Hudson Miller, part-time bouncer and currently suspended boxer (for hitting an opponent’s corner man after a bout, causing the man to fall through the ropes and onto the apron around the ring), fails to answer not one, but two calls from his estranged father one night. The next morning, he receives a call he does answer: from a detective, telling Hudson that his father has been murdered – one shot to the back of his head.

Miller returns to his small town, determines what the cops know (nothing), visits his stepmother (useless), calls his mother (sad), then goes back to the big city. Things change, though, when his father’s will is read: he left Hudson three rental properties and his salvage yard operation, none of which are anything Hudson knows anything about. He also inherits his father’s helper at the yard, Charlie, an old Vietnam vet, and the proverbial junkyard dog, Buster.

Frustrated with police, and lacking a steady job, Hudson decides to move back to the town, living in the empty rental and figuring out how to run the yard, and starts digging around in the mystery surrounding his father’s death. The police do come up with something, though: guns. Stored in a vault under a fake floor, it appears Hudson’s father was involved in gunrunning. Hudson, for his part, thinks it possible his father would be involved in that, because his father wasn’t exactly a pillar of good deeds.

One night, Buster starts barking and digging at something under one of the cars. Charlie and Hudson manage to drag him away, move the junked car, and discover another car: buried. When they unearth the crushed car, there’ a dead body in the trunk. While Hudson thinks his old man could have been involved in guns, he doesn’t think his father was a murderer.

With the yard shut down while the police do their thing, Hudson returns to the city to do a few shifts at the bar. One evening, he gets a call to turn on the TV. The news has broken not just about the body in the car, but the young man’s name. The story goes on to mention the salvage yard. Hudson, now tremendously mad, goes to the police station and asks the detective what is going on?

The detective points out the mother and sister of the young man, Mo Reyes, are right there in the front of the office. Hudson calms himself and leaves, but not before Reyes’ sister Lucy puts a dent in the hood of his Jeep.

Lucy shows up at the yard, and instantly becomes the leader of the very small group: following her lead, both men assist in gathering information about what happened to Reyes, which in turn would help them with Hudson’s father’s murder.

15-year old Lucy has a couple of instances of not quite believable behavior: she takes an Uber to confront a man who was arrested smuggling guns, only to be bailed out by Hudson and Charlie, for one.

At the end, though, they’ve followed the trails, collected the clues, and formed a scenario of how these events transpired, and who the killer must be.

It’s a good read, without any real slow pieces, and the only infodump is from someone they’ve confronted about Reyes’ death – no ding for that. Beyond Lucy being a tad too impetuous, the characters are excellently drawn.

Four and a half out of five stars, rounded up to five.

Thanks to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Kate Marshall is back. Myra, her AA sponsor, has died and left Kate her business, with the caveat that Kate start her own PI business. And she does.

Business, however, is slow, and Kate and Tristan need a break. They get one when Bev, the mother of journalist now missing a dozen years, asks them to look into her daughter’s case. It’s long gone cold, but Kate and Tristan will take it – it’s better than no work, after all. Bev’s current partner has somehow laid hands on the boxes (and boxes) of case files kept by the police, and Kate and Tristan start going through it, following the same leads, looking in the same spots. They come up empty, even though the journalist was thought to be working on a story involving a local politician.

Until Kate notices two names written on a notebook. Two men, young and healthy, gone missing without a trace. Just like the journalist, but prior to her own disappearance. Could they be related?

With a new wind in their sails, the duo start the tedious task of determining who these men were, tracing their contacts, and figuring out why they would disappear. The chasing of the clues, the interviews, the scenery: no sagging middle in this book.

Eventually, Kate puts the pieces together. The only gripe I had here is that unlike the last book in the series, I didn’t think there were enough clues – or, rather, enough details in some respects – to allow the reader to determine (or guess) the villain in this one.

Still, it’s an enjoyable read, about people who are grounded in who they are and have a doggedness worthy of admiration.

Four out of five stars.

Thanks to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for the reading copy.

The third in the Amanda Steele series opens with a bang, so to speak. In the wee hours of the morning, Angela Parker nudges her husband Brett and tells him there’s someone in the house. While he investigates, she gets their very young daughter Zoe, then hides in the closet. She hears Brett being shot, and then with dread, waits her turn as the intruder discovers her.

Steele is called to the scene, and she and her team (plus everyone else who shows up at a murder) move around the interior of the house, looking for anything to give a clue as to who these people are, what they did for a living, and if they recently mad someone incredibly mad. They quickly realize that Zoe is not there – not in the closet, not behind mom in the closet – and think perhaps the intruders have taken her. The child is about the same age as Steele’s daughter was when she died, and eventually Steele finds the girl in a wicker basket at the foot of the bed.

Zoe, for her part, traumatized by what she’s seen and heard, does not speak – thus, the silent witness. Much of the first third of the book revolves around Steele gaining Zoe’s trust and getting her to talk and Steele’s own, constant, inner thinking about how she misses her daughter and doesn’t want to get close to Zoe. Despite this, she does wind up taking Zoe in, since the girl is likely in danger.

The team pulls the strings of the investigation, eventually pulling in a connection to another case involving a sitting rep in the city, a hotel seemingly in the middle of nowhere, another unsolved murder, and corruption under their noses.

The pacing is fairly taut, and the writing is fine – no major bumps except the drumbeat of Steele insisting to herself that the kid will be put into the system, that she can’t handle it, and so on. That did get a little old by about the 60% mark, but it eases up toward the end.

The end…I’m not a big fan of bad guy infodumps at the end. But we get one, and not a bad shootout to go with it, which kind of made up for that.

Solid three out of five stars.

Thanks to Bookouture and Netgalley for the reading copy.

A Change of Circumstance reminds me of the repositioning sails cruise ships do, to move, free of passengers, to another location to begin ferrying people in a different area.

This is listed as a mystery, but it’s more of a domestic slice of life book about Simon and his family, and Brookie and his family, and Cat and all the DCs, and poor Mr Lionel, and the Chinese herbalist, and the junkie found dead of an OD/contaminated batch of heroin and a couple of animals and Olivia and whether Simon is going to get with Rachel and ugh.

The crime is laid out, so there’s no spoilers in place by saying if you’ve read Oliver Twist, you’ve read this story before, only better in that book, because this crime is an homage to that. There’s even an Olivia to help get any non-literary heathens up to speed on where they could track down the OG version.

Seriously, though, I really didn’t care about Simon at all. This is the first book in the series I’ve read,but if the writing is like this in all of them – sometimes ending a chapter very abruptly, almost as if there’s something that’s been left out, or hopping between two or three heads without any break to help us figure out whose head we’re in now – I won’t be going back to book one, as I do with many other series, and I definitely won’t be picking up/requesting the next one. The latter I really, really do not like: head-hopping only works if it’s done well. This was not. The story was fractured and quite unenjoyable for that reason alone. Put all the rest in between all the domestic stuff, and it’s a sandwich not worth eating.

Two out of five stars.

Thanks to Abrams/Overlook Press and NetGalley for the reading copy.

This is (I think) the fourth book in a series. I’ll say that this time, it would have helped to read the previous books to figure out PI Charlie Cameron’s history with his two friends and with the big bad guy, Sean Rafferty. That said, it can (and does, mostly) stand on its own, with enough fill-ins to not make it terribly confusing.

Charlie is approached by two women, separately, to help them with an issue. One is Kim Rafferty, the bombshell trophy wife of psychopathic gang leader Sean Rafferty who wants to leave him, and the other has a surprising connection to a man just released from prison, convicted of killing that same woman’s husband.

Thus we begin two separate story arcs: Rafferty’s is told from multiple viewpoints: Sean, Kim, a gangster from Portugal, the woman who runs Sean’s brothels – but not Charlie’s, as he declines. The other is told primarily from Charlie’s and Dennis Boyd’s. Charlie agrees to take the second, but very early on, he decides that maybe Boyd is guilty – one of the witnesses, for instance, who Boyd swore was lying on the stand, is found dead the night after Boyd is released. The optics of that, as far as Charlie is concerned, are terrible.

After meeting with Boyd, though, he agrees to help. Having the second witness of three turn of dead, too, is problematic, but Charlie realizes he was wrong: it does appear that Boyd, who had been sleeping with the man’s wife, and was the most likely killer, may be innocent after all.

Charlie’s no slouch, either. He doesn’t spend his day behind a computer, tapping away. He’s on the streets, chasing down clues, finding people, and sometimes pissing off his pal who is with the police. When he says he’s taking a case and will work it, that’s exactly what he does.

Not a lot of plot details in this review, as the entire thing would need to be spoilered.

The writing is quite good, and while sometimes Charlie can be a bit of a smartass, can’t we all? Dialogue has no issues – no one is working overtime to be cutesy or coy, or occasionally witty. It flows nicely, and even a few rapidfire sections are not difficult to follow.

The dual stories are both interesting in their own right, although the Rafferty storyline was wrapped up in just a handful of pages, including a somewhat not easy to believe escape at the end, which was a bit out of sorts for the book until that point. There’s a kind of, maybe, cliffhanger on that one, but I can’t say why, lest I spoil it. The Boyd story – well, you’ll just have to read it, and I recommend you do if police/PI mysteries are your thing.

A solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Marko Zorn is back in this followup to 2020’s The Reflecting Pool, the first book in the series, which I reviewed here – one year ago exactly to when I finished reading Head Shot. Something probably interesting only to me.

Zorn is the same cop now as we was then: not carrying a gun, being snarky, not always telling people what he’s doing, and meeting up with shady characters. While it is helpful to get a feel for Zorn’s character by reading the first book, it is not at all required, as Head Shot can be read as a standalone.

The book opens with the murder of an actress, with whom Zorn was intimately familiar years ago. It’s a classic locked room mystery: the actress said her final line, and went to her (prop) dressing room to commit suicide in the play (it’s Hedda Gabler, for those who know Ibsen). Strangely, she flubbed her last line before going off the stage. A shot did ring out, but when the stagehand goes into the room, the actress is dead on the floor, a pistol by her right hand, and a gunshot wound to her left temple. There are no windows in the room, and only one door, which no one saw open after the end of the scene, when the actress was supposed to go backstage when the lights were down. Zorn is not assigned to the case, but his partner Lucy is.

He also goes to a meeting with Cyprian Voss, who often gives him side jobs to do, and pays well for him to do them. The assignment from Voss? Protect Nina Voychek, Prime Minister of Montenegro, which is on an official state visit.

Zorn has been asked by the Secretary of State to do the same task, as it was requested by the Embassy itself. When he tries to point out he is not trained as a bodyguard or close protection detail, he’s overruled and told to suck it up and do it anyway. At the Embassy, a frightened young woman presses a paper into his hand. On it, a series of numbers. He assumes it’s a coded message of some kind. He gives her his card and asks her to call him. She doesn’t, as the next time we hear about her, she’s dead, too, after being strangled.

There have already been assassination attempts against Voycheck, and the suspicion is that it’s a hired gun called Domino, who has an impressive success rate. Turns out, Zorn has had assassination attempts against himself as well, but for what reason, he does not know.

Things become a bit hectic in Zorn’s world at that point: he’s checking on the security covering Voychek (the lead FBI agent wants nothing to do with him and flatly tells him he isn’t welcome), and bouncing between that and the case of the murdered actress and is told by a supervisor and another cop that he isn’t welcome there, either). Is there a connection between the two cases? Maybe, maybe not.

The action picks up and we follow Zorn as he checks in with a hacker and gives him the message to decode, checks in with Carla, director of the FBI, who also wants him to protect Voychek, also paying him to do so. He doesn’t mention that he’s already being paid by Voss.

As Zorn puts the pieces together, more bodies show up. and there are plenty of suspects to go around. Eccentric or no, do any of them hold some answers to the slew of questions Zorn has about the cases?

Head Shot is a fast read, not because it’s boring and the temptation to skim is there, but because it is quite good, and leaving aside a few of the things that require more suspension of disbelief than is usually required, the things that happen and the actions of the various characters is completely consistent with the story’s own internal logic.

A solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to Oceanview Publishing and NetGalley for the reading copy.