“Dorsey’s 15th pits Serge against what may be the only folks as dysfunctional as he is: members of the international intelligence community.” from pineapple grenade
with skin pieced together like puzzles, all of them ravaged by war, but Major Black, the officer in charge, seems to have some future plan for them. When mysterious things begin happening throughout the house, Ruth is convinced she can figure out the truth if only she can get to the heart of what is happening behind D’Espérance’s closed doors. Brenchley (Desdaemona, as Ben Macallan, 2011, etc.) offers more questions than answers, creating a mysterious atmosphere without establishing a strong enough plot to make sense of it all.
MURDER OF THE BRIDE
Challinor, C.S. Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (240 pp.) $14.95 paperback | Mar. 8, 2012 978-0-7387-2335-8 Series: Rex Graves, 5 Why wouldn’t your wedding day be one of the happiest of your life? Because it’s your last. Amateur sleuth and Scottish barrister Rex Graves and his fiancée Helen are attending the nuptials of her former student in Derbyshire. The weather is miserable, the bride is heavily pregnant and the family members are bickering. Polly Newcombe is a wild child. Her groom, accountant Timmy Thorpe, is a sickly momma’s boy whose fraternal twin is a womanizer who neglects his wife and children. The reception is at the family home of Newcombe Court, a showcase for an amazing combination of architectural styles, where Polly and her mother still live after the disappearance of her father years before. When the bride, her mother and the vicar all suffer what appears to be a bad case of food poisoning, leaving Polly’s baby the only survivor, Rex is suspicious. Having prosecuted a case of arsenic poisoning once before, he recognizes the symptoms. The police are glad to have help from Rex, especially when a valuable collection of snuff boxes is stolen and Polly’s paternal aunt is found dead, pushed off the tower. Identifying still another corpse found at the train station as the missing Mr. Newcombe strongly suggests that someone has a grudge against the family. Rex must work through a large number of suspects in a limited time if he and Helen are to get on with their planned hiking trip. Rex’s fifth case (Murder on the Moor, 2011, etc.) is a derivative but pleasant classic English mystery.
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1 february 2012
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TAKEN
Crais, Robert Putnam (352 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 24, 2012 978-0-399-15827-8 A kidnapping drops Elvis Cole and Joe Pike into the maelstrom of human smugglers. After L.A. college senior Krista Morales finds out the secret her boyfriend, USC dropout Jack Berman, has been hiding, she brings him out to the desert to reveal her own secret: the place where her mother Nita, who runs a highly successful business, was once brought into the country as an illegal alien. Unfortunately, the coyotes are still plying their customary trade at the very same spot, and Krista and Jack get swept up in a passing caravan. Convinced there’s something strange about a ransom demand of a measly $500 delivered over the phone by her daughter in a heavy Mexican accent, Nita calls in Elvis Cole, the World’s Greatest Detective. Working as usual with laconic Joe Pike, Cole soon ties the human-trafficking ring to the Double Dragon Korean gang and Syrian mastermind Ghazi al-Diri. But his attempt to infiltrate the ring as an unscrupulous capitalist who needs cheap labor backfires when he’s recognized and seized himself. Now Pike must enlist his mercenary buddy Jon Stone to help rescue Krista, Jack, Cole and maybe even the two dozen illegals with whom they’re being held in an undisclosed location. For some reason, the normally reliable Crais (The Sentry, 2011, etc.) doesn’t trust his story, loaded with the promise of vigilante heroics and nonstop violence, to deliver the goods. So he jazzes it by pulverizing it into sections that leap back and forth in time and among different points of view (e.g., “ELVIS COLE: four days before he is taken”). The result is to loosen the logical links that connect one set piece to another and recast the whole story as if it were a string of trailers for a dozen hellacious summer movies.
PINEAPPLE GRENADE
Dorsey, Tim Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 24, 2012 978-0-06-210073-3 Serge Storms (When Elves Attack, 2011, etc.) bumps it up a notch, joining a CIA operation so covert even the agency doesn’t know about it. Convinced that he may be wasting his considerable talent for mayhem by confining himself to killing bad guys one at a time, Serge decides to go global. A day after their flight from Tampa somehow never gets off the ground, he and perma-buzzed pal Coleman drive to Miami and check into the Royal Poinciana, whose crumbling aqua trim appeals to Serge’s sense of nostalgia. He gets himself a quick gig exporting cheap souvenirs to third-world countries. But he has his eyes on a bigger prize. He and Coleman visit the
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