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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

SUSPENSE: New title no joy for Harry Bosch fans

By: John Sullivan

Posted: 11/14/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

A year past, it was The Brass Verdict. In May, The Scarecrow.

Now, the formerly stellar and unerring Michael Connelly slays Nine Dragons (Little Brown, $35, 384 pages), and fans eagerly waiting for a new Harry Bosch thriller to temper their dismay over his off-series entries will have no joy.

Relying on a breakneck pace that falls short of concealing a flawed, erratic storyline, Dragons takes the morose LAPD detective off the reservation to Hong Kong to rescue his daughter from triad bosses who don't like where his latest murder investigation is heading.

Sadly, it all presents like a made-for-video pastiche of Connelly's holiday snaps, badly in need of a film editor. More vexing for Bosch fans, it's far less revealing of Harry's intuitive sleuthing and driven complexity than during the series' youth, despite the studiously personal venture.

***

Robert B. Parker writes fluff, testosterone cosies most often starring bad-boy Boston PI Spenser. And since Parker has been around since the dawn of time (OK, he's a ridiculously dapper 77), he's not likely to change his act anytime soon.

Still, The Professional (Putnam, 304 pages, $34), No. 37 (!) in the series, finds Spenser mellowed to the point of near-catatonia as he's hauled in to referee the case of Gary Eisenhower, cad extraordinaire.

Bedding and blackmailing rich-men's arm-candy is Gary's forte, but Spenser can't help but like the guy until bodies start falling. No innocents in this one but, problematically, not much of a story either.

The oddly shrunken detective and Susan, his annoying "honey bun." loiter throughout, exchanging lightweight psychobabble and what passes for witty repartee in Parkerland.

But tough-guy sidekick Hawk is all but MIA, and there's nary a gunfight or bruising dustup in sight.

***

Wilson, a guy with no first name, is The Grinder (ECW Press, $25, 220 pages), a ghostly underworld fixer who goes off the grid as a P.E.I. tuna fisherman to escape mob infighting in author Mike Knowles' native southern Ontario.

Unearthed by his über-nasty former boss and blackmailed with threats against his only friends, Wilson plows through a gaggle of underlings to find out who's grabbed the boss's gangster-wannabe nephews.

There's more mayhem than mystery in this thin sequel to Knowles' 2008 debut, Darwin's Nightmare, and Wilson flunks the sympathetic anti-hero test with his unrelieved brutality.

Still, Grinder displays some nascent storytelling chops and a viable future for the Hamilton schoolteacher.

***

A lost child, a stalled career, a marriage on the brink -- Glasgow Det. Sgt. Alex Morrow is resident of a "dark, belligerent void" when an elderly Asian shopkeeper is abducted by two thugs for a ransom his modest family can't possibly afford.

Character play trumps a spare narrative in Denise Mina's Still Midnight (McArthur, $25, 356 pages), the "tartan noir" author's eighth novel and first stab at a police procedural, with south-side Glasgow's racially charged streets playing a gritty supporting role.

There's an emotive authenticity to Mina's patriarch, Aamir, and his secret-strewn family, a dismaying reliability to her take on petty police politics and seamy underworld ruthlessness.

While the case itself is "a big fat bollocks," its bungling, low-level villains are compassionately drawn, with reluctant kidnapper Pat elevated to a core everyman role.

Less successful is Morrow, too angry and uncompromising to be likable, too emotionally elusive to be terribly sympathetic. That curious flaw stalls Midnight just short of being Mina's breakout novel.

John Sullivan is editor of the Free Press Autos, Homes and Travel sections, and specialty websites.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 14, 2009 H9

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