If you enjoy small town murders and mayhem, I’ve got two summer reads that will crowd your nights and fill up your morning coffee time. These quick and easy reads glue themselves to your imagination, yet still leave room for yard work, grocery shopping, and all those impromptu social engagements that keep you busy from now through Thanksgiving. How can you resist when the plots keep you guessing and turning pages? This book is filled with starkly interesting and clearly cut characters who walk both sides of the dusty, pockmarked streets.
The first of these startlingly addictive books is The Third Victim, by Phillip Margolin, an author I’ve never had the pleasure of reading, but will again! I know you’re busy baking cookies, digging in the garden and hastily showering and getting ready to meet Fred and Gloria for lunch, so I’ll as brief as I can, and still show you how excited I am about this book!
A small town cop is driving along a lonely road at night, when he catches something startling in the headlights. A woman, bruised, bleeding, whose clothes are ripped, with a face that is clearly distraught, is in the road, waving frantically. Of course, the cop stops.
Now that Mr. Margolin has sucker punched you, prepare yourself for a host of villains, many of which might have a tendency toward rough sex, greed, or at least shady situations involving money in great quantities. Trouble is, not all the characters are THAT bad. And mixed in with the villains are some upright citizens and protectors of the law, including cops and lawyers. At least I guess so. To tell the truth, which I sometimes do, I couldn’t figure out who-done-it. Guess that’s why I read this 300+ page book in three sittings, and apologized to Fred and Gloria for thinking they meant dinner, not lunch! The Third Victim, by Phillip Margolin.
My next recommendation was like finding a treasure without a map. Stranger in Paradise, is a Jesse Stone novel by Robert Parker. I thought I’d read all of his Jesse Stone novels. I know I’ve read most of them, but this one popped up, starling me like a squirrel about to lose his nuts. See, I’ve even stooped to reading, or I should say, tried to read some follow-on Jesse Stone novels by those who mistakenly thought they could just make friends with the ghost of Robert Parker and write on. Doesn’t happen, boys and girls. Genuine is genuine. A Zircon isn’t a diamond just because it glitters.
So, admittedly I was beside myself with the joy only a Jesse Stone fan can know, when I found an original I hadn’t read. Let the coffee get cold! Who cares? When I saw it was Fred is calling, I didn’t answer. I had to read this book! Maybe, if it had been Gloria…
So what is the attraction? I’m talking about the book again. Jesse Stone, for the benefit of the three people who haven’t seen the made for TV movies, starring Tom Selleck, is a small town sheriff with a couple of personal problems, a bottle of Scotch, and an ex-wife he’s still in love with. Living in the small Massachusetts town of Paradise, he’s a man bound to his own set of rules for right and wrong. Sometimes they match the law and sometimes they don’t, but are always the right thing to do.
If you grew up as a teenager in a small town in the 50s or 60s, you know what I mean. The sheriff, or a deputy didn’t toss you in jail for speeding through a red light, he (there were no shes back then) would stop you, and give you the chat. “What the heck did you think you were doing? Do it again and I’m going to tell your daddy!” We can certainly have along discussion about what things were like back then, compared to now, but let’s keep talking about the book.
The people in Paradise are mostly good and the word ‘bad’ often carries the connotation of nothing more than snobby or slightly rude. But, all that changes when a man called Crow, a handsome killer, comes into town, dragging some big city problems with him. Added to the plot is a delinquent teenage girl, as far away from nice as mud is from pudding, and her daddy is a big time mobster from Miami. Yes, it’s an omelet that Jesse and his deputies, Suit and Molly, have to unscramble before someone gets hurt. Oh, it gets worse, and as usual it involves money and greed, mixed in with right and wrong and the law and Jesse’s code of ethics.
What kept me reading? The extraordinarily compelling complex and complicated characters and a plot cut with a razor that keeps you guessing who’s going to bleed.
These are not books of great intellectual interest, the kind that appear on every high school and college reading list. No need for Cliff Notes to get you through the course and no amphetamines to get you past the first paragraph. Nope. None of that. These two are simply entertaining, exciting, with fast moving plots and characters that stick like Gorilla Tape to your rapidly fluttering fingers.
The Third Victim
&
Stranger in Paradise
These two will turn anyone into a speed-reader!
No comments:
Post a Comment