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.

RECOMMENDED

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on January 14, 2025

My favorite novels about the nature of law and justice are The Ox-Bow Incident and A Covenant with Death. My favorite novels that mock the legal system are Bleak House and A Frolic of His Own. My favorite novel about a trial is To Kill a Mockingbird. My favorite legal thriller is Presumed Innocent. I highly recommend them all.

Published in 1987, Presumed Innocent told the story of Rusty Sabin, a prosecutor who was wrongly accused of killing an illicit lover. Sabin, by then an appellate judge, was accused of killing his wife in the follow-up novel, 2010’s Innocent. Presumed Guilty marks Sabin’s third starring role, this time as a defense attorney rather than a defendant.

The categories I invented for my list of favorite novels about the law overlap. All are represented in Presumed Guilty. Sabin entertains the reader with his hard-earned opinions about the relationship between law and justice. At times, the novel mocks the legal system, although Scott Turow does so by depicting it accurately. The system too often mocks itself.

Rusty Sabin respects the law but has been known to break it. He is easily forgiven for harmless and well-intended transgressions. Given his experiences, Sabin harbors an understandable contempt for those who place the freedom of others at risk by undermining rights that are essential to a fair trial.

Through Sabin, Turow spotlights the criminal justice system’s imperfections and explains why they impair an accused’s opportunity to have a fair shake against the government. Without lecturing, he identifies social problems — racism, the growing belief that facts are whatever you want them to be — and illustrates how they stain the justice system.

Turow also mocks prosecutors who see themselves as avenging warriors, a self-important conception that excuses any violation of rules that stand in the way of a conviction. Turow reminds us that prosecutors have a dark history of excluding Blacks from juries, hiding exculpatory evidence, and violating court orders to keep silent about inadmissible evidence, among other offenses.

While Presumed Guilty thus earns praise for its astute analysis of a flawed legal system, it also excels as a legal thriller. It isn’t as fresh or astonishing as Presumed Innocent, but it tells a compelling story that, like many legal thrillers, centers upon a whodunit mystery. Is the defendant guilty and, if not, can the reader identify the true culprit? As is often the case in the real world, evidence is murky and open to interpretation. Turow lets the suspense build before the reader learns the (somewhat) surprising and (mostly) plausible truth.

Because this is how Sabin’s life has gone, the story centers on a crime that touches his family. Sabin has retired and is living in a quiet place outside of Kindle County. He lives with Bea and her adopted son Aaron. On Sabin’s 75th birthday, Bea agreed to marry him, but they haven’t set a date.

Aaron is a 22-year-old Black man who abused drugs during his teens. He was joined in that addiction by Mae Potter, with whom he fell madly in love. Mae has a streak of wildness that, combined with narcissism, compulsive behavior, and moments of deep depression, make her a difficult girlfriend and a challenge to her family’s high place in the county’s social hierarchy.

Mae’s grandfather, Mansfield “Mansy” Potter, is Sabin’s best friend in the county. Mae’s father, Harrison “Hardy” Potter, is the county’s prosecuting attorney. Sabin tolerates Hardy for the sake of his friendship with Hardy’s father.

Aaron is on probation because he was arrested while holding Mae’s drugs. He isn’t allowed to leave the county. Sabin becomes concerned when Aaron is late returning from a camping trip with Mae. He will be forced to report Aaron’s absence if he doesn’t come home. Although Aaron finally returns, Mae doesn’t. Nor does Aaron seem overly concerned about her disappearance.

Aaron will be charged with Mae’s murder when her decomposing body is found in her wrecked car some weeks later. It doesn’t help that he apparently flees when the body is discovered, only to be arrested when he makes a mysterious appearance at the place where Mae’s body was found. Was he there to destroy evidence, as the prosecutor contends?

A pathologist concludes that Mae died of strangulation. Against his better judgment, Sabin agrees to represent Aaron for lack of a more skilled and affordable alternative. I doubt any lawyer who has never defended a murder case would start by representing his fiancé’s adopted son, but Turow creates a background that makes the representation plausible, if not inevitable. Anyway, the story just wouldn’t be as good if Sabin didn’t defend the case.

Turow plants clues that could incriminate other suspects, including Hardy and Bea. Sabin seizes the clues to create doubt in the prosecution’s case. The reader will use them to ponder the killer’s identity — unless Mae committed suicide, a possibility that the forensic evidence suggests. But how does that theory account for the absence of a rope around her neck when it was recovered from the wrecked car? And how did a similar rope end up in Sabin’s garage?

Courtroom scenes make or break legal thrillers. Turow is the genre’s master of capturing the drama of a riveting cross-examination. He also reveals the “inside baseball” of criminal defense, the strategic choices that lawyers make minute-by-minute in response to the changing trial dynamic. Courtroom politics are central to the story, given the prosecutor’s contempt for the judge — and for the law when it gets in the way of his self-righteous belief that only he is the true arbiter of justice.

Aaron might be Turow’s most sympathetic character. He has a tough but credible backstory. He has learned that he needs to embrace truths rather than run from them. That guiding principle makes him want to testify, pitting him against Sabin’s fear that the jury will want to convict him as soon as it learns about his history of drug abuse and probation violations.

This is Turow’s best novel since Presumed Innocent. It mixes a credible mystery with a suspenseful trial that leads to surprising revelations. Sabin digs deep within himself to resolve conflicting feelings about his relationships with Bea, Mansy, and Aaron. The story reveals powerful truths about the law but doesn’t let them slow the pace of an engaging story.

RECOMMENDED

The Forger's Requiem by Bradford Morrow

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 14, 2025

The Forger’s Requiem is the third (and presumably final) book in a series that began with The Forger and continued with The Forger’s Daughter. The forger is Will Gardener. His daughter, Nicole Diehl, is also a forger, or at least she became one in The Forger’s Daughter due to the machinations of Will’s enemy, Henry Slader. The Forger’s Requiem recounts the essentials of the backstory so a reader can enjoy the final novel without reading the first two.

The rest of this review might contain a spoiler for readers who haven’t read the first two novels but plan to do so. Govern yourself accordingly.

Slader is a rival forger who, in the first novel, “cleaved off several of Will’s fingers in a mad assault that landed the man behind bars for a good long stretch.” The second novel follows Slader’s scheme to enlist Will’s cooperation in plan to sell a first edition of an Edgar Allen Poe book with the author’s forged signature. Slader uses blackmail to induce Will’s cooperation. At the novel’s end, Nicole liberates her father by smacking Slader on the head with a shovel that they then use to dig his grave.

The Forger’s Requiem begins with Slader rising from the dead. Of course, Slader isn’t dead, but was mistaken for a corpse when Will and Nicole interred him. This seems appropriate, as Will is obsessed with Poe, who “buried his characters alive with impressive regularity.”

Slader realizes that his life has “amounted to little more than a wasteland of mistakes,” but he needs money to disappear and live out his days as a hermit. He again resorts to blackmail — this time choosing Nicole as his victim — by threatening to release the blackmail material that he has been holding against Will.

Nicole wants to protect her father but is even more interested in learning whether the material is authentic. If so, her father might be something of a monster. Nicole is morally flexible about forgery but brutal murder is on another level. She ponders this dilemma while finding a girlfriend with whom she can share clever banter.

Slader needs Nicole to fabricate a series of letters written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. To get into the spirit, Nicole visits England, learns all she can about Shelley, speculates about Shelley’s life, and shares her literary insights with her new lover. Fans of Frankenstein or its author should enjoy the deep dive into Shelley’s life, just as fans of Poe might enjoy the earlier novels.

Nicole develops a measure of sympathy for Slader as they chat over tea. Their erudite conversations, like Nicole’s banter with her lover and the story’s literary asides, make the book seem very civilized. That makes a savage ending an interesting contrast, albeit one that seems unlikely and a bit forced. I nevertheless recommend the trilogy to fans of literary crime fiction. Readers who don’t have time to read them all can get the flavor of the series by reading The Forger’s Requiem.

RECOMMENDED

Downstate by Jeffery Deaver

Published by Amazon Original Stories on January 14, 2025

Jeffery Deaver has written a few novellas for the Amazon Original Stories series. The story “Dodge” in his Broken Doll series introduced Special Agent Constant Marlowe. Constant’s own series of stories began with “The Rule of Threes” and continues in “Downstate.”

Constant is a boxer. That isn’t quite enough to sustain interest in her character over the course of a novel, a problem that Deaver accommodates by featuring her in shorter works where her absent personality might be less noticeable.

Constant works for the Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations. She starts the story by being shipped downstate to Plains County, a place that has more in common with the deep South than the progressive North. Her mission is to identify and find Mr. X, take him into custody, and persuade him to testify against Tyson Barth, a mobster in the Chicago suburbs.

Mr. X specializes in finding information. How he does this is a detail Deaver doesn't bother to explain. Barth hired Mr. X to identify two witnesses who have agreed to testify against him. Barth presumably intends to kill the snitches when he learns their identities. Since Mr. X takes as much pride in keeping his secrets as he does in learning the secrets of others, his true identity is a mystery. Although he feels no guilt about laying the groundwork for murder until he meets Constant, he feels embarrassed when she guides him on a path toward reform. I felt a bit embarrassed at my attempt to swallow any of this.

Constant enlists the help of Plains County Sheriff William Dodd and of Deputy Trenton Carr. Because someone in law enforcement has likely been leaking information to Barth, the reader will know that at least one of the cops is untrustworthy.

In an episode that appears to be unrelated to the central story (so, of course, it isn’t), a young man named Felipe Vargas steals some gift cards from a convenience store. A man in the store gives chase. Constant, who is visiting the store to buy milk and cookies (how wholesome can a woman get?), chases the man to keep him from beating the teen too badly. This encounter branches into a story about sex trafficking, the default option of thriller writers who want to shock readers but can’t come up with an original idea.

In another episode, two tough guys try to intimidate Constant. As other stories in the series have demonstrated, Constant likes to resolve such problems by securing her gun before challenging the tough guys to a boxing match. After knocking them to the ground, she arrests them or decides that a good beating was punishment enough for acting like a tough guy. Her behavior is more than a little ridiculous — I can’t imagine her not facing discipline for challenging perps to fistfights — but it seems to be her signature.

Constant devises a scheme to find Mr. X, which leads her to some dirty cops, which leads her to fear that a cop is endangering Vargas, which causes her to snatch Vargas as she devises a way to turn Mr. X against Barth and save Illinois from another of those dreaded sex trafficking rings. The plot fails to convey a sense of reality but I was almost willing to suspend my disbelief until the final scenes bestow an out-of-the-blue happy ending on one of the characters. Unable to overcome my gag reflex, I downgraded a tepid but full recommendation to a limited recommendation for diehard Deaver fans and readers who love happy endings, no matter how forced they might be.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Pro Bono by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on January 14, 2025

When Charlie Warren was a teen, his mother Linda started dating Mack Stone. Perhaps put off by a name that sounds like the invention of a bottom shelf thriller writer, Charlie never got along with Mack, even after he married his mom. Then he discovered that Mack was stealing money from his mother’s accounts. Mack nearly burned down the family home as he made his escape, but Charlie miraculously put out the fire, used a borrowed car to chase down Mack, and ran him off the road where he crashed into a tree.

As Charlie is driving away from the scene of the crash, he passes an oncoming bus full of prisoners who are fighting fires. The bus stops at the crash scene and two of the prisoners — Andy Minkeagan and Alvin Copes — recover Mack’s documents from the truck, including records of his stolen investments and convenient proof of his actual identity. The prisoners see Charlie’s face as he speeds past and deduce that he caused the crash, a deduction of Sherlockian power. That coincidental encounter sets the scene for the rest of the story.

In the present, Charlie is a lawyer who specializes in recovering hidden funds, usually in the context of divorce. Vesper Ellis retains him after noticing that three years after her husband’s death, someone using his identity has been withdrawing funds from his investment accounts. Charlie is a CPA as well as a lawyer, so he quickly confirms that there is something fishy about the accounts held by two different firms.

The financial thieves who stole from Vesper are married to two sisters — May and Rose — who enjoy the lifestyles their crooked husbands provide. Thomas Perry provides no convincing reason to believe that the sisters would be murderous, yet they need to be to keep the plot in motion. The sisters have a brother named Peter who turns up from time to time without adding anything of significance to the story.

Most of the story is dedicated to Charlie’s efforts to recover Vesper’s stolen money, as well as additional sums to keep the firms’ wrongdoing confidential. For reasons that only make sense to Charlie, he does this pro bono rather than taking a third of the millions he manages to recover for Vesper. A lawyer can’t shag a current client so he isn’t motivated by sex, although Vesper clearly wants to give him a naked reward for his efforts.

The rest of the plot relates to the money stolen from Charlie’s mother. As Charlie chases the crooked husbands, he enlists the help of Andy and Alvin, who have been released from prison and plan to force Charlie to help them access his mother’s stolen funds. To foil their scheme, Charlie has to become a tough guy superhero. He just doesn’t seem the type, creating yet another plot point that I couldn’t accept.

Even less probable is Charlie’s plan to reform the criminals by putting them on his payroll with the promise that they’ll get a fair share of the money after Charlie recovers it. Now I'm all in favor of reforming criminals, but I'm not willing to employ two ex-cons after they point their guns at me. Charlie's saintly qualities are a bit much in a guy who murdered a man for swindling his mother.

Obligatory action scenes justify the novel’s marketing as a thriller, culminating in a plan by the sisters to protect their husbands by befriending Charlie’s mother and then doing away with her. Like Charlie, Linda has an improbable knack for avoiding death. A final improbability involves Charlie’s uncanny knowledge that his mother will need rescuing despite the absence of any reason to fear for her safety.

The plot of Pro Bono is mildly interesting because it focuses on financial crime rather than the typical thriller obsession with serial killers. The coincidences and strains in logic that drive the plot are the novel’s most serious flaw, but the flaw is so often repeated that it detracts from Perry’s effort to build suspense.

Perry always writes in a plodding style, making the success of his novels turn on whether he tells an intriguing story. Pro Bono is sufficiently intriguing to earn a guarded recommendation, but I won’t be putting it high on my list of 2025 thriller recommendations.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS