Smoke on the Water by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Forge Books on February 11, 2025

“For weeks the air smelled like a wet dog dipped in lip wax.” I love sentences like that one. I love Loren D. Estleman because he produces them so regularly.

Smoke on the Water is the prolific Estleman’s latest Amos Walker mystery. Walker is retained by Hermano Suerte, a lawyer in a hotshot firm, to recover a file. The firm got the bright idea to send files home with its associates while its offices were being scrubbed free of mold. A box of files went missing when Spencer Bennett, the lawyer who had custody of it, was killed by a hit-and-run driver as he was walking to a bus. The story makes little sense to Walker because Bennett lived in Detroit and owned a car. Traveling by bus violates the principles of car owners in Detroit.

One file is more important than the others. A whistleblowing accountant named Francis Birdseye retained the firm after he discovered discrepancies in his employer’s books. Rather than explaining the missing money, his employer fired Birdseye. The employer is a construction company that doesn’t do any construction but appears to be shaking down companies with threats to destroy their property if they don’t pay up.

The police searched Bennett’s home as part of their death investigation but couldn’t find the files. Walker visits Bennett’s live-in partner, an artist named Evan Morse, who denies knowledge of the files. Walker knows he’s lying but doesn’t know why.

Birdseye appears to have been murdered by a car thief who ran him down with his own car. That's another fact that makes no sense to Walker. Nor does the eventual discovery of the car in an airport parking lot, along with a body in the driver's seat that died from two gunshots to the head.

Walker is a traditional gumshoe who makes a nuisance of himself until he pieces together the puzzle. He uncovers an erudite but homeless witness who sets him on the right track, but not in time to prevent more killings. A subplot involves series regular John Alderdyce, a homicide detective who may or may not have tried to commit suicide.

As is customary of Amos Walker novels, the plot is credible and the ending is surprising. Smoke drifting into Detroit from Canadian wildfires contribute to the novel’s atmosphere (and to the novel’s title). Characters are colorful and dialog is snappy. Since Estleman never wastes words, the story moves quickly. The plot has enough action (including a traditional shootout) to qualify as a thriller, but Estleman keeps the story in motion even when Walker isn’t enduring a beating. I’m not sure that Estleman is as popular as some best-selling thriller writers, but he should be. The man just flat out knows how to write.

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Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

Published by ‎ Soho Crime on February 4, 2025

Saint of the Narrows Street is a story of people who are searching for identities to replace their lost lives. What happens to people who lose their dreams, or who never have dreams to chase? Near the novel’s end, Fab ponders that question when he walks into a seedy bar: “The joint’s a real den for degenerate drunks. All he can think is they were once little kids. Stood in schoolyards and mouthed the Pledge of Allegiance. Ate their sack lunches. Said their prayers.”

Fab is only eight months old when the story begins. Risa, his 28-year-old mother, has already made a life-defining mistake by dropping out of Staten Island College and marrying Sav Franzone. Sav thinks Risa is boring. In an abstract way, he’s proud that she gave birth to his son, but he’s already itching to split. Sav is out most nights, drinking and cheating on Risa with Sandra Carbonari.

One night Sav comes home drunk with a gun and a plan to travel to Florida with Sandra. He waves the gun around, points it at Risa and Sav, packs a bag, and gets into a fight with Risa’s sister Giulia. As he’s choking Giulia, Risa hits him with a cast iron pan. Sav hits his head on the corner of a table as he falls. Risa calls Sav’s childhood friend, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, who comes over in time to watch Sav die. They haul the body away and bury it on rural land that belongs to Chooch’s mother.

The story follows the main characters as they live troubled lives for the next eighteen years. Risa lives with her guilt by telling herself that Sav would have killed her or her son if she hadn’t killed him. Chooch lives with his unrequited love for Risa and his feeling that, unlike his father, who “had an identity as a New Yorker and as an Italian American,” he has nothing but the property he inherited from his parents. Giulia lives a life of dissatisfaction, broken only by a drunken yet memorable sexual encounter with a woman.

Collateral characters contribute to the theme of broken lives that end in violence. Sav’s brother Roberto returns a few years after stealing money from a vengeful man and running away with his wife. A drunken priest with a gambling addiction tries to blackmail Risa with his half-formed hunches about her role in Sav’s disappearance. When he’s ten, a young troublemaking friend of Fab goads him into “living on the edge” until the friend pays a price. Optimistic people believe it's never too late to start over, but some people are perpetually “pinned forever to the void of this moment, the terror of regret.”

Saint of the Narrows Street gives the impression that some people were born to lose. Sav and Fab, Roberto and the gambling priest, fit that profile. Other people might be able to live fulfilling lives but, for reasons of their own, go in the wrong direction. Risa, Giulia, and Chooch never took the risk of looking for a better life. By the novel’s end, they’re in their forties and wondering what’s left.

The story culminates with Fab’s search for his absent father. Conversations with Sandra and other people who knew Sav offer clues about his father’s fate. Tension mounts as Risa realizes she can no longer hide the truth about her father’s death from Fab. But how will he react to the truth? Will all the central characters come to a violent end?

The story is bleak, but only because it takes an honest, unflinching look at certain kinds of lives — the lives of people who are stuck, who have abandoned hope or never had any. Poignant takes on characters (Risa thinks her father’s “version of God seems to have nothing to do with love and everything to do with shutting the door”) sharpen their personalities. Sharp prose and full characterizations contribute to one of the strongest novels I expect to read this year.

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"Eleven Numbers" by Lee Child

Published by Amazon Original Stories on February 1, 2025

Reacher novels have become predictable. Some seem like parodies of the first novels in the series. I was happy to see Lee Child write something that wasn’t about a tough guy whose violent adventures are narrated in clipped sentences.

The premise of “Eleven Numbers” is simple. Nathan Tyler is a math professor. Tyler is among a handful of respected academics who have given intense thought to Kindansky numbers, a special subset of prime numbers that Child appears to have conjured from his imagination. At least, a quick Google search returned only this story and some references to Wassily Kindansky, a Russian artist whose abstract drawings were based on geometric patterns. My apologies to Kindansky and to Child if Kindansky numbers are real.

Tyler is invited to attend a math conference in Moscow at a time when Americans are being urged not to travel to Russia. He accepts the invitation at the urging of the president, who — with the help of a more renowned mathematician — explains that certain nine-digit Kindansky numbers were used by Russian mathematician Arkady Suslov when he designed a computer security algorithm. Enter the wrong password — a nine-digit Kindansky number — and the system will lock out the user and trigger a password reset. The algorithm is protecting Russia’s nuclear arsenal. America would love to get inside and monkey around with it.

The problem is that Suslov is the only person who knows which of the eleven potential numbers is the correct password. The president wants Tyler to travel to Russia, meet with Suslov, and get a sense of which number he used.

Things go south for Tyler when he rents a car at the airport in Moscow, drives toward his hotel, and gets T-boned by a police car. He’s arrested and tossed into jail, making his mission look like a failure. In fact, his mission has only started.

The story is simple but interesting and at least modestly suspenseful. I liked it because Tyler isn’t a tough guy. He relies on his intelligence to perform his mission and on his instincts to smell a double-cross that the American government has probably planned for him.

I also liked Child’s resort to a conventional writing style. The short sentences and “Maybe this. Maybe that.” style of the Reacher novels has become iconic, but it doesn’t work well outside of the Reacher universe. It’s nice to know that Child can tell an engaging story that doesn’t rely on fistfights, shootouts, and two-word sentences that have grown a bit tired in the Reacher series.

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Dead Money by Jakob Kerr

Published by Bantam on January 28, 2025

Dead Money is an engaging whodunit set in the world of venture capital and technology startups. Trevor Canon is the CEO of Journy, a company that seems to combine Lyft-like services with Lime-like rentals. Journy has not yet gone public but is expected to make Canon even wealthier when it does.

Canon is murdered in his office while he’s working late. Shortly before his murder, Canon changed his will to specify that, in the event of his murder, his shares in Journy could not be distributed to other investors in the company until the murderer is convicted.

The company’s executives each own a piece of the company, as does Hammersmith Venture, the venture capital firm that financed Journy’s startup. Journy’s five key executives carried keycards that would have provided access to the elevator leading to the CEO’s office, making them the prime suspects.

Mackenzie Clyde is a lawyer employed by Hammersmith Venture. Mackenzie does not perform traditional legal work. She investigates and troubleshoots problems, reporting directly to the firm’s CEO, Roger Hammersmith. Mackenzie is not impressed by the tech industry, which she describes as “a giant, soulless, self-propelling machine that runs on its own bullshit.” Sounds about right.

Intermittent flashbacks provide insight into Mackenzie’s nature. She grew up feeling freakish because of her unusual height. She took refuge in basketball until a male student who read and copied her essay falsely claimed that she copied his work. School officials knew the kid was lying but his father was rich and important so they suspended Mackenzie (but not the male) from extracurricular activities. That experience might cause some people to resent the privilege that attends wealth, but it motivated Mackenzie to acquire wealth of her own.

Mackenzie’s mother taught her to seize opportunities — specifically, opportunities to become wealthy — because power is the only shield against the powerful. Mackenzie went to law school and accepted a job with a Big Law firm. Before she started, she met Eleanor Eden, a woman who wrote a bestselling book about how women can shatter the glass ceiling. Mackenzie called out the book as bullshit, earning Eleanor’s admiration. Eleanor admits the book was full of nonsense but writing it was an end to a means.

Eleanor advised Mackenzie to ditch Big Law and move to the West, where opportunities for success abound. Mackenzie took a job as in-house lawyer with Hammersmith Venture. How she became Roger Hammersmith’s personal fixer is a mystery I won’t spoil.

In fact, saying much more about the plot would risk spoiling it. It is enough to know that Hammersmith designates Mackenzie as his liaison to the FBI, which takes over the investigation of Trevor’s murder. Mackenzie works closely with Agent Jameson Danner, whose father is a wealthy senator, as they interview the prime suspects and work their way to a reveal of the killer’s identity.

Although three of the four key characters — Mackenzie, her mother, and Eleanor — are morally suspect, they all justify their actions with the conviction that opportunities are meant to be seized, even if others must suffer. This seems suspiciously similar to the philosophies that drive Silicon Valley startups and Big Law, philosophies that Mackenzie seems to find appalling, but Mackenzie’s beliefs are more nuanced (and less admirable) than they first appear.

Danner at least is law-abiding, but he suffers from the usual law enforcement belief that using other people to build a criminal case is always justified — all the more so if the manipulation advances his career. Fortunately, fictional characters don’t need to be morally stalwart to be interesting. Whether they are right or wrong, the characters act consistently with their beliefs. I can’t say I cared about any of the characters by the novel’s end, but I didn’t dislike any of them, and I admired Jakob Kerr’s willingness to take chances with characters who might turn off readers with their unsavory behavior.

I also appreciated an offbeat plot that doesn’t depend on a tough guy saving the day by being tougher than everyone else. Dead Money is carefully constructed to give the reader an opportunity to piece together clues in search of the killer’s identity. The final reveal is surprising and surprisingly believable. A clever reader might guess parts of the answer but I doubt that most will work it out entirely. Kerr nevertheless plays fair by giving the reader a reasonable opportunity to solve the puzzle. Those elements combine to make Dead Money one of the smartest crime novels I’ve read in the last several months.

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Chain Reaction by James Byrne

Published by Minotaur Books on January 28, 2025

Desmond Aloysius Limerick has quickly become one of my favorite action heroes. He relies on his wits more than his fists and isn’t likely to get into a clichéd action hero shootout. In Chain Reaction, Dez fashions a slingshot from a Y-shaped machine part and some rubber gaskets. His deadly aim, shooting nuts and bolts at bad guys, is unlikely but fun.

Dez is a gatekeeper. He has been trained to open doors and keep them open until the mission is over. That skill served him well in the military. He’s trying to live a more peaceful life now but, like most action heroes, trouble finds him.

The novel opens in Spain, eighteen months in the past. Still serving in the military at that point, Dez is supporting a British government effort to acquire a new drug that a professor claims will cure opioid addictions. Dez manages to thwart thieves who want to steal the formula while simultaneously outing the professor as a fraud. Being a guy who lets bygones be bygones, Dez allows the professor’s beautiful assistant to escape.

The assistant is Catalina Valdivia. In the present, Cat is scoping out a convention center in anticipation of committing a crime when she learns that Dez will be there, sitting in with a jazz band. A band member texted Dez to ask for his help, or so Dez believes. Soon after his arrival, the convention center is occupied by terrorists who threaten to (and do) kill people if they venture outside of the buildings.

The terrorists are demanding the return of a Russian spy ship that has been captured by the US and Turkey. They’re using a jamming device to prevent anyone in the convention center from using wireless signals to call for help, but Dez knows his way around electronics and manages to put in a call to the FBI. Agent Stella Ansara appreciates his help despite Dez’s insistence on doing things his own way, especially after he manages to make it reasonably safe for the FBI to enter the center. He gets a capable if reluctant assist from Cat, who eventually ends up in his bed, as do many of the women Dez encounters.

The terrorists are a cover for targeted assassinations of people who have been lured to the convention center, including Dez. The assassinations have been orchestrated by a high-priced group of killers that includes Liv Gelman. Dez recognizes that the convention center has been breached by another gatekeeper and believes that Liv is the only person (apart from himself) who has that set of skills. Liv is one of Dez’s many former lovers. He’s surprised to learn that she is still active, given his belief that he had killed her.

I enjoy the Dez Limerick novels both for the unique nature of the series protagonist and for the perfect balance that James Byrne manages between humor and thrills. For example, when Dez is taken into custody, he’s “given a perfectly fine cup of coffee and, oddly enough, some surprisingly good snickerdoodle cookies while he’s inside. As interrogations go, this one is top drawer.” Nothing much bothers Dez.

In fact, Dez’s nonchalant attitude about danger — he jokes his way from one violent encounter to the next — makes it easy for the reader to enjoy Dez’s company and to overlook the unlikely nature of the plot. It’s rare to encounter a modern thriller that doesn’t tell a farfetched story, but eyerolls are minimized when an infusion of humor signals the reader that it isn’t meant to be taken seriously.

Chain Reaction is smart, engaging, and funny. It also delivers the thrills that thriller junkies crave. This is the third novel in the series and I've enjoyed them all. Readers who haven't followed the series can read this novel as a standalone without missing important context.

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