you can almost picture Parker, thinking with urgency and knowing he has about 120 days to finish this book, ticking down the list of unusual lifestyles that he's covered recently, looking for a new one: "Voyeurs, wife swappers, con artists, Bonnie & Clyde-fetishists... hmmm. Haven't done incestuous twins marrying retired mobsters yet..."

In less contrived news, the book brings Stone's flirtation and quasi-relationship with Sunny Randall to a reasonable close. Randall had featured in five or six of her own novels - all of Parker's detective series are set in the same Massachusetts, with supporting characters crossing around between them - before being more formally folded in as the major supporting player in Stone's. They realize that they've been falling in love for years, and, the impediments of their ex-spouses removed and finally consigned to the past, the series concludes with the two thinking positively about a future together. It's not often that series fiction gets a happily-ever-after wrapup; I'm glad that things ended this way for the two, regardless of whether Parker had more ideas in store. Recommended as a distraction.

LSH Reread, part thirteen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 37-40 and Annual # 3, Superman vol. 2 # 8, and Action Comics # 591, 1987)

Major developments:

*Cosmic Boy and Night Girl have returned from a vacation in the 20th Century, only to find it radically altered from the history that they have known, without the Superboy of Smallville who inspired the formation of the LSH, and who later grew up to be Superman. In this iteration, Superman made his first public appearance in 1986, and was never active as a "Boy of Steel." They confronted an old and powerful enemy, the immortal and entropic Time Trapper, who warned them to never attempt to travel in time again.
*Ignoring this, Brainiac 5 leads a team that includes himself, Cos, Night Girl, Ultra Boy, Blok, Invisible Kid, Sun Boy and Mon-El back to Superboy's time of the 1960s. But their old friend betrays them, trapping Mon-El, Ultra Boy, Cos and Night Girl in stasis. The others use the time bubble to move forward in time...
*Brainy and the others find Superman in the late 1980s, but he has no memory of the LSH, and while he finds their story about his history and recent events intriguing - "like some crazy Twilight Zone version of my life" - they are all frozen in time by Superboy and his stasis ray.
*Superman breaks free from Superboy's stasis ray and pursues him back to the 1960s, while the Time Trapper explains to the audience what the heck is going on: he has taken advantage of a temporal anomaly - the LSH interacting with a universe that never existed - to create that universe itself from a sliver of time, one million years old. This "pocket universe" included a Superboy who donned a costume at the age of eight, inspired and later joined the LSH of the 30th Century. Each time the LSH, who are really from the future of the new-to-us Superman's universe (the "real one"), traveled back to visit Superboy, they were actually passing from our universe into this "pocket."
*The two Kryptonians fight. Superboy is actually a hell of a lot more powerful than the new-to-us Superman, but the older man's got the moral strength, and knows that whatever has gone on to make the Boy of Steel betray the Legion, his heart isn't in it. Superboy concedes; he's learned about the Time Trapper, after the incidents of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Trapper has demanded that the Legion be destroyed for his "pocket universe" to survive, and desperately hoped that Superman could find an answer. The Legion insists, however, that Superman remain in 1987. If he were to die in battle with the Trapper at the end of time, it really could unravel all of history.
*But the casualty of the battle is actually Superboy, who is mortally wounded while heroically powering one of the Trapper's devices and sending his adopted homeworld into safety somewhere else, ripping the pocket universe away from the Trapper's control and also away from the Crisis on Infinite Earths. His last feat of strength is flying the Legionnaires' bubble back through time to the correct 2987, and he dies in Mon-El's arms after asking his old "brother": "Take care of Earth for me... it -- it was the nicest home a boy could want..."
*SP Officer Gigi Cusimano spends an evening reminiscing about the days when she dated Colossal Boy before she accepts a promotion and commission to be chief of the SP attachment on Mars, which will probably make her unavailable for many more evenings with Sun Boy.
*Cos and Night Girl retire to her home planet of Kathoon. Finding evidence of a plot by the alien Dominators, they call for backup. With the LSH unavailable, Bouncing Boy, Comet Queen, and Myg - the new Karate Kid - come to assist. They decide to form a new group of Substitute Heroes.
*The criminal kingpin Starfinger finds a couple more of his extortion schemes halted by the Legion, and he has a great big temper tantrum.


I'll come back to Starfinger, who really is proving to be a disappointment, in the next chapter of this reread. This time out, we'll talk about Superboy.

DC Comics has stopped and restarted their continuity heaven knows how many times in the last thirty years, and never understood the lesson that writer and artist John Byrne taught them in 1986: you have to do a full, line-wide reboot for anything to make sense and not have huge plot holes. Byrne, along with George Perez, who rebooted Wonder Woman around the same time, were probably the only DC creators who did it right. They certainly didn't do it very well (coughByrneBigBardaSleezcough), but that's a separate argument.

Byrne perceived that one of the problems with Superman in the early 1980s was his enormous supporting cast of fellow Kryptonians and hangers-on. He was far too powerful, and in the unlikely event he did meet too great a challenge, he had a mob of cousins and parallel universe "brothers" and the entire city of Kandor to call for help - hardly the life of the "Last Son of Krypton." Byrne also dumped most of the dumber aspects of the character, apparently asking the very sensible question, "When was Superman ever stupid enough to tell people that he had a secret identity?" This new, streamlined Man of Steel made his public, costumed debut as an adult in 1986, after Clark Kent had a successful athletic and college career, arriving at the Daily Planet as a seasoned reporter with experience covering war zones for the wire services and only using his super powers, secretly, in emergencies. In short, Byrne made Superman readable for the first time in ages, and consigned the bumbling, foolish, No-Friends Clark to history.

But this new narrative sat awkwardly with most every other creator and editor in the comics. Historically, Superman always inspired all the other modern-day superheroes to get started, but, depending on who was writing what title, the Justice League and Batman might have been operating for years before his debut. Very little was making sense as, for example, the many Batman writers decided against restarting their character, because that would mean rebooting Robin back to a kid and forcing a reboot of DC's best-seller, Teen Titans, which featured Robin as a twenty-something hero named Nightwing.

And then there was Legion, which had about thirty years of history reliant on the idea that teenage Superboy had inspired the team and spent most of his teenage and - I guess - college days hanging out with them having adventures. As it had been DC's second-most popular title (sales had allegedly dropped by a fan-estimated third when it moved to the deluxe line with better paper, however, and Byrne's new Superman comics were outselling it by 1987), nobody wanted to reboot or restart LSH. The result was this phenomenally awkward four-part story, in which Levitz and his editorial team worked with John Byrne and his editorial team to explain the new, massive plot hole between the Superman comics published in 1987, which had no continuity or backstory, and the previous thirty years of Legion, which were choking in them.

I tried to explain the solution in the details above, and... it really is stupid. I'm not saying anybody could have done better, and certainly not me, and the presentation is marred by the Time Trapper's bizarre monologue, where he spends pages and pages explaining what the hell he had done to an audience consisting of the readers and nobody else, but this is the sort of inelegant and ridiculous solution to a problem that defines DC Comics in general. Later writers would keep grappling with this problem, leading to more and more continuity restarts, defining the comic, probably fairly, as the most overly complicated thing in funnybooks to follow.

Having said that... Levitz and artist Greg LaRocque do a pretty good job starting the four-part crossover, and John Byrne, accepting his tendency toward LOTS of monologue-choked thought balloons, actually does an exemplary job incorporating the characters into his middle episodes. It's so note-perfect - apart from the pages of the Time Trapper boasting about his plan - that it's completely remarkable, and not in a good way, that, one month later... well, just Google "john byrne big barda" and prepare for your mind to boggle. The offense is immortalized in an ad for that issue right at the end of episode three of this story.

But part four... well, this is something special. Tasked with saying farewell forever to the Boy of Steel, Levitz and LaRocque really rise to the occasion. Superboy's death really is just the saddest damn thing that ever happened in an American superhero funnybook, and if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye, something's downright wrong with you. Sure, he was the victim of some editorial or publisher's mandate, but that fabulous scene, our hero helpless in Mon-El's arms, is something else.

The funeral - the Legion has no way of returning their old friend's body to the Kents back in Smallville, who will never know what happened to their adoptive son, so they bury him with full honors on Shamballa - is kept to a single double-page splash, and there, almost small enough to miss, is a little clue as to what will happen soon. It's Duo Damsel, holding her husband and confiding that she really did love Superboy. Teamed with Polar Boy's resolve that one day soon, they'll see whether an immortal like the Time Trapper can die, it points the way to terrible decisions and real, ugly change.

Trifecta

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free (but not this week), 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 Trifecta (Rebellion, 2012).


Many years ago, some 2000 AD readers were having a game of "what ifs" on one of the message boards or newsgroups, and talk got onto one of the occasional huge events in the pages of Judge Dredd. See, there are dozens of spin-off series that are set in the same world as the hero, and tell stories about other judges in other departments, or plainclothes detectives in other cities, or gay vampire occult investigators in the employ of the Vatican's black ops program, or what have you, but the cataclysmic events in one series are rarely ever referenced in the others. Wouldn't it be lovely if a major, world-shaking thing actually was shown to rock the protagonists of several series at once? The idea was cherished, nurtured, considered, and, as things happen on message boards, quietly filed away and forgotten in favor of new conversations.

The twist in "The Cold Deck" is integral to discussing what happens, so here goes: right under everybody's noses, after a few weeks of thinking three separate series were every bit as separate as 2000 AD series typically are, the three were all suddenly shown to be beautifully interlinked. The twist itself was cute, but the execution was more flawless than any ever seen in comics. Nearly forty years I've been readin' funnybooks, and I've never seen it bettered. The three writers, Al Ewing, Si Spurrier, and Rob Williams, have absolutely blown away every antecedent in the genre, from every time the Avengers have fought the X-Men, or DC's Superman learned that it was Marvel's Galactus that destroyed his home planet, of course it has taken the architects building the world's best comic book to show everybody else how to do it best and make it matter.

Here's the part that I liked the most: the story took advantage of last year's excellent Dredd movie to pull it off. As the film was released, the sister comic Judge Dredd Megazine devoted two of its three slots for new comics to a pair of Dredd episodes, and the other to the movie's co-star Anderson, leaving all the many other recurring Dredd-universe series temporarily homeless. For example, the Meg had been the traditional home of a series called The Simping Detective by Spurrier and, in this new story, artist Simon Coleby. At the same time, it also made sense for 2000 AD to beef up its Dreddworld content to take advantage of moviegoers' curiosity. At most, there might be a second story in any given issue set in Dredd's Mega-City One, such as the popular Low Life by Williams and artist Matt "D'Israeli" Booker.

So everything was announced with the happy understanding that the extra Dredd-world content was scheduled because of the movie. Everybody likes Low Life, which features a somewhat deranged and hygiene-challenged undercover judge named Dirty Frank. And everybody likes The Simping Detective, back in action after a few years away, which features another undercover judge, Jack Point, who poses as a private eye. And everybody has been very pleased with the Dredd episodes by Al Ewing, who's frankly considered to be that strip's heir apparent to its main writer, John Wagner, when the day of his retirement comes, and especially when fan favorite Henry Flint is on art duties. There has never been a time when readers have been lulled into such a false state of security.

Here's the thing: Marvel and DC learned ages ago to hype and promote the bejesus out of their big events stories. They send out the press releases, they let everybody know that nothing will ever be the same again, they provide retailers with checklists to pass out to customers, because a new big event, usually built around the temporary "death" of a major character, will cross over from one main title into sixteen or more subordinate ones. I'd like to think that readers know it's a shell game and don't really appreciate it, but deal with it all the same. I suffered through the intrusion of heaven knows how many crossovers into the American titles that I wished to read, for decades, and enjoyed exactly one of them, One Million. That's not a good batting average. (As I'm writing this, incidentally, I'm enjoying a long reread of the 1980s Legion of Super-Heroes, and I'm right at the point between the last of several intrusions from Crisis on Infinite Earths and a two-part intrusion from Millennium. None were welcome.) The point is: the hype is the key. They start excited arguments at comic news and fan sites, even the good ones like The Beat, and they get the comment threads humming and the advertisement views rising, so the fan media keeps covering new hype projects, because - good Lord! - this time, when Professor X dies, he might stay dead for a whole seventeen issues instead of sixteen. This is serious business! Keep talking about it! Surely, if 2000 AD wanted to get more coverage, they'd announce a crossover and promote it, so everybody on every comic fan site can get excited and get the ad views and clicks, right?

No, they'll just print part two of a Dredd episode that ends with our hero kicking down the door of an apartment and then begin the very next page, starting part four of the Simping Detective story, with the occupants of that apartment seeing their door being kicked down by Dredd.

Wait, what?!

I don't know where to begin with it. The visual itself is amazing: it really looks like Judge Dredd has just broken into somebody else's strip. Of course Jack Point and the criminal that he's grafting are unhappy to see him: they're trying to have their own damn adventure.

In retrospect, there were lots of clues that Dredd and Point were actually working on the same case, but nobody noticed them because, over in Low Life, Dirty Frank had woken up a few issues previously with his memory wiped, and he's on the moonbase city Luna-1 and he's very deep undercover as a billionaire about to have an important board meeting with a half-man half-shark. All of the readers' investigation circuits were so engaged trying to puzzle out the tantalizing clues and hints in that strip that it just flat out did not occur to anybody that we should also be looking for anything unusual anywhere else. So when a transmission from Point is received by Dirty Frank on the moon later in the same issue, it's the second forehead-slapping jawdropper in one week. We've got an insanely large corporation led by a shark-dude on the moon, some sort of Maltese McGuffin business in Point's neck of the woods, and ugly politics within Justice Department with an attempted coup, and all these are the same case?!

This just made the next four issues completely wild and exciting, putting all these pieces together along with our heroes, finding connections and seeing a grandiose and huge conspiracy that somehow lives up to the attention. Put another way, two other very good series were running alongside these three in 2000 AD: Brass Sun, an extremely promising new series written by Ian Edginton, and a long-overdue ABC Warriors story in which Pat Mills, brilliantly and masterfully, starts tying together some thirty year-old loose ends, and "Trifecta" - to call this crossover by the name of the issue-length episode, co-scripted by all three writers and drawn by Carl Critchlow, that concluded it - outshined them both.

Everybody involved can take a bow. Between all this, and the conclusion of Nikolai Dante, and the amazing "Day of Chaos", and the Dredd movie, 2012 was simply one of the finest years in the Galaxy's Greatest Comic's 35-year history. If you read any other comic - any - last year, then you were reading second-rate material. The medium just doesn't get better than this.

LSH Reread, part twelve

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 30-36, 1987)

Major developments:

*Universo's pawns manipulate the most powerful Legionnaires into off-world assignments. Some of those who remain on Earth round up some restless lightning monsters, mindless natives of the planet Korbal, who have been let loose at the Niagara nuclear power plant.
*Brainiac 5 receives word that his old friend, longtime supporting player Rond Vidar, has died in the hospital. Vidar is Universo's son.
*Everyone on Earth falls asleep, and wakes up under Universo's control. Some days later, Saturn Girl awakens on a strange planet, finding Brainy, Dream Girl and Cham also present along with several other heroes, but all are amnesiac and patiently doing manual labor together.
*Universo is eventually defeated; Saturn Girl rejoins the team on active duty while her hubby takes care of the twins.
*Polar Boy is elected Legion leader.
*Cosmic Boy and Night Girl return from a vacation in the 20th Century with incredibly troubling and ominous news...


Now here's a weird period of the book. The Universo subplot has been building for about a year, and, in any other period, the resulting four-part story would be thought of as a real epic. It's helped by Greg LaRocque's artwork continuing to improve, visibly, with each month. After a rough start in 1985, he seemed to really work at it, and the results are often striking. Early in the story, Saturn Girl breaks one of her self-imposed rules and intrudes into Cham's, Brainy's, and Dream Girl's minds to break Universo's hypnotic control. Their mindscapes are brilliantly realized, and the story looks set to be a major game-changer.

And yet... it is wrapped up so quickly and so tidily that the whole story feels really forgettable. Perhaps this is not entirely Levitz's fault; as we'll see in the next recap, what happens next required a scheduling beast, since LSH was about to cross over into two other DC Universe titles, and since John Byrne, co-architect of those, was the big bear among DC's creators at the time.

It was a real interesting development to see Rond Vidar, one of the book's longest-serving supporting players, killed off. I don't suppose anybody was starting clubs or writing fanfic about the guy, but it really cements Universo as one of the most evil and awful enemies of the LSH, somebody who recognized that his own son, nice-guy that he is, was his Achilles heel, so he murders him.

Through this, and the months and months of planning and manipulation, Universo becomes one of the greatest threats in the history of the comic, and the villain who came closest to global domination - in fact, for a few weeks, he did control the Earth. It's a shame that the ending wraps everything up so incredibly quickly, especially after spending two issues breaking Saturn Girl and the other three out of his prison planet, and a shame that LaRocque didn't elect to update Universo's appearance to reflect his much more intriguing characterization. With his monocle, chrome dome, and Baddies-R-Us facial hair, he looks exactly like a kiddie TV version of a bad guy.

Another surprise here is how strange the pacing feels. A small team including Tellus, Quislet, Wildfire, and the White Witch is assigned to a mystery on Tellus's home world, another trap by Universo to get more of his enemies out of the way. It must be said that Levitz completely blows the timeline here. Saturn Girl's experiences (several days), Mon-El and Ultra Boy's experiences (maybe a day or two), and Tellus's team's experiences (maybe hours) simply do not line up, but the comic insists that they're happening simultaneously.

Element Lad resigns after blowing this case so badly, setting up another Legion election. In keeping with tradition, the readers have their say, and Polar Boy, of all people, is elected. This won't go well. Interestingly, a letter is printed suggesting that Levitz look into what became of the rest of Polar Boy's old Substitute Legion. It's neat and fun that the longtime C-lister is given the chance to shine, but I don't know that we ever did learn what became of the rest of the Subs, and whether they settled for being disbanded so abruptly. I guess we'll see over the next 27 or so issues whether that plot thread is mentioned.

But first, everything's got to fall completely and totally apart. I'm really looking forward to seeing this next story again.

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.