Thriller

Review: Boundary Waters

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Cover image of "Boundary Waters" by William Kent Krueger

Boundary Waters (Cork O’Connor #2), William Kent Krueger. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9780671016999), 2000 (link is to a different edition in print).

Summary: A young country-western singer hiding in seclusion in a Boundary Waters cabin is pursued by a man claiming to be her father, FBI agents, a father and son from an organized crime family–and a couple of cold-blooded killers for hire.

Cork O’Connor is living in Sam’s old house, running Sam’s burger concession. His girls help in the summer but he and Jo remain apart. Unbeknown to him, a country-western singer, Shilohm, whose mother and Cork had been friends has used an Anishinaabe guide to hide away in a remote cabin in the Boundary Waters to seek clarity about her life.

A man known as Arkansas Willie Ray, who raised her and helped her build Ozark Records, shows up and hires Cork to help find her. She had been communicating and all communication had stopped. Then the FBI shows up at Sheriff Schanno’s office, also searching for her. They use strong arm tactics to compel Cork to help them along with Stormy Two Knives and his ten-year old son Louis, whose uncle, Wendell Two Knives had taken him when he brought supplies to Shiloh. Louis is the only one with any idea where she is.

They set out on a journey into the Boundary Waters as the weather transitions from fall to winter. Meanwhile, back in town, another “father” arrives, an aging organized crime boss and his son, also wanting to find her. Meanwhile, the search party doesn’t realize two other ruthless hired killers are also hunting for Shiloh. Already, they have tortured and killed Wendell Two Knives, without extracting any information. They also don’t know that Shiloh, tired of waiting for Wendell, has started back, using a map Wendell gave her. Something else is following Shiloh–a mysterious wolf who doesn’t attack.

While Cork and his party hunt Shiloh and realize they are also being hunted, Jo and the Sheriff figure out that all is not as it seems with the party that went out. Danger may not only be stalking Cork and the others but traveling with them. All this makes for a page-turning account where we wonder whether anyone but the killers will come out alive.

Meanwhile Jo struggles to believe with the support of her sister Rose, that all will come right, even as bodies are found (but not Cork). One senses that though their relationship was badly damaged, there is love that remains, to be explored if Cork survives. All this, along with Krueger’s well-drawn descriptions of the wilderness, make for a novel rich in its character relationships, setting, and thrilling plot.

Review: Forty Words for Sorrow

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Forty Words for Sorrow (John Cardinal and Lise DeLorme Mystery #1), Giles Blunt. New York: Berkley Books, 2000.

Summary: When a missing teenager’s body is found in a mineshaft, John Cardinal is re-assigned to a case he’d been pulled off of and is joined by Lise DeLorme, who is also investigating him for corruption. Meanwhile, facts point to a serial killer when another body turns up and another missing youth is traced to their community.

John Cardinal had been investigating the disappearance of a girl, Katie Pine, that he’d linked to another missing youth. When the search threatened to absorb most of the Algonquin Bay police department resources, he was taken off the case. No other leads developed until now. Then a body was found, frozen in ice in an abandoned mine shaft. and identified as Katie Pine. He is put back on the case. We learn the depths of how much Cardinal cares about his work, and about the victims of crime in this interior monologue after he tells Katie’s widowed mother that her body has been found:

“Eskimos, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough for this childless mother in her empty house.”

Blunt, p. 37

Cardinal has been assigned a partner from Special Investigations, Lise DeLorme. Sharp, observant, and strikingly attractive, it turns out she is investigating Cardinal on the quiet. After several frustrated attempts to bust a major credit card fraud operation, it becomes apparent someone is tipping off the suspect, a man by the name of Corbett. Cardinal suspects the investigation though DeLorme denies it. And there is something suspicious about this apparently diligent, caring cop. His wife is in an expensive psychiatric facility and he has a daughter in an art program at Yale. And all this on a cop’s salary. Yet as DeLorme comes to work with him, it seems out of character.

Their investigation leads them to see a link with one and possibly two other missing youth. They find another body. Then the girlfriend of another young man shows up. He had been headed to Algonquin Bay and had failed to stay in touch. It looks like they are hunting for a serial killer. Will they find the killer before there is another victim? They may have some time, but not a lot–it appears that the killer likes to play with the victims before administering slow, torturous deaths.

Unbeknownst to Cardinal and DeLorme, they are looking for two people, a twisted young man who already has a record as a child for killing animals and a needy, unattractive young woman who has been taken in thrall with both the man and his cult-like fascination with torture and murder. As DeLorme and Cardinal investigate, tension rachets up as we follow the killers in their plans to “party” with Keith London, the missing young man. The plot moves back and forth between the killers and the detectives, with the investigation DeLorme is pursuing on Cardinal in the background and Cardinal’s own troubled conscience raising further apprehensions.

Blunt plots this masterfully, developing the relationship between Cardinal and DeLorme from initial distrust to growing admiration that stays professional. Cardinal is faithful to his wife–even when she thinks herself worthless in her illness. We find ourselves rooting for them, not only to catch the killer(s), but for Cardinal to be cleared and for them to be able to trust each other. Blunt combines a fascinating police procedural with characters we care about and a psycho-thriller with truly evil killers and a young man with a girlfriend who loves him who we desperately want to survive.

[BTW, thanks BT for the gift of a great read!]

Review: The Last Professional

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The Last Professional, Ed Davis. Tijeras, NM: Artemesia Publishing, 2022.

Summary: A young man trying to find the tramp who assaulted him as an adolescent catches a freight and meets an old hobo running from a killer and the two form a friendship around the lure of riding the freights.

Lyndon works as a gifted programmer at a California tech firm in the early ’80’s. When an obnoxious boss attempts to sexually assault him, something snaps. He eludes the man, quits his job and hops a freight at the Roseville yard. It’s not the first time. The last was fifteen years ago as a twelve year old when “The Tramp” pulled him aboard the freight stopped behind his home as it started up. He’d seen and talked to him many times, a substitute for the father who had abandoned him. But this time was different–he was assaulted for two weeks. The author captures his ambivalence–someone who paid attention but forced himself upon him. He remembered his smell, and the distinctive, fist-shaped buckle he wore. Then he literally dumped him. But “The Tramp” never left him. And when he hops the train, he begins to wonder if he can find “The Tramp” and. . . .

Lyndon discovers he’s not alone. There’s an old hobo on the train–calls himself The Duke. Where Lyndon is trying to find someone, The Duke is running from someone. Someone from his past. He’d barely escaped him in the Colton jungle (the encampment of hobos), when Short Arm left another man dead. He was there when Short arm that name–a arm lost in a train accident–and The Duke left him for dead. Short Arm doesn’t leave anyone alive who crosses him, including two of The Duke’s friends who lie about The Duke’s whereabouts. Their paths crisscross throughout the book and The Duke knows Short Arm will find him. It’s only a matter of time

Lyndon (now nicknamed “Frisco Lyndy”) and The Duke travel, The Duke orienting him to the life of a hobo. He’s a “Profesh,” one of the last of a breed, with a code of his own and a knowledge of every yard, jungle, and good place to eat cheaply in the country. He schools Lyndon on eluding the “bulls,” the yard security, and the ins and outs of riding every kind of car and how to avoid getting killed. More than that, they just talk about life, and the draw of the freights. The Duke tells him, “These freights let you ride. They don’t let you go.”

“These freights let you ride. They don’t let you go.”

Ed Davis, The Last Professional

They talk about the man Lyndon is trying to find and the man The Duke is running from. The belt buckle identifies The Tramp as a Johnson, a group of outlaw hobos that one has to kill someone to be part of. Short Arm is also a Johnson. The Duke, partly out of protectiveness, suggests that the two couldn’t be the same person. Short Arm is the last of the Johnson’s. But Lyndon wonders. And at any rate, he won’t abandon The Duke. The Duke is the only man who hasn’t abandoned or hurt him.

In some ways, this is the railroad equivalent of Kerouac’s On The Road. The two get into scrapes and adventures as they cross the country. What separates it from Kerouac is two things. One is the friendship that forms between these two men, and the other is that Davis captures for us the hobo’s life. The narrative is broken up with numbered “Tracks” (e.g. Track #10) that are conversations on various subjects from our illusions of safety to sex to death.

Ed Davis has served up a story that builds to a powerful ending, an unusual friendship between a younger and older man, and a description of a life that is mostly in the historical past (though this article suggests there are still a few riding the rails). The illustrations by Colin Elgie both fit and created the images formed by the story in my head. I had a tough time putting it down.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Prodigal Son (Frankenstein Book One)

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Prodigal Son (Frankenstein Book One), Dean Koontz. New York: Bantam Books, 2009.

Summary: A serial murderer is loose in New Orleans, and something far worse that two detectives begin to unravel, helped by a mysterious, tattooed figure by the name of Deucalion.

A serial murderer is on the loose in New Orleans. A number of women have turned up dead–missing one part of their bodies–feet, hands, ears, lips surgically removed–you get the idea. A few men have also died, with internal organs surgically removed. Detective partners Carson O’Connor and Michael Maddison are leading the investigation. She is intense, hard-driving both inside a car and out. Maddison is her complement–utterly loyal as a partner, always able to deprecate both himself and Carson in a way that keeps it real. Carson also has charge of her autistic younger brother Arnie, building a castle fortress in his room.

The fortress is an image, a warning that there is indeed danger afoot, far worse than just a serial killer. Carson’s first hint is a mysterious visitor, Deucalion. He has come to New Orleans from a monastery abroad, ostensibly the inheritor of a theater. He moves with lightning quickness, practicing an unusual sleight of hand, and tattooed on one side of his face, concealing extensive scars. He claims to be more than two centuries old, assembled from body parts, brought to life in a lightning strike–by Victor Frankenstein. He claims Frankenstein is still alive in New Orleans, also known as Victor Helios, who presents as a city benefactor. He also develops a special bond with Arnie, who is also in danger.

The real truth is far more insidious. Helios has perfected his abilities to create human life, apparently soulless but enhanced creatures, a perfect race being infiltrated throughout society until the day Helios realizes his dream of replacing the human race. Yet something is going wrong. Created without aspirations other than to serve Helios and subservient to his wishes, some are beginning to think, and act, and even kill on their own. It turns out that you cannot create humans and ensure they will remain automatons. They long for meaning, for joy, or even just to escape their bondage to Helios–longings far more human than Helios will permit.

A fellow blogger recommended this book, to amend the lack of “thrillers” in my reading. I can see why Koontz is so popular. It is not because of the depth of his characters. Carson O’Connor and Michael Maddison seem pretty stereotypic characters at this point (there are four more books in this series). It is because of the swift movements and turns of the plot that keep you turning the pages. It’s the ability to keep drawing you deeper into the maelstrom (if you thought this was bad, wait until you see this). Then there is the exploration of the nature of beings made by other human beings. Is there something truly human within? Someday, if it hasn’t already occurred, we will probably find a way to clone human beings. Will we do this with the will to power of Helios? Will we try to de-humanize them as we have with slaves and the trafficked? And what will we do when they cease to buy it?

All I know is that I will start looking for book two, City of Night. Thanks, James.