Let the Good Stuff Roll

2009, that great year for crime fiction, isn't over yet. Here's one that would make a perfect stocking stuffer -- if people still do that in the age of Kindle.

Gaelic Noir lives, with help from a fine female practitioner. "Campbell shows a light and conciliatory touch... She is excellent on the symptomatic one-upmanship of academia... she clearly has a talent for direct and uncompromising character portrayal," says the Irish Times. "Written in glistening prose... a major talent," agrees the Irish Independent. Jay Hamilton lives a comfortable life in London as a psychoanalyst, but the darker recesses of his own psyche would not stand up to close examination. His brother, a genius professor of mathematical linguistics at UCLA, was killed and Jay was the first on the scene. When Jay uses his clients' case studies as material for his fiction writing, the fallout threatens to cause his past to unravel.

And here two more goodies due out in the months ahead:

Ex-FBI agent Steve Vail is more than happy to leave the Bureau behind, but they aren't through with him yet. A group called the Rubaco Pentad is killing human targets one by one unless the FBI can give them buckets of cash, with the amount and the body count escalating each time the agency doesn’t pay up. The Feds are stumped. Some signs point to a corrupt agent while others lead to completely dead ends. Vail has built a reputation for being able to find anybody anywhere. Now, with no official ties, he's the perfect choice for the sort of under-the-radar investigation they need. But as Vail well knows, going after people who use killing as a bargaining chip is asking for the worst kind of trouble.



Anyone who enjoys C.J. Box and Nevada Barr should relish this one. Set in the wilds of Maine, it's an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive -- his own father. Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father Jack, a hard drinking womanizer who makes his living illegally poaching game. An even more frightening call comes the next morning from the police: They are searching for the man who killed a beloved local cop the night before—and his father is their prime suspect. Jack has escaped from police custody, and only Mike believes that his tormented father might not be guilty.

It almost makes me sad that my two-year stint as a judge on the crime panel for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards is nearing its end..