Nighttown

Review by New York Times Review

EVEN RUGGED HE-MEN like Jack Readier need to sleep once in a while. In PAST TENSE (Delacorte, $28.99), Lee Child's wandering hero is on an epic road trip in search of his roots. Reacher has made his way to his father's birthplace in Laconia, N.H., where he finds the remains of his family home in the rubble of Ryantown, a settlement that grew up around a tin mill that turned out to be an ecological disaster. At its peak, Reacher discovers, the mill "seemed to be universally accepted as a horrific tableau of clouds of smoke and raging fires and boiling metals, like a miniature hell." Intrigued, he sticks around to learn more. While Reacher is occupied with his research, another drama is unfolding at the isolated motel where a young Canadian couple, Shorty Fleck and Patty Sundstrom, are stranded when their clunker of a car breaks down. After a number of guests arrive carrying disposable luggage and archaic weapons, it slowly dawns on Shorty and Patty that "something is not right." By this time, they've been locked in their room, left to wonder, with mounting dread, exactly what kind of lethal games are being played. Child's writing seems unusually expressive in this novel, possibly because of its intimate subject matter. While making inquiries around town, Reacher is invited inside the home of a man who keeps 12 dogs. "The screen door creaked all the way open ahead of him, and slapped all the way shut behind him, which were in his limited experience the eternal sounds of a New England summer." It's a startlingly sweettempered image, coming from a big bruiser like Reacher - and a reminder that Child is one writer who should never be taken for granted. MYSTERY LOVERS READ for Story - except when we read for character. DARK SACRED NIGHT (Little, Brown, $29), the latest novel from Michael Connelly, has a narrative that keeps veering off the main line and onto side tracks. Harry Bosch, the semiretired hero of Connelly's police procedurals, is obsessed with the unsolved coldcase murder of Daisy Clayton, a 15-year-old runaway whose short career as a prostitute ended when her body - used, abused and washed clean with bleach - was found in an alley. On this case, Renée Ballard, a young cop attached to the Hollywood Division of the L.A.P.D., makes a terrific partner for the old lion. She does the methodical inside work while Bosch rashly steps on the toes of the Mexican Mafia and nearly gets killed. The plot is too disjointed, but Connelly's robust characters more than compensate: from Daisy's drug-addicted mother to a murdered tattoo artist whose only body art was the crucifix around her neck. One of the most vivid is a sensitive cop who committed suicide before the story even opens, but lives on through the poetic entries left behind in his notes. "Subject is a human tumbleweed," he writes of one person of interest to the police. "Goes where the wind blows him. Will blow away tomorrow. Nobody will miss him." SOME PEOPLE welcome the night: hotel managers, nightclub pianists, "Saturday Night Live" interns. Also burglars like Junior Bender, the personable protagonist of Timothy Hallinan's comic mysteries. In NIGHTTOWN (Soho Crime, $26.95), a woman in a cheap orange wig hires Junior to break into the Los Angeles home of an eccentric recluse, lately deceased, and steal an antique doll. Junior wasn't born yesterday, so he figures there's something inside this doll. But before he can pull off the heist, he's got to calm his nerves because, in his professional opinion, "the place absolutely hummed with malice." Hallinan is exceedingly funny when describing colorful crooks like Louie the Lost, a getaway driver with no sense of direction, and Stinky Tetweil, a grossly fat fence who surrounds himself with exquisite objets d'art. Hallinan's eclectic narrative also extends to insights about 19th-century spirit photography ("It would be kitsch if it weren't so callous") and a Native American legend about human shadows. This one's good for what ails you. was this absolutely necessary? To pull the plug on Frank Elder, I mean. John Harvey's British sleuth solves his last case in BODY & SOUL (Pegasus, $25.95), further depleting the fast-disappearing ranks of wise and compassionate detectives. To soothe the sting, Elder is reunited with his estranged daughter, Katherine. Headstrong and willful even at the best of times, she becomes self-destructive at others: After her love affair with an artist turns sour, she tries to kill herself. Then he's found murdered in his studio. Well-rounded, sympathetic characters have always been a hallmark of Harvey's work, and he's at his best here. Katherine's mood swings are uncomfortably real, as she's desperately in love one minute and the next just plain desperate. Cad though he is, her feckless lover, the painter Anthony Winter, is still recognizably human. But the richest character of all is Elder himself, tough on the job but stopped in his tracks by a song. What is it about that Billie Holiday standard "Body and Soul"? His reply: "The helplessness of it, I suppose." Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Junior Bender, a careful and talented thief, doubles as a sleuth with a special clientele: other crooks in need of under-the-table detective work. This time, though, the crook with a problem is Junior himself. It all stems from breaking one of his own rules: never take a job if you're being offered too much money. And $50K for stealing a doll from the abandoned house of a deceased widow is definitely too much money. Naturally, it goes bad, first when Junior finds another thief in the house, also hired to find the doll, and then, when Thief Number Two, who happens to be a friend of Junior's, is killed shortly after exiting the premises. Junior wants to avenge his friend's death and, in the process, find the damn doll. This installment of the unfailingly entertaining series is a bit darker than fans might expect from a Junior caper. Still, while the frenetic action leaves little time for the tomfoolery we love, Junior's musings on everything from silverware to first editions are again a delight, and his band of Holmesian Irregulars continues to steal scenes as effortlessly as Junior lifts a diamond tiara.--Bill Ott Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Edgar finalist Hallinan's suspenseful, well-crafted seventh Junior Bender mystery (after 2016's Fields Where They Lay) finds the L.A. burglar/investigator, who has worked on the wrong side of the law for more than 20 years, desperate for money to help his girlfriend, Ronnie Bigelow. Ronnie's two-year-old son, Eric, has been taken from her by the boy's father, "a New Jersey mob doctor," and Junior needs major funds to pull off his plan to reunite Eric with his mother. In desperation, he agrees to break into a house last occupied by the late Daisy Horton, a nonagenarian known as the "Cruella de Vil of fading Los Angeles gentility," to retrieve a doll for an unidentified client. Junior comes up empty, as does the rival seeking the same item he encounters in the creepy Horton house. Junior's lack of success, combined with the murder of the other burglar shortly after she leaves the premises, leads Junior to seek the truth behind his commission and its connection with what he did find-rare first editions, including an autographed copy of Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Hallinan's top-notch prose and plotting are reminiscent of Lawrence Block and Elmore Leonard. Agent: Bob Mecoy, Bob Mecoy Literary. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Junior Bender knows better, but he can't resist the $50,000 offered to retrieve a porcelain doll from an abandoned Los Angeles house, slated for demolition after the death of its reclusive owner. His long CV lists his profession as "property reallocation"; friends call him a burglar. Junior soon meets one of those old friends, who has been dispatched on the same mission. They are both unsuccessful, and she ends up dead. Junior unselfishly dedicates himself to tracking down all the culprits pro bono. There's a passel of characters, all cartoonish: anonymous client Bride of Plastic Man sports an unforgettable orange wig; professional killer Eaglet is the proprietor of One-Shot Solutions; Anime Wong can do no wrong with a name like that. It would seem that Junior likes to read on stakeouts-there are enough literary references for a bibliography. Margaret Millar, William Gaddis, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and especially Arthur Conan Doyle all get a shout-out. VERDICT This seventh series installment from Hallinan (In Fields Where They Lay), a sort of West Coast Damon Runyon who has been short-listed for about every mystery genre prize, displays his ability to spin the merest gossamer into an engaging, flip, 300-plus-page novel that goes down very smoothly.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2018. 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.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Junior Bender, everybody's go-to burglar in LA, takes on another job that doesn't smell rightit fairly reeks of talcum powderand lives to regret it early and often.Eager to finance the kidnapping of his live-in girlfriend Ronnie Bigelow's 2-year-old son, Eric, from her ex, Junior would love to bank the $50,000 he's been offered to steal an antique doll from Horton House, due for demolition following the death of its long-bedridden owner, Daisy Horton, the Witch of Windsor Street. But he doesn't trust his anonymous client, whom he dubs the Bride of Plastic Man. And the job turns out to be anything but routine. Junior can't find the doll anywhere he searches in Horton House. Instead, he runs into Lumia White Antelope, a fellow burglar, who's found the doll but not the treasure that was presumably hidden inside. When Lumia is shot to death by the people waiting to pick her up, Junior vows to track down the client who hired her. That's easier said than done, even for someone as well-connected in the Los Angeles underworld as Junior. Although crooked buddies like fence Stinky Tetweiler and Eaglet, the professional killer who's the sole proprietor of One-Shot Solutions, are more than willing to help if the price is right, Junior's meetings with Lumia's handler, Itsy Winkle, and Hollywood producer Jake Whelan don't amount to much more than a lot of huffing and puffing on both sides, and his most promising lead, a talent agent who can identify the Bride of Plastic Man, evaporates when she's murdered too. Working every angle, including a tip of the deerstalker to Sherlock Holmes, Junior eventually manages to unearth the truth, if not justice or the American way.Highly readable but relatively weightless, as if Hallinan (Fools' River, 2017, etc.) had padded a short story out to novel length by spinning loop after agreeable loop of his hero's woolly asides, reflections, and professional apothegms. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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By way of a prelude, a few words about the dark.       In the entire, staggering length of the Bible--Old and New Testaments combined, a total of 783,137 words--darkness is mentioned only about one hundred times, and it gets slagged almost every time. It's identified with ignorance, hell, evil, exile, the absence of God, and other conditions to which few of us aspire. The only positive mention of darkness in the whole Book is when the Lord speaks to Moses after dimming the day to protect the Israelites from the sight of Him, and that good darkness, the one and only good darkness, is called by a completely different word, araphel , which will never be used again. Just that once. For God's personal and merciful darkness.       It gets its own damn word to distinguish it from, you know, ordinary every-night darkness, which is Not Good.       According to the King James Bible, translated from a bunch of older languages by forty-seven of Shakespeare's contemporaries, the Lord gets right down to business with the very first line he speaks: Let there be light , He says. And then . . .        And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.        And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.       Night is just what's left over after the big chop: over here , light, which is good; and over there , dark, which is definitely not good and which will be thrown at us, regular as clockwork, every sunset through eternity to lay claim to half of our lives, whether we like it or not. And we're not supposed to like it.       As you can probably tell, I have a problem with this outlook.      I make my living, ninety percent of the time, in the dark. Burglars tend to prefer the dark because, while some of us are pretty dumb, there aren't many of us stupid enough to begin a job by turning on the lights. One iron-clad rule of burglary is to avoid unexpected interactions with others, and darkness helps to prevent them. That was taught to me at the age of seventeen by my mentor, the late, great Herbie Mott, and he had the game down cold. Thanks to Herbie's guidance, I've been at this game very successfully for more than twenty years and I don't even have an arrest record, much less a conviction. I'm good at this, and I resent the way my old ally darkness is slandered.       It's not that light is useless . I'm as fond of a sunny day as anyone who isn't prone to melanoma, but I can't help thinking that giving the sun the night off is one of creation's better ideas. It rests the eyes, it allows plants a chance to take a break from making sugar. It clears the landscape for a lot of very interesting animal life. Most love is made at night, at least by people older than, say, seventeen. Many of the world's most fragrant flowers bloom at night. In place of the monochrome blue of the daytime sky, night offers us the moon's waxing and waning face, set off against the infinite jewelry of the stars.       If it seems to you that I've given this a lot of thought, you're right. Nighttime, in a manner of speaking, is my zip code. It's an undiscriminating neighborhood, one I share with disk jockeys, cops, ambulance drivers, insomniacs, air traffic controllers, French bakers, peeping toms, recovering drunks, speed freaks, the terrified, the bereaved, the guilt ridden, and those with the medical condition photophobia. Sure, it's a mixed batch, but night also evens the odds for the blind and extends a hand of mercy to the odd-looking, the ones who draw stares in the glare of noon. It softens the edges of even our ugliest cities.       But there actually can be too much of a good thing.       I had never really subscribed to that idea, but as I stood in the entry hall of Horton House, holding my breath and listening--which is always the first thing I do when I enter a house--I was revising my opinion. Horton House was too dark . For the first time in my perhaps four hundred burglaries, it seemed like a good idea to just blow it off and go back out into the comparative glare of a moonless night.       And it wasn't just the dark, which was so close to absolute that I might as well call it that. The house was noisy , in the way only an all-wooden house that's more than a century old can be. Horton House had been built by a briefly prominent family in 1908, and every join, plank, beam, and nail was feeling its age and complaining about it. It was almost as loud as a sailboat, which (the claims of their owners notwithstanding) never stops creaking and moaning and sloshing. Horton House made so much noise that I was having trouble listening around and through all of it for the sound of something human: movement, breathing, snores, whatever. The place was supposed to be empty; in fact, a sign outside confirmed that the house was due for demolition in three days. Still, I waited and listened, as I always do, in recognition of the perpetual gulf between what I think I know and what's actually happening.       The most off-putting of the house's trinity of disquieting characteristics--the one I found even more disagreeable than the darkness and the noise--was its smell . One component was a sharp-edged stink that could only be really, really old paper, and I was willing to bet that my little penlight, when I felt secure enough that I was alone to turn it on, would show me the original wallpaper, more than a century old, clinging for dear life to the walls. And running just beneath the sharp wallpaper smell, like a large but muted string section supporting a snare drum, was a pervasive, over-sweet scent with an almost physical heaviness that I first guessed as long-dead flowers, maybe tuberose or narcissus or some kind of lily. It took me a full minute to realize what it really was.       Baby powder.       If what I'd learned about the house was true, there hadn't been a newborn baby here since 1921, and the thought of the smells that baby powder might have been intended to disguise in these latter days was more than a little unsettling. The "baby"--Miss Daisy, the last of the Hortons--had died upstairs, almost exactly a month earlier, at the age of ninety-six after spending almost fifty years confined to a bed on the second floor.      Put it all together, and what it came down to was that Horton House had a certain WEEEooooWEEEoooo factor. The place absolutely hummed with malice. Miss Daisy, who had spent eighty years or so alone here, except for a skeleton staff of servants and a long and apparently unsatisfying succession of daytime caregivers, was semi-famous for hating everything. In her thirties, before the fall on the stairs that had almost severed her spinal cord, she'd been nicknamed "the Witch of Windsor Street" for her skill at terrifying children who dared to play on the sidewalk in front of Horton House. Her animus remained evident even after she gave up hoping for a cure and took to her bed: her response to the changes in her neighborhood, as the old houses went down and stucco went up to welcome an influx of new occupants whose native languages were more likely to be Spanish and Korean than English, was to put the evolving world literally out of sight and out of mind. First, she had her gardeners install the thick ficus hedge that surrounded the property and over-fertilize it until it was higher than the streetlights and the windows of the houses on either side. Second, when the home on her left was demolished to make way for a three-story apartment house with vaguely French Provincial pretensions, she covered the inside of every window in her own house with two layers of the heavy brown paper used for supermarket shopping bags. Dark as it was at night, in the daytime, the light in here in mid-afternoon must have been the rich color of caramel. I knew much of this because Miss Daisy had long been the Cruella de Vil of fading Los Angeles gentility, and as such, she'd gotten her share of newspaper space and, much later, TV time, although she was never seen on-screen.       Apparently, one of the more enduring marks she'd left on Horton House was the odor of that damn baby powder, a kind of cloying sweetness that bordered on decay. I hated it all the way to the back of my neck, which is a part of my body I've learned to pay attention to. Everybody gets the prickles in different places, I guess, but I get them on the back of the neck, and my neck had essentially been calling my name from the moment I opened the gate in the center of that towering hedge.      Which I had done with a key , by the way. The key alone should have told me from the beginning that something was off about the whole enterprise. I hadn't even turned my penlight on, and I was already having second thoughts. Excerpted from Nighttown by Timothy Hallinan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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