Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

Someone is killing gray-haired guys in Minnesota. After mutilated body number two turns up, posed leaning against a Veterans’ Memorial with a lemon duct-taped inside his mouth, the local cops decide they have a problem on their hands. And thus they rouse Virgil Flowers out of a warm bed (not his own, for what it’s worth), not least because Virgil Flowers is one helluva cop and the Minnesota BCA’s (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) go-to guy for messy cases just like this one. The dead men are all sixtyish veterans, and that lemon business has a distinct flavor of war-era Vietnamese assassination squads. Might all this be because of something the men did… say, thirty-some years ago? Things get even more interesting when a third body shows up almost on the State Capitol’s steps. With both the press and the state’s camera-loving governor jumping around like water drops on a hot, greasy skillet, Virgil kicks into high gear. His investigation leads him to a local sixties radical-turned-aging-hippie; thirty-odd years out a college professor still trading on his stay at the Hanoi Hilton, and his fine-looking Eurasian daughter. As the body count mounts, faint glimmers of a long-ago story make their way to the surface, and Virgil and his cohorts get the first impression of what they’re up against. It ain’t pretty.

You can count on Virgil Flowers, however, to do whatever’s necessary to get his man (or men), whether it means invading another sovereign nation or getting whacked upside the head. This time he’s up against an implacable, inscrutable enemy – or maybe enemies, he doesn’t know how many, much less who – and the very pressing problem that he doesn’t know why these particular men are being targeted, how many bodies there will eventually be, and the biggest question of all: who’s next. Good thing that Virgil Flowers is the kind of guy who likes puzzles… Read the rest of this entry »

Doesn’t make any difference what it is, the sages say, you can always have too much of a good thing. Too much food? Fat. Too much water? Drown. You get the picture. Still, it’s kind of interesting to see just what others consider “too much” of something. I think I can give you an example when it comes to mystery novels: Brian Freeman’s latest in the John Stride series, Stalked. Just as he did in his two previous novels, Immoral and Stripped, Freeman’s assembled a kitchen sink plot, tossing in every item in his writer’s bag of tricks. The result? Let’s just say that Freeman may have potential, but he needs a firmer hand in the editing department. Come with me and see what I mean…

With his friend and fellow homicide detective a suspect in the murder of her husband, Lt. John Stride is required to keep his nose out of the investigation. Of course he can’t: Maggie is, after all, his former partner; and that’s ignoring for the nonce the long-ignored physical attraction between them. Fortunately, he has the disappearance of a troubled young woman to keep him occupied – except that, wonder of wonders, Tangerine “Tanjy” Powell might have been romantically linked to Maggie’s late husband. Looks like Stride has found a back door into the murder investigation after all…

Meanwhile, Stride’s live-in lover, former Las Vegas homicide cop Serena Dial, has picked up a new job for her PI business. She’s hired by Stride’s political arch-enemy to deliver a wad of cash to a blackmailer. It’s weird, though – the blackmailer specifically requested Serena as go-between, which makes her a little itchy- especially since she’s had a feeling of being watched for the last few days. Since we already know that a prison escapee from Alabama has a score to settle with Serena, it’s a safe bet someone new in town has it in for her – but who? And why? And what’s with the usherette from the big theater in the Twin Cities, anyway, huh? What’s her problem?

Mystery novels being mystery novels (and Freeman being Freeman), we can rest assured that everything will eventually be tied up in a nice neat bow, though several of the threads in that bow will be twisted to within an inch of their lives. Oh, and there’ll also be lots… and lots… of sex. Read the rest of this entry »