Creepy thriller tops winter reading list
The following books have been reviewed by Jean Heller.
'A Darkness More Than Night' by Michael Connelly, Little Brown, $25.95.
Terry McCaleb, the FBI profiler from Blood Work, who was forced to retire after a heart transplant, returns in a wonderfully creepy new thriller from Michael Connelly, 'A Darkness More Than Night.'
McCaleb is approached by a friend in the Los Angeles Police Department who has a case she can't resolve. A house painter named Edward Gunn, who once got away with murder, has been found dead in his apartment. The killer bound Gunn's nude body into an impossible position where the weight of his own legs slowly strangled him. Gunn's head has a single small puncture wound, and the murder scene was watched over by a ceramic owl, which has since disappeared.
The crime scene is a bizarre reminder - almost a re-creation - of one of the dark and tortured paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, who happens to have a modern namesake, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, another of Connelly's excellent protagonists. When McCaleb learns that Bosch was the lead detective on the murder case against Gunn, that Bosch is tortured by the fact that Gunn got off, and that Bosch was possibly the last person to have seen Gunn alive, the circumstantial case against the detective is impossible to deny. The conflicts are myriad. McCaleb's wife, Graciella, wants him off the case, fearing for his health. McCaleb, once a friend of Bosch's, doesn't want to believe what the evidence tells him. The LAPD and the FBI both want McCaleb to stand down.
The premise is set up as well as anything the remarkable Connelly has ever done, and if the resolution seems a bit strained, well, that's OK too, because 'A Darkness More Than Night' is just a slam-bam story. It is also a cool title.
'Death Benefits' by Thomas Perry, Random House, $24.95.
'Death Benefits' is another of Thomas Perry's off-series thrillers, which are generally his better books. This one isn't perfect by any means, but it is high-octane.
John Walker is a very young analyst with a major San Francisco insurance company when he is asked to play sidekick to an free-lance insurance investigator named Stillman. Stillman is looking into a mammoth case of fraud, which probably involved a company employee Walker once dated. The woman has disappeared and seems to be moving around the country carefully laundering her share of the proceeds of the crime. The investigation nearly gets Walker and Stillman killed from the inception, and the action continues nonstop, from a beautiful computer whiz named Serena, who can find anybody anywhere, to a second major and deadly case of insurance fraud that uses a Florida hurricane as the backdrop to the crime. While the hurricane isn't very well rendered, it is just scenery, so it doesn't matter much.
The investigation eventually leads Stillman and Walker to an otherworldly town in New England where everyone has a dark secret, and everyone knows what it is except Walker and Stillman. The denouement in 'Death Benefits' is totally improbable but so absorbing you won't notice until you finish reading and wonder ... now wait a minute.
'Trust Fund' by Stephen Frey, Ballantine, $24.95.
In financier Stephen Frey's new financial thriller, 'Trust Fund,' we are supposed to believe that Jimmy Lee Hancock, the head of an enormous family-owned hedge fund, would gamble $2 billion of the fund's ample reserves to finance a high-level conspiracy against the resources of the Internet, as well as the military-industrial complex.
Bo, the youngest Hancock son, has built the fund into its formidable self, but he and his wife are suddenly ordered by Daddy to get out of Manhattan and off to Montana, ostensibly because Bo's drinking and potential womanizing threaten the presidential aspirations of another son, Paul. Suddenly, non-Hancocks start showing up in power at the fund where only family had reigned in the past. Bo learns that something shady is afoot and speeds back to New York as the bodies begin piling up. Even the Kennedy family was more believable than 'Trust Fund.'
Jean Heller is a Clearwater, Fla.-based free-lance writer for the Tribune-Review and the author of the mystery-thrillers, 'Handyman' and 'Maximum Impact.'
