Winter's Favorite Reads

 This is a shorter quarterly list than usual. That doesn’t mean read any less, or that I didn’t like as many books. I’m a Shamus judge this year, so my reading time has been consumed by award submissions and I don’t think it’s appropriate to single any of them out until the short list has been announced. Those books will be noted in a future “Favorite Reads” post.

 

The Blooding, Joseph Wambaugh. An examination of the first homicides solves through DNA analysis. Two young women were brutally murdered in only a few minutes from the English university where the scientific breakthrough was made, allowing their cases to be used to prove the theories. Fascinating from start to finish and told in Wambaugh’s avuncular yet riveting style. I never met the man, though we corresponded once, but I was truly sad when I learned of his death last year. He was a national treasure for both his fiction and non-fiction writing, and the crime writing community owes him more than can be expressed.

 

The Fatal Saving Grace, Jim Nesbvitt. It took nerve to reintroduce loose cannon private eye Ed Earl Burch into a formal law enforcement setting, but Nesbitt shows the inevitable friction while also displaying the ways in which Ed Earl was a stud cop in his day. The supporting cast plays well off of the protagonist and the dialog is always entertaining without drawing attention to itself. Nesbitt also creates a sense of place reminiscent of the movie Hell or High Water, though this story takes place farther west. I’m going to have to go back and look into some of the books I missed in this series while I wait for the next one, and I am waiting for the next one.

 

Hang on St. Christopher, Adrian McKinty. Book Eight of the Sean Dufffy trilogy. (That was the author’s original plan. The first three went so well he couldn’t stop, and we’re all better off because of it.) Duffy is a Catholic cop in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, which means he has to check his car for bombs every time he gets in. The friction between Duffy and the protestant cops has pretty much died down, but no one else he deals with during an investigation trusts him, including Special Branch. McKinty creates a sense of time and place like few others, and Duffy is a fascinating and always growing character. Let’s hope the author has at least one more of these in him.

 

The Last Exile, Sam Wiebe. Book Five of the Wakeland series picks up where Sunset and Jericho left off, with Dave Wakeland having left the agency he was running with partner Jeff Chen. The book starts with Wakeland living in Montreal and returning to Vancouver to help Chen’s cousin, lawyer Shuzhen Chen. What starts as a protection job soon enmeshes Wakeland with a ruthless motorcycle gang as he learns the agency is in the midst of going under, due in large part to an unscrupulous real estate developer. Wiebe always makes the Wakeland novels about more than the case, and The Last Exile is no exception.