Monday, November 16, 2015

Best Police Mystery Book List

Do you like a book with suspense and thrill? Do you like it when it is from the police view point? Check out this book list...


1) "The Black Echo" by Michael Connelly

 Big, brooding debut police thriller by Los Angeles Times crime-reporter Connelly, whose labyrinthine tale of a cop tracking vicious bank-robbers sparks and smolders but never quite catches fire. Connelly shows off his deep knowledge of cop procedure right away, expertly detailing the painstaking examination by LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch of the death-scene of sometime junkie Billy Meadows, whom Bosch knew as a fellow "tunnel rat" in Vietnam and who's now o.d.'d in an abandoned water tunnel. Pushing Meadows's death as murder while his colleagues see it as accidental, Bosch, already a black sheep for his vigilante-like ways, further alienates police brass and is soon shadowed by two nastily clownish Internal Affairs cops wherever he goes--even to FBI headquarters, which Bosch storms after he learns that the Bureau had investigated him for a tunnel-engineered bank robbery that Meadows is implicated in. Assigned to work with beautiful, blond FBI agent Eleanor Wish, who soon shares his bed in an edgy alliance, Bosch comes to suspect that the robbers killed Meadows because the vet pawned some of the loot, and that their subsequent killing of the only witness to the Meadows slaying points to a turned cop. But who? Before Bosch can find out, a trace on the bank-robbery victims points him toward a fortune in smuggled diamonds and the likelihood of a second heist--leading to the blundering death of the IAD cops, the unveiling of one bad cop, an anticipated but too-brief climax in the L.A. sewer tunnels, and, in a twisty anticlimax, the revelation of a second rotten law officer. Swift and sure, with sharp characterizations, but at heart really a tightly wrapped package of cop-thriller cliches, from the hero's Dirty Harry persona to the venal brass, the mad-dog IAD cops, and the not-so-surprising villains. Still, Connelly knows his turf and perhaps he'll map it more freshly next time out.








2) "The Bone Collector" by Jeffery Deaver

A quadriplegic criminalist hunts the most elusive quarry of his career: a serial killer who leaves clues at each crime scene allowing the cops to head off the next murder--if they can decode them in time. With nothing left to live for since an accident ended his forensic career and his marriage, bearish Lincoln Rhyme has made an appointment with Dr. William Berger, of the suicide-friendly Lethe Society. But Rhyme's old NYPD colleague, Det. Lon Sellitto, just happens to breeze in, uninvited and unwelcome, minutes before Berger does, and talks Rhyme out of suicide and into spearheading the hunt for Unsub 823, the demonic cabbie whose fares often face nightmarish scenarios of torture and death. Though he shows no mercy to his victims, Unsub 823 obligingly salts each crime scene with cryptic clues to his next, clues that whet Rhyme's jaundiced appetite and give him the hope of saving currency trader T.J. Colfax, German emigrÇe Monelle Gerger, elderly William Everett, and widowed Carole Ganz and her daughter. It's not long before Rhyme's blood is pumping again, and he's persuaded beautiful Amelia Sachs, the Major Crimes officer who preserved the first crime scene long enough to gather a few precious scraps of evidence, to put off her medical transfer to Public Affairs and become his eyes, ears, and nose at each gory scene. Working feverishly against a series of impossible deadlines, Sachs and Rhyme piece together a profile of the perp's appearance, his lodgings, his car, his habits, and the idÇe fixe that drives him: He believes he's the Bone Collector, a demented ghoul who preyed on New York's dead and near-dead at the turn of the century, determined to free his victims from this mortal coil by stripping them to ageless bone. Deaver (A Maiden's Grave, 1995, etc.) marries forensic work that would do Patricia Cornwell proud to a turbocharged plot that puts Benzedrine to shame.







3) "Knots and Crosses" by Ian Rankin

A compelling first novel sent in Edinburgh, where a series of killings of young girls has the city in a panic. Ex-army police detective John Rebus is in the thick of the investigation. Scarred by his elite-corps army training, a nervous breakdown and a divorce, father of teen-age Samantha, Rebus is a dogged but not too sharp investigator. The anonymous letters he starts to receive after the first murder are shrugged off as the work of a crank; he never questions the affluence of his rarely seen hypnotist brother Michael; and he never figures out the one factor common to all the victims. In the meantime, his girlfriend Gill Templet, a press liason policewoman, and hard-bitten, hard-drinking reporter Jim Stevens are smarter. It slowly becomes clear that the killer's focus is Rebus himself, who must finally confront an implacable enemy and hie own long-repressed traumatic memories. Solidly drawn characters, keen psychological insights and an intriguing, well-knit plot--along with a rather florid but individual writing style--make Rankin a newcomer to watch.






4) "Faceless Killers" by Henning Mankell

Who would so savagely kill an elderly farming couple in the Swedish town of Lenarp--the husband gruesomely tortured, the wife slowly strangled with a noose tied in an unusual knot--and then step out to the couple's barn to feed their horse? Inspector Kurt Wallander, battling midlife crisis--his estranged daughter has rarely called him since she lit out from home; his estranged wife greets him by telling him how much weight he's put on--would love to have the leisure to speculate about the identity of the killers, described only by the dying Maria Lîvgren as "foreign." As acting chief of the Ystad police, though, he's got more urgent business on his hands: a series of xenophobic phone calls ("You now have three days to make up for shielding foreign criminals. . . . Or else we'll take over") from somebody who's willing to set fire to a refugee camp barracks and gun down a visiting Somali to show how serious he is. Surprised by the news that Johannes Lîvgren was not exactly the colorless chap he appeared, Wallander despairs of finding enough time or energy to kindle a romance with deputy D.A. Anette Brolin, who's married to boot. But how long will it take his plunge into ethnic hatred to give him the answers he needs? Though "the last thing Kurt Wallander felt like was a laughing policeman," fans of Maj Sjîwall and Per Wahlîî will feel right at home in this first (1991) of Mankell's five Wallander novels, right down to the laconic paragraphing. Readers who think of Sweden as snow-white are in for a surprise.





5) "The Black Dahlia" by James Ellroy

Tim real-life unsolved "Black Dahlia" case (L.A., 1947), source material for several novels and films, get another go. round from hard boiler Ellroy (Blood on the Moon, Because the Night), in a long, earnest, overwrought novel that concentrates on the dark psychosexual hangups of two L.A.P.D. cops. The narrator is "Bucky" Bleichert, who, together with partner Lee Blanchard (his one-time pro-boxing rival), is assigned to work with Homicide when the mutilated body of trampy, pathetic, would-be actress Betty Short is found in a vacant L.A. lot. Blanchard is instantly obsessed with the Dahlia (as the papers soon dub Betty), because of guilt over his kid sister's bygone murder. Bucky becomes obsessed, too, especially once he starts sleeping with Dahlia lookalike Madeleine, a decadent rich girl who once had a lesbian fling with the Dahlia. Blanchard goes berserk, disappears, and later turns up dead in Mexico. Despite much triangular sturm, Bucky marries Blanchard's gift. And eventually, after the primary clues in the Dahlia case run dry (boyfriends, porno flicks), Bucky starts uncovering one nasty secret after another--corruption, perversion, coverups, family skeletons--until he finds the place where the Dahlia was tortured and butchered. . .and confronts the killer. Ellroy writes with undeniable energy, striving for down and-dirty textures and a raw emotional edge. But while some individual vignettes deliver the intended impact, the overall effect is unconvincing and shrill--with too many psychos per square chapter and too many lapses into stagily lurid narration. (". . .My voice came back in racking fits, 'I'll get him for you, he won't hurt you anymore, I'll make it up to you, oh Betty Jesus fuck I will.'")









6) "The Blessing Way" by Tony Hillerman

Bergen McKee, a professor and "monster slayer" of Navajo witches and wolves, finds he has more real ores to contend with in the deaths of "no good for anything" Luis Horseman and of a colleague. . . . Authentic anthropological details; the self-effacing courage of McKee; and a particularly exciting entrapment in the canyons of this no white man's land make this an unqualified success.





7) "The Cold Dish" by Craig Johnson

Revenge killings disrupt the serenity of a small western community and greatly complicate life for a sheriff nearing retirement.

Kent Haruf’s readers will feel immediately comfortable in newcomer Johnson’s Absaroka County. Everybody in the beautiful, isolated Wyoming area knows each other. Conversations are spare and, if not always irony-free, certainly lacking coastal self-pity, analysis, or politics. And the inhabitants are smart enough to handle their own business, even when that business is murder and the clues are few. Responsibility for solutions rests in the broad hands of Sheriff Walt Longmire, Vietnam Marine veteran and widower, overweight, and excessively fond of beer. The victims are two of the four local high-school boys who got off way too lightly for the rape of and assault on Melissa Little Bird, a mentally disabled Cheyenne girl. Longmire realizes after the first murder that if his plan to name his successor is to succeed—tricky enough even before the murders, since his fondest wish is to pass the badge to Deputy Victoria Moretti, a foul-mouthed but extremely capable Philadelphian—he’s going to have to solve things before the state police muscle in. Considerable assistance with the police work comes to Walt from Cheyenne publican Henry Standing Bear, the sheriff’s best friend and also a Vietnam vet. Henry is Walt’s Virgil as the sheriff steps onto the local reservation. Melissa had many friends and a large family, and feelings ran high after the rape. Bullets at the crime scene seem to have come from an elegant 19th-century rifle like the one owned by Melissa’s father. Moving carefully (the pace is exceptionally deliberate), Walt reconstructs crime scenes and picks through lab analyses, but the sparse clues are slow to yield their truths. Indian spirits step in to help, but they don’t solve the puzzle. Walt does.

The police work comes slow and the solution comes out of nowhere, but Johnson’s gorgeous Wyoming and agreeable characters make the trip very, very pleasant.






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