Desert Star by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly has hit yet another literary home run with Desert Star (Little Brown, 400 pp. $29), the prolific, bestselling novelist’s just-released detective procedural/thriller.

This is Connelly’s fourth novel co-starring Harry Bosch, who served as a tunnel rat in the Vietnam War and recently retired as an L.A. Police Department homicide detective, and current LAPD robbery/homicide detective Renee Ballard.

Last year’s Bosch-Ballard, The Dark Hours, was Ballard-centric; in Desert Star Connelly makes Harry the star — which is great news for those of us who have read and relished the seventeen Harry Bosch detectives Connelly has produced since the brilliant, Vietnam War-flashback-heavy The Black Echo came out in 1992.

Desert Star, like all the other Connelly novels, is a taut, plot-twisting, page turner set mostly in Los Angeles. This time Bosch volunteers (at Ballard’s invitation) to work for free with her cold case team on two heinous murder cases. One of them—the murder of a family of four, including two young children—has festered in Bosch’s psyche for years. The other is forced upon Ballard’s department for internal LAPD reasons, mainly because it involves the murder of the daughter of an influential city councilman.

Michael Connelly

Connelly shows off his best writing chops in this dialogue-heavy, fast-moving tale filled with inside baseball policing details he gleaned during his years as a crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. Plus, Desert Star—the title refers to a type of flowering plant that blooms in the desert—has more references to Harry’s Vietnam War experiences than any of the recent Bosch books.

The war comes up several times in conversations with Ballard, and when Harry interacts with a Nam vet bartender. The barkeep turns out to have served with the 1^st Battalion/Ninth Marines, AKA “The Walking Dead.” Bosch tells the Marine that he served in the Army, in the 1st Infantry Division, and the barkeep deduces Harry was a tunnel rat. ‘

“Those tunnels, man,” he says, “what a fucked up place.”

It’s not giving anything away to say that both cases get solved, and Harry has the leading role in both, using his brains, experience, and an obsessively risky MO to track down the family killer.

If you love a great detective yarn with flawed but morally upright and tenacious good guys (and gals) and evil bad guys who eventually get their due, you won’t be let down by Michael Connelly’s Desert Star.

The official Michael Connelly website is michaelconnelly.com

–Marc Leepson

El Pistolero by Marvin Wolf

El Pistolero: A Chelmin and Spaulding CID Mystery (249 pp. $13.95, paper; $4.259, Kindle), by Marvin J. Wolf is an action-filled mystery thriller. Wolf is a Vietnam War veteran, having served many years in the Army. He is the author of more than twenty books, including ones he co-wrote with famed Vietnam War correspondent Joe Galloway and former South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky.

In the book, Army Criminal Investigation Division agents, Rudy Chelmin and Will Spaulding, get involved in a desertion case that goes back to the Vietnam War in 1971 and may also include murder. The men worked a few special cases together, but it’s been awhile. Spaulding went on to become a helicopter pilot but was temporarily grounded because of a health issue, which led to the two men renewing their partnership.

When asked by a civilian what CID means, Spaulding quips, “Like the Navy’s NCIS, except we’re Army. And we don’t have a TV series.”

During this detective procedural the two men find themselves working, usually on a friendly basis, with local police departments as well as the LAPD, FBI, and the DEA. The FBI believes the deserter may have become a hired killer who is a master of disguises and is likely responsible for murdering dozens of people. Most of the victims had ties to organized crime.

Spaulding is a millionaire as a result of a big lawsuit settlement. That plays sort of a wish-fulfillment role because the two men frequently eat lavish meals and Spaulding can pay cash for a new car whenever he wants one and write a large check to help the family of a law officer killed in the line of duty. Spaulding continues to fly for the Army because he loves it.

As the story rolls along, we encounter fake cops, the Mexican Mafia, burner phones, street gangs, cops in the pocket of the gangs, thugs with shotguns, prison gangs, bomb squads, heroin smuggling, gunfights, and international intrigue.

Through it all these two guys are constantly in motion, which propels the story along at a rapid rate with lots of running, flying, and driving fast down highways.

If you like a lot of exciting, fast-moving action, this is the book for you.

Marvin Wolf’s website is marvinjwolf.com

–Bill McCloud

War Crimes by Martin Robert Grossman

War Crimes (Koehler Books, 276 pp. $29.95, hardcover; $17.95, paper, $5.03, Kindle) is Martin Robert Grossman’s second mystery novel featuring Jerry Andrews, a Vietnam veteran and recently retired Los Angeles Police Department detective. The former Green Beret is living in a peaceful village in northern Mexico when he gets a call from an old Army buddy, Jon Compton, a retired Texas Ranger. Compton asks Andrews to help him resolve an issue he’s taken on.

Seabrook, Texas, is a small fishing town near Houston. In the mid-1970s Vietnamese shrimpers who fled their homeland ended up working the coastal waters there. Feelings of prejudice, combined with fears of competition, led some locals to attack the newcomers and burn their boats. There also was at least one murder, and the influx of Vietnamese led to the appearance of a revitalized Ku Klux Klan.

Things calmed down and nearly two decades went by. But now the body of a Vietnamese male is discovered. He had been shot in the hard and had his throat cut. A playing card–an ace of spades with the Grim Reaper holding a scythe—was found on the body. Former Ranger Compton volunteers to help investigate. Then, following a second similar murder, he decides to ask his old buddy Jerry Andrews to join him.

Soon there’s a third victim, with mutilation added to it, and Compton tells Andrews they need to quickly solve these new murders “under the radar” before the situation causes a new race riot. But racist skinheads are already beginning to gather in town and a reporter for the local newspaper hopes to break the story wide open. After a fourth murder they know they’re after “a deranged serial killer” who is very likely a Vietnam War veteran.

There’s a broad cast of characters in this story, many with military backgrounds. There’s a nearby VA hospital and a private retreat set up for veterans. The founder of the latter is driven by a desire to slow down the numbers of brave men fought in the Vietnam War only to end up being killed by “the lifestyle” they’ve “been forced into by an ungrateful nation.”

Martin Grossman

The direct connection between War Crimes and Grossman’s previous novel, Club Saigon, in addition to the character of Jerry Andrews, is the illicit movement of cocaine and heroin between Vietnamese-American communities. In both novels the author frequently refers to Vietnamese people as “Orientals.” That term today is outdated, but at least its use is consistent throughout the two books.

After reading War Crimes and Club Saigon you could end up believing that every American who served in Vietnam left the war zone as damaged goods. Some did, but most didn’t. Remember that as you read these novels in which memories of the war eventually pour out in extremely violent fashion.

Grossman’s website is martinrobertgrossman.com

–Bill McCloud

The Oath by Dennis Koller

Dennis Koller’s The Oath (Pen Books, 336 pp. $14.99, paper; $4.99, Kindle) is an exciting and fast-moving mystery thriller. In November of 1966, Tom McGuire was shot down over North Vietnam and spent the next seven years as a prisoner of war, returning home in 1973 as part of the first group of POWS released.

In 2000 McGuire is a homicide detective in San Francisco when an award-winning columnist for the city’s largest newspaper, Ruth Wasserman, is murdered in an unusual manner. After being shot and killed at close-range, her arms were trussed behind her in a way that McGuire immediately realized was the manner used by the guards in that long-ago Hanoi prison.

McGuire soon recalls that Wasserman, while a writer for the Village Voice, along with a small group of female college students, had visited the Hanoi Hilton. While there, the women betrayed a handful of American prisoners who had slipped them scraps of paper with their Social Security numbers. Three of the men immediately paid the ultimate price for trying to get that info back to the U.S. government.

The investigation into the Wasserman murder soon uncovers the deaths of a few of the other women. All were found with their arms bound behind them. McGuire realizes the killer is likely a former POW now on a tour of murderous vengeance. Furthermore, it may be someone he knew back then. And why does the governor of California appear to be the next person on the list?

Ultimately, McGuire’s aggressive investigation leads to higher-ups in his department who then conspire to take him off the case. Unofficially, he continues and, with the help of a street informant, bulldozes his way through secret government hit squads and deadly Vietnamese gangs.

Koller pulls off a difficult task as he alternates chapters between those written in McGuire’s first-person voice, and third-person ones describing the unknown perpetrator known as “the man.”

Throughout the story the reader is forced to think about the point at which a person with antiwar views becomes a traitor. But Koller also makes you aware of the unintentional war-time bombing of civilian areas and to consider what constitutes an “immoral” military order. There’s the legacy of the My Lai massacre.

Dennis Koller

The book is divided into sixty short chapters. Just past the half-way point the story begins racing, literally against the clock, toward a satisfying climax. Some might see the book as pulp-ish wish-fulfillment tale. I didn’t.

For me, The Oath worked well as a straightforward thriller. And it kept my interest throughout.

The author’s website is denniskoller.com

–Bill McCloud

The Night Fire by Michael Connelly

Reading the new Michael Connelly Harry Bosch/Renee Ballard detective procedural, The Night Fire (Little Brown, 416 pp., $29), you’d have to be a good detective to know that Bosch is a Vietnam War veteran. This is Connelly’s 32^nd detective procedural, the 22^nd featuring Harry Bosch. I’ve been a big fan since I read the first one, the brilliant Black Echo, in 1992, and have devoured (and reviewed) every one of them. Before this, each Bosch book included details of Harry’s service in the war (he was a tunnel rat) and its impact on his mercurial law-enforcement career.

In some of the books Connelly offered but a few sentences here and there about Harry and the Vietnam War. In others, including The Black Echo, there was much more. This time the word “Vietnam” is not mentioned. Late in the book, Harry tells Ballard that he served in the Army—but that’s it.

Which is fine, although a tad disappointing because in my view Harry Bosch (along with James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux) is by far the best-drawn fictional Nam vet detective out there. And it’s always a good thing to encounter admirable Vietnam War veterans in fiction. Harry is street-smart, dedicated, courageous, and stubborn. He’s also brusque and often cranky and doesn’t easily suffer fools, frauds, or criminals. He regularly gets into deep trouble at the office and often runs into life-threatening situations on cases.

In The Night Fire, Bosh and Ballard—both of whom are dedicated, driven, high-maintenance detectives (he’s retired from LAPD and working part time; she’s active duty) —work on two different cases alone and together. As usual, Connelly tells a tale with red herrings galore and more than a few plot twists—sometimes a bit too many. But Connelly’s a master at spinning an exciting yarn that gets more exciting as it goes along and he does exactly that in this book.

As always, Connelly creates fully flushed-out characters, especially Bosch and Ballard. And, in the end—well, no spoilers here. I will say that Connelly offers some veiled references to what might come next in Bosch’s life, mostly dealing with age-related physical problems.

My advice: Read this excellent detective novel and follow the clues to find out for yourself whodunit, how the detectives figured it out, and what might become of Harry Bosch.

–Marc Leepson

The Off-Islander by Peter Colt

Peter Colt spent twenty-four years in the Army Reserves. During that time he served in Kosovo in 2000 and in Iraq in 2003 and 2008. Colt, who was born in 1973, got to know many Vietnam War veterans and Green Berets while serving in the Reserves. He grew up on Nantucket—the island referred to in the title of his new book, The Off-Islander (Kensington, 240 pp. $26, hardcover; $12.99, Kindle).

Colt’s first novel is more about the death of the lifelong friendship of Andy Roark, a P.I., and Danny Sullivan, a lawyer, than it is about anything else, which includes trying to find a missing person, the long-gone father of a client. Andy and Danny are refugees from Boston’s Southie, where they were raised. Danny is annoyed with Andy because he has not found a stable job, or a wife, kids, house, mortgage, or dog.

Andy’s Karmann Ghia needs a new clutch and he needs a job to get the money to fix it. So he takes the job and flies to San Francisco to meet with the client and hear what she has to say. The last time Andy was in San Francisco he had just come home from the Vietnam War and got stared at for his short hair and called a “baby killer” in a bar.

In the Army Andy did Recon work and came away from that experience with disdain for supply clerks, jerks, and bottle washers who seemed to later claim they’d served in the Special Forces. He was a Green Beret, just like the man in the song. He went out and found the enemy and killed him or helped him get killed by artillery or bombs. He and his fellow Green Berets trained small, hard, nut-brown Montagnards to kill, too.

Peter Colt

Andy notes that he worked in a dangerous part of a dangerous, stupid part of the war where the enemy threw their best men at him and his fellow Green Berets, and put bounties on their heads. When Andy came home, he had a lot of trouble trying to be a normal person, going to college, and fitting in. It was chaos; whereas in the war, things made sense to him.

His search for the missing man, Charles Hammond, is confused and difficult and seems destined to fail, but Andy persists despite attempts on his life and a distinct lack of support from Danny Sullivan.

By the end of the book, Danny and Andy are no longer friends and the reader has been taken for a long, exciting ride in pursuit of the missing man.

We are told that this is not the last of the Andy Roark novels. I look forward to the next one.

The author’s website is peter-colt.com

–David Willson

 

The Crossing by Michael Connelly

It’s been a year since Michael Connelly‘s nineteenth Harry Bosch detective procedural, The Burning Room, came out. I’ve been a giant fan of Connelly and his Bosch novels since the first one, Black Echo, burst on the scene in 1992, getting great reviews and garnering big-time sales.

It’s always a special treat to read these fast-paced, cleverly plotted thrillers featuring Vietnam veteran Harry Bosch, the iconoclastic LAPD homicide detective who had a rough childhood and who served as a tunnel rat in the Vietnam War. Bosch’s service in the war is a theme in several of the books, and gets mentioned often in others. Lately, as Bosch has reached retirement age, his war service is only touched upon. And that’s as it should be.

In The Crossing (Little Brown, 400 pp., $28), which came out early in November and became a No. 1 bestseller, the war is mentioned only once. It comes when Harry is contemplating his worth as a father (something he does often). He ruminates on the fact that he’d never taken his teenaged daughter camping. “He had never been taken camping,” Connelly writes, “unless his time sleeping in tents and holes in Vietnam counted.”

While Harry’s Vietnam War service is not central to the book, Harry Bosch certainly is. His good and not-so-good traits that we have come to know over the years are on full display. On the good side: He is a relentless seeker of justice for those who have been murdered or harmed by criminals. He is a smart, brilliant, hard-driving crime solver. He has little use for ticket-punching, self-serving LAPD bureaucrats and politicians. He is a dedicated, if oftentimes baffled, single father of a teenaged girl. He is a survivor who skillfully has come through more than his share of post-war violent confrontations with criminals.

On the not-so-good side: His relentlessness often leads to serious rule-breaking. His disgust with the LAPD lifers often leads him into personal trouble–and trouble for the cops he works with. And lately, he makes a few crucial mistakes as he goes about his crime-solving.

Connelly

In The Crossing—which I happily just binge-read—Bosch has just retired and reluctantly takes a temporary job with his half brother, Mickey Haller. He’s the flamboyant “Lincoln Lawyer,” who loves taking on difficult cases–and craves the media spotlight.

Haller’s representing a former gang member who is in jail for horribly raping and murdering a woman. The evidence looks extremely solid. Haller doesn’t care; he believes the guy is innocent and is ready to use any legal technicality to help his case. Bosch does care—and only agrees to investigate the case after he’s convinced the client is innocent.

Connelly spins out his usual convoluted but extremely clever plot flawlessly. Even though you know who the bad guys are early on, the pages still keep turning as Connelly puts one roadblock after another in front of Harry and things get exciting and tense as the book moves toward its inevitable violent conclusion.

If you like rapid reading police procedures that are a cut above in literary merit, you can’t go wrong with The Crossing–or any of the Harry Bosch books.

—Marc Leepson

 

Shandar: @killcongress.com by Wrigley Brogan

In Shandar @KILLCONGRESS.COM (Ink and Lens, 218 pp., $10, paper; $2.99, Kindle), Richard Baker, writing as Wrigley Brogan, offers up a noir-ish detective novel with a hard-boiled cop, Walter Checkers, at the center of the action. Most of the characters are Vietnam veterans (as is the author). A group of young Vietnamese women who work as prostitutes also are a big part of the action.

Somebody is blowing up bad people using C-4, making quite a mess in the city, and Detective Checkers is asked to figure out what’s going on. As the detective puts it, people are being blown to bits and there are no leads, nothing to go on, except a woman must be involved.

The book is filled with philosophical asides, many of which seemed priceless. For instance, “Anyone that believed we were fighting for American freedoms around the world was a fool at worst, and naïve at best.”

Later, Doc, a Vietnam veteran medic, says, “Don’t forget what we learned in the war.  Every decision we make in life is wrong. Do you shoot this person or that person?  Do you go down this trail or that one?  Do you save Bill or Jerry?  The decision is always wrong.”

There are many other references to the Vietnam War. The novel is permeated with the them. Keeping track of them was like trying to register snowflakes in a snowstorm. This is done with wit and intelligence, however, and is never cumbersome.

I highly recommend this mystery novel to all readers, especially Vietnam veterans who are hungry for a good read that is a salute to that dirty little war that most of us can’t seem to get out of our systems.

There’s lots to love in this book. At one point, it is said that the most worthy candidate for political office is the one who raises the least money. I immediately thought of Jim Webb.

Baker has respect for the American teenagers who trudged through the Vietnamese jungle during the war. Books that demonstrate that respect are needed in our literature.

—David Willson

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but my two absolute favorite detective fiction series feature main characters who are Vietnam War veterans. That would be Dave Robicheaux, the flawed Cajun detective hero of twenty smashingly good procedural/thrillers by James Lee Burke, and Harry Bosch, the complicated Los Angeles Police Department detective at the center of nineteen thriller/detectives by former L.A.Times police reporter Michael Connelly.

Which brings us to Connelly’s latest, just-published Harry Bosch, The Burning Room (Little, Brown, 388 pp., $28). It’s been two years since the last Bosch, The Black Box (Little Brown, 416 pp., $27.99). I was more than ready for the latest installment in the adventures of the smart and dedicated—but sometimes ornery and emotionally fragile—former Vietnam War tunnel rat, now nearing retirement working in the LAPD cold-case division.

I devoured the rapid-reading Burning Room as I had its eighteen predecessors. Once again I was impressed by Connelly’s story-telling abilities. The plot hummed along with plenty of twists (maybe one or two too many). The characters were well drawn and believable. The physical landscape of the greater Los Angeles area sketched vividly and convincingly.

The plot follows Connelly’s main Bosch formula: working with a new partner, Harry uses his brains and experience (and stretches legal limits a tad) to solve a perplexing crime. There are plenty of roadblocks, including the fact that the case is ten years old and it leads him to a related, second heinous crime to investigate. Harry runs into trouble from self-serving bureaucratic higher-ups and has to juggle work vs. family responsibilities, namely being the single father of a high-school-age daughter.

Michael Connelly

This is a police procedural with thriller elements, so we more or less know who the bad guys are fairly quickly. But that doesn’t hamper the page-turning quotient. Connelly keeps things moving quickly to a conclusion that including a surprise element.

Bosch’s service in the Vietnam War plays a very small part in the book. The first mention doesn’t come until about a third of the way in.

He’s discussing interrogation techniques with his young partner, whose grandfather (!) served in Vietnam. The topic of “enhanced” methods and “tools of interrogation,” Connelly writes, “threatened to trigger Bosch’s own memories and he didn’t need that now. He brought the discussion back on point.”

Later, Bosch comes across a Vietnam War-era M60 machine gun. “Those who carried the M60 through the Vietnamese jungle had a love/hate relationship with it,” Connelly writes through Bosch’s eyes. “They called it ‘the pig’ whenever they had to lug the heavy weapon out on patrol. But heavy or not, it was the best gun to be holding in your hands in a firefight.”

As usual, Connelly, who was in middle school during the height of the Vietnam War, does very well in the accuracy and verisimilitude departments when dealing with the Vietnam War and Harry’s service in it.

Connelly’s website is www.michaelconnelly.com/novels/burning-room

—Marc Leepson

Nightmare Range by Martin Limon

I can’t say it better than Lee Child:  “Martin Limon is one of the best military writers ever. His stories are addictive entertainment today—and valuable slices of history tomorrow.”  The two protagonists on the seventeen stories in Limon’s Nightmare Range: The Collected George Sueno and Ernie Bascom Stories (Soho Crime, 400 pp., $26.95, hardcover, $14.95, paper; $12.99, Kindle), and also of Limon’s series of gripping novels, are in their early twenties, full of juice, and self-described “rear echelon pukes” in early 1970’s Korea.

These Army CID agents are an odd couple; George was raised in a series of foster homes in East L.A. and Ernie is from an East Coast family with money and education, stuff he’ll have nothing to do with. Ernie Bascom is a Vietnam veteran who did two tours in Chu Lai where he acquired some bad habits. He has long since kicked heroin. But he’s still addicted to the U. S. Army—three hots and a cot, etc.—as well as the adrenaline rush of fighting authority and chasing bad guys. George is that rare American who can speak enough Korean to get along, and Ernie has a gift for fitting in with the dregs of humanity, no matter how low.

They are perfect for undercover operations as Army C.I.D. agents, mostly wasting their time chasing down housewives who do black market deals. But they also get the occasional murder. Limon’s peerless credentials include ten years in Korea and twenty years in the Army, as well as a singular talent for story telling, especially stories of the rough and tough, back-alley brawling type, with some occasional deep thinking and mystery solving by his super bright Agent George Sueno.

Martin Limon

I’ve loved every one of Limon’s novels and each of these short stories packs as much punch and excitement as most writers’ full-length novels.  If you are a reader who hungers for stories of an exotic and dangerous world where there are beautiful women and killers down every alley, these stories of Korea where a protracted war that has never ended continues to kill, maim, and soak up billions of dollars a year, this collection of stories is for you.

Martin Limon gets the U. S. Army right on every page: the language, the details of assignment and training, the subtle differences of rank, the drinking and gambling, all of it. If you are tired of authors who just don’t seem to know what Army life is all about, and you have yet to read the works of Limon, wait no longer. Martin Limon ranks right at the top, along with James Jones.

My favorite quote from these stories is: “In the Army, the less you know, the safer your career prospects.” You said it, Mr. Limon.

—David Willson