Dutton, January 5, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-525-95149-0
Hardcover, 384 pages
$26.95 U.S./ $33.50, Canada

Reviewed by Larry W. Chavis

In L. A. Outlaws Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Charlie Hood met Suzanne Jones, a.k.a. Allison Murrieta, a lineal descendant of the legendary California outlaw. Meeting her, suspecting her, seeing her violent end changed Hood in ways he is still discovering. Not the least of these is the relationship and responsibility - and fear - he feels for for Bradley, Allison’s oldest son, a responsibility that drives him in  The Renegades to try to steer Bradley away from the road his mother followed to her grave.

Now, in Iron River, Charlie Hood is on special assignment with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, ATFE to the press, but still ATF to its operatives. The river of the title is the torrential stream of guns headed across the southern California and Arizona borders to Mexico, part of the fuel, along with drugs and money, that powers the vicious cartel wars, and makes the border country a no-man’s-land of blood and death. Charlie Hood has been assigned to a special task force to do the impossible - stem the flow of guns and jail the illegal purveyors. The first operation of which he is part goes bad, and the son of the man who leads the most vicious Zeta band on the border is killed, bringing the paramilitary killers across the border to kidnap and torture the ATFE agent responsible. What follows is intrigue, danger, and violence, as Hood and the members of Operation Blowdown seek to rescue their comrade.

In the course of all this, Bradley Jones pops up, still trying to straddle the gulf between lawlessness and law enforcement, leaving Charlie Hood in deeper doubt of being able to save him.

Of the three books, this may be the best in terms of character development and insight, and in story impact. The horrendous events happening daily in Mexico, tied to the insatiable American appetite for drugs and money, are shown starkly, with no attempt to soften them. Charlie begins to understand that he, like most, has never understood the forces involved, and perhaps even glimpses larger Forces behind the events, in the enigmatic Mike Finnegan, a man who should have died in an accident but didn’t, and who knows more than he should about events he hasn’t seen - leaving Charlie Hood deeply puzzled.

While, perhaps, not the best book to be released in the new year, this one is worth your while.

Copyright ©2009 Larry W. Chavis

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION
I have a material connection because I received a review copy that I can keep for consideration in preparing to write this content. I was not expected to return this item after my review.

Minotaur Books, September 1, 2009
ISBN 13: 978-0-3112-36848-7
Hardcover, 320 pages
$24.99
$31.99, Canada

Reviewed by Larry W. Chavis

According to those who study the subject, female serial killers are very rare compared to their male counterparts and overwhelmingly kill for personal gain of some kind. They are generally close to their victims–spouses, children, lovers-cultivating relationships with them before committing murder, often using low-profile methods such as poison over a period of time.  Naturally, exceptions have always existed, the bloody Countess Báthory in history and Aileen Wuornos in modern times being two notable examples.

In HEART SICK, Chelsea Cain introduced the world to Gretchen Lowell, strikingly beautiful, charismatic, and sadistically deadly, with hundreds of butchered victims to her credit. Her prize, however, was Detective Archie Sheridan, head of the task force charged with her capture, and her torture-and-sex relationship with him drives  the story through HEART SICK and SWEETHEART, the second book in the series.

Now comes EVIL AT HEART, opening with Gretchen still at large and Archie a patient in a hospital psych ward, having admitted himself two months prior. With Gretchen on the loose bodies can be expected, and they begin to turn up in sites associated with Gretchen’s former crimes, all marked by her characteristic brutality. Even Archie appears to be at risk in the nominally safe-guarded mental ward. He faces the question of remaining, or of checking out of the hospital and back into his life in order to stop Gretchen–or surrender to her.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Cain’s sultry murderess is the fast grip she has on the emotions of her victims, and the apparent ease with which she can shape others into tools. Archie both hates her and desperately longs to be possessed by her, and this inner struggle informs most of his actions in the book, some of which would cause a rational being to pause and scratch his or her head. But Archie is merely emblematic of Portland society, whose infatuation with the blonde serial killer expresses itself in Gretchen tours, Gretchen billboards, Gretchen tee-shirts and Gretchen fan clubs. At first look, a reader might question the plausibility of such goings-on in a modern city, but then one remembers the Charles Manson sites and groups that have existed ever since that horrific night in 1969, and wonders if, in fact, expecting otherwise is the real implausibility.

The primary characters from the preceding books are present, and some growth can be seen, particularly in Susan Ward, reporter and hair-color experimentalist. She may be the most interesting figure in this episode of the story. Certainly she seems to grow more.

While serial killer books are a bit wearisome to some, owing to the vast number that make it to the bookstores, one that’s well-done is still worth your while. In EVIL AT HEART Ms. Cain has offered, and I think delivered, an entertaining read.

Copyright ©2009 Larry W. Chavis