This month I’m wondering if crime fiction is the only genre where writers die and their characters keep solving murders without them. Last summer Jeffery Deaver continued Bond’s covert activities in “Carte Blanche,” Anthony Horowitz kept the game afoot with Holmes and Watson in “The House of Silk,” and now Ace Atkins has taken up Spenser’s sword in Robert Parker’s “Lullaby” (Putnam, $26.95) released at the same time as Atkins’ own “The Lost Ones” (Putnam, $25.95).
Most of us schooled in the hard-boiled consider Robert Parker, who incidentally completed Raymond Chandler’s unfinished “Poodle Springs,” as iconic to the genre as the holy trinity of Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett. Given how high Parker sits in my esteem, I approached “Lullaby” with trepidation, deciding to read Atkins’ “The Lost Ones” first.
Set in “Miss-ippi,” outlaw country, where the “land looks like somethin’ outta the Old Testament,” Varner’s Quick Mart smells of “old grease and dead crickets,” a “black woman named Peaches” makes the best pecan pie, and children and guns are traded like moonshine, my favorite cool cowboy, Quinn, is the new sheriff in town. With his deputy, Lillie Virgil (love Lillie), Quinn gets pulled into an FBI drug sting that hits close to Quinn’s farm that he inherited “with a stockpile of hunting rifles … and a cattle dog named Hondo.” Atkins’ sense of place is superb, his story stark and suspenseful. Quinn has a quick wit, a strong code of honor and radiates sex appeal, but more importantly he knows the difference between law and order. Like Spenser.
By the second chapter of Atkins’ Spenser novel, I was no longer in the South but in Southie with Quirk, Susan, the ever-steadfast Hawk and a tough teen named Mattie Sullivan who hires Spenser to find who murdered her mother in exchange for “six cinnamon and six chocolate frosted” doughnuts. The speeding-bullet banter, the breakneck plotting and the sparring relationship between Mattie and Spenser are terrific. Atkins succeeds with both books and that’s high praise.
Although Lisa Brack-mann’s witty thriller “Getaway” (Soho, $25) is about a desperate housewife, Michelle, a widow burdened with overwhelming debt who decides a vacation in Puerto Vallarta is exactly what she needs to heal, “Eat, Pray, Love” it’s not. And thank goodness for that. In a moment of lust, Michelle invites a handsome expat, Daniel, back to her hotel room. During the night, the room is robbed, Daniel is assaulted and Michelle falls apart, thinking she’ll “let her hair go gray, her thighs get fat,” live on peanuts from the mini bar, and never leave her room. But she does leave, and things go from bad to really, really bad. Michelle narrates her story, describing it as “James Bond as told by Cosmo.” Exactly.
Whereas Michelle is the kind of character with whom you’d be reckless, LAPD Capt. Josie Corsino in Connie Dial’s well-written police procedural “Fallen Angels” (The Permanent Press, $28) is the woman you’d want to have your back when you do. Josie is head of the Hollywood detectives’ bureau. Her marriage is in “a tailspin,” her son, a talented blues pianist, is a “mystery to her.” While investigating the baffling murder of Misty Skylar, “Miss underage, never-gonna-see-eighteen movie star,” Josie is also juggling incompetent superiors, patriarchal politics, corrupt ex-cops and Hollywood sleaze. This is a world where “lots of money and good surgeons” are the “secret to a long and gorgeous life.” The Skylar investigation could be a “career-ending disaster” for Josie, but she’s a “frustrated street cop” at heart … intuitive, tough, flawed and believable. Dial was an LAPD cop for 27 years and her experience is evident in her engaging plot and the depth and authenticity of her characters.
