Summer Reads

It's the end of summer and time to take stock of what I read. Here they are, in no particular order.

Shutter Island
The Night Gardener
Dogtown
Soultown
The Last Coyote
Bloodwork
Paper Doll
The Hard Way
The Enemy
Indigo Slam
L.A. Requien
Dark Paradise

Here are summaries of some of them. You can read the rest on MakeMineMystery.
The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos. Pelecanos never fails to deliver. A teen age boy is found shot to death in a community garden. The circumstances are eerily similar to some murders years earlier and bring an old cop out of retirement. There are none of the usual Pelecanos characters, but there is Washington D.C., stripped of it's marble and granite facades to reveal the people who live and work and die there.

Paper Doll, Robert B. Parker. Spenser is trying to solve the murder of a socialite and finds an entire Southern town against him. Vintage Parker.

Indigo Slam, L.A. Requiem, Robert Crais. Elvis Cole is hired by some latch-key to find their father who has fled the witness protection program in Indigo. Elvis and Joe Pike are a formidable team. Pike is such a controlled, laconic character, it's hard to imagine him as the protagonist of a story, yet that's what we get in L.A. Requiem when Pike's former girlfriend is murdered. Lot's of gunplay and wry wit in both.

The Last Coyote, Bloodwork, Michael Connolly. My favorite Connolly novel is usually the one I'm reading at the time, but put some distance between me and the stories and I'll say The Poet, The Narrows and Void Moon. Now I'll add Bloodwork to it. Just when I thought I had it figured out, Connolly kicked the chair out from under me. In Bloodwork, heart recipient Terry McCaleb tries to find the killer of the woman whose heart he has. Why can't I come up with ideas like that? In The Last Coyote, Harry Bosch tries to solve a decades old cold case, the murder of a prostitute--his mother.

The Hard Way, The Enemy, Lee Child. Does anybody plot better than Lee Child? In The Hard Way, Jack Reacher tries to find a mother and daughter who have been abducted. The story takes him from New York to London where he single-handedly wipes out the entire armored division of the US Army. Wait, scratch that. That's the other story. The Enemy is a flashback to when Reacher was an Army MP Major. The Berlin Wall is coming down and Noriega is on the run from the U.S. Army in Panama. Reacher is trying to solve the death of the general who commands the Army tank divisions. How does Child, a Brit, know so much about the workings of the U.S. Army. In the end, Reacher, armed with a Beretta, faces down a squadron of battle tanks.