Review by New York Times Review
HOME IS THE ONE PLACE on earth you can't fix - but don't tell Ace Atkins's straight-arrow hero, Quinn Colson. When he returned to Mississippi after serving 10 years as an Army Ranger, he found Tibbehah County infested with strip joints and meth labs, bogus preachers and vicious bikers, crooked politicians and marauding gangsters. Now, in THE INNOCENTS (Putnam, $27), the sixth book in this series, Quinn has been voted out as sheriff, but he's still trying to make things right. Some familiar good ol' boys turn up here, including Quinn's father, a burnt-out Hollywood stuntman with a delusional scheme to open a dude ranch. But although this is a novel fueled by testosterone and moonshine, three of its best characters are women. Lillie Virgil has been acting sheriff since the last person to hold that office "got himself killed." But although she's admired for her keen marksmanship and filthy vocabulary, she may have met her match when Fannie Hathcock takes over the old Booby Trap, renames it Vienna's Place and establishes a somewhat more genteel atmosphere in which to buy a lap dance. A shrewd businesswoman, Fannie uses the Golden Cherry Motel, across the street, as a dorm for the Born Losers, the "dirty, stinky and mean" biker gang that provides protection for her club. But it's 18-year-old Milly Jones who grabs your heart. Determined to tell the shameful story behind her brother's suicide, she needs someone to help tell it right. This poor innocent even drives all the way to Tupelo to attend a book signing by a "real" writer, only to come away with a quick brushoff and a Christian romance novel. To raise a nest egg, Milly signs on as a pole dancer at Vienna's Place and, drawing on her gymnastic skill as a former cheerleader, the kid is a sensation. But she's so desperate to get out of town that she grabs her money, stiffs Fannie out of the house share and heads for the highway. When Milly resurfaces - weaving down a country road while engulfed in flames - the narrative understandably gets darker, challenging Lillie and Quinn to break through the community's rigid defenses and twisted loyalties. But the deeply cynical ending only confirms Milly's observation that "people around here hate when you tell the truth." "YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN in this game." Peter Lovesey gives fair warning in ANOTHER ONE GOES TONIGHT (Soho Crime, $27.95), his latest impeccably constructed mystery featuring the unpredictable but ever-entertaining Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath Constabulary. Diamond is on the scene of a car crash near a railroad line when he rescues a severely injured old man, thrown from what appears to be a custom-built tricycle. This peculiar person, it is later revealed, is a retired engineer and an ardent railroad buff, a member of a breakaway branch of the Bath Railway Society. Things get interesting when Diamond discovers that other elderly members of the group have recently died, leading him to suspect that he might have saved the life of a serial killer. Lest we get too focused on all the funny business involved in railroad mania, there are red herrings to sniff out and misdirections to blindly follow. For all the witty jabs Lovesey takes at English eccentricities, this is a classic whodunit. As Diamond notes, "Taken as problem solving, plotting a murder could be treated like any other engineering project, constructing a turbine or a tunnel." The same might be said of deconstructing a good murder mystery. EACH OF MARTIN WALKER'S novels set in the Dordogne highlights some feature peculiar to this beautiful pastoral region of France. Previous plots turned on the annual truffle auction in Ste. Alvère; the prehistoric limestone caves along the Vézère River; and the grape harvest in the fictional village of St. Denis, where the amiable Bruno Courrèges serves as chief of police. In FATAL PURSUIT (Knopf, $25.95), the colorful attraction is the Concours d'Élégance, a vintage car parade and sports car rally to be held in St. Denis. Through a comedy of errors, Bruno is recruited as navigator of a classic Citroën DS3 in the rally, which is both thrilling and truly élégante. The barely noticeable murder of a local historian eventually folds into the more dramatic mystery of "the most expensive car of all time," a 1936 Type 57C Bugatti - one of only four built, but gone missing somewhere in France during World War II. For the first time, Walker has created an object of desire more delectable than the festive meals Bruno always prepares for his friends. TWO BOYS GROW up poor on the side streets of a big city. One manages to climb his way out of the old neighborhood; the other stays behind to make their tough city tougher. Michael Harvey does wonders with this standard opener in BRIGHTON (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99), which finds him back in his native Boston. Kevin Pearce and Bobby Scales share a terrible secret from their past that Kevin is forced to confront years later, as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, when a murder investigation takes him back home to face his old friend Bobby - and his own conscience. The story is boldly told, from so many angles and points of view that the moral center keeps shifting. Even the characters who die won't go away in this fiercely felt lament for a neighborhood and a youth that never was.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 10, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The elderly English gentleman in knickers and a Holmesian deerstalker is putt-putting down a darkened road on his motorized tricycle when a traffic smashup occurs. He's brought back from the dead by Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, who has arrived in time to administer CPR. Afterward, Diamond is perplexed by the emotional bond the act created, and the puzzlement turns creepy when Diamond discovers sinister things in the old guy's history. Has he rescued a monster? Lovesey's fans will be overjoyed to watch his series hero, Diamond smart, obstinate, slyly funny back in action (this is the sixteenth in the much-loved series), and they'll love just as much being made into chumps by a complex plot that the author takes pains eventually to clarify just before he lets us know we've missed everything. Pacing, dialogue, exposition, backstory nobody handles them better than Lovesey, who always writes elegantly while spinning a tough-minded police procedural. Diamond knocks on doors, endures uncooperative and occasionally abusive witnesses, sits through tedious interrogations, pushes himself beyond exhaustion, and lets us know everything he knows. So how come he can figure everything out and we can't?--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar-finalist Lovesey's superior 16th whodunit featuring Det. Supt. Peter Diamond (after 2015's Down Among the Dead Men) offers fair play fans a delightfully clever puzzle that toys with their expectations. Diamond, the irascible head of Bath's CID, isn't pleased when his boss, Georgina Dallymore, pulls him from his regular duties to look into the circumstances of a police car crash that killed the driver, Police Constable Aaron Green, and badly injured his passenger, Sgt. Lew Morgan. Georgina hopes that Diamond's review of the evidence will rule out any police negligence. His visit to the crime scene yields a dramatic surprise-the body of an elderly man who was apparently struck by the vehicle while riding a motorized tricycle. Diamond's heroic efforts at CPR save man's life, but the unidentified accident victim remains unconscious, leaving the circumstances of the collision obscure. Lovesey taunts readers with extracts from what appears to be a serial killer's diary while building up to an ingenious final reveal that highlights his gift for misdirection. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lovesey's latest Peter Diamond procedural (after Down Among the Dead Men) has the Bath detective outside of his normal purview when he is asked to conduct an internal investigation into a fatal crash involving two officers responding to a call at the end of their shift. To Diamond's horror and astonishment, he finds an almost lifeless pensioner who must have been involved in the accident and resuscitates him using CPR. However, as he looks further into what the elderly man was doing out late at night on a motorized tricycle, he begins to wonder if he might have saved the life of a serial killer. In tracing the events of that evening, Diamond stumbles onto something larger and deadlier than the original investigation warranted. VERDICT Lovesey delivers a page-turner complete with a likable protagonist whose encounters with authority bring humor to a whodunit with an amazing conclusion. [See Prepub Alert, 2/1/16.]-Lisa O'Hara, Univ. of Manitoba Libs., Winnipeg © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sent to look into an accident involving two fellow officers from the Avon and Somerset Police, DS Peter Diamond finds himself improbably but compellingly on the trail of an unusually cold-blooded serial killer.Georgina Dallymore, the boss whom Diamond's recently been closer with than he'd wanted (Down Among the Dead Men, 2015), wants her star investigator to exonerate Lew Morgan and Aaron Green, the two uniformed officers who'd crashed their patrol car in an effort to avoid hitting Ivor Pellegrini, an old man on a homemade tricycle who now lies in a coma at the Royal United Hospital. It's too late to question Green, who was killed in the crash, and Morgan didn't see enough to settle things. But that mostly turns out to be beside the point, because Diamond, who was responsible for spotting Pellegrini hours after the accident, giving him life-saving CPR, and sending him to the hospital, is soon pursuing an altogether different case. People close to Pellegrini have been dying, apparently of natural causes, at an alarming rate in recent months. The dead, all connected to the Great Western Railway Society, of which Pellegrini has been a mainstay, include Massimo Filiput, his old friend Cyril Hardstaff, Cyril's wife, Winnie, and perhaps others. Who would take the trouble to kill so many inoffensive old people, and how, and why? It's only after getting tricked into swallowing a red herring deeply laid by the killer, who duly notes the triumph in an encrypted journal, that Diamond eventually identifies his quarry, a deceptively minor character who turns out to be a good deal more major than he'd suspected. On the long side but so fast-paced you won't care: another absorbing, resourceful English procedural from one of the best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
