Review_FICTION
50 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JANUARY 27, 2020
Review_FICTION
Doiron, fans of Doiron’s Mike Bowditch
series will be intrigued. (Mar.)Columbus Noir
Edited by Andrew Welsh-Huggins. Akashic,
$15.95 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-6177-
5765-5
This superior Akashic noir anthology
gathers 14 dark snapshots of Ohio’s capital,
a very dangerous place indeed, with heavy
drug use and murder touching down
everywhere, from the German Village
neighborhood to the statehouse. One
highlight is Craig McDonald’s “Curb
Appeal,” one of several invoking the
homicidal search for housing. In the editor’s
effective “Going Places,” a security man
who covers up affairs for the governor gets
pulled into a murder plot. In Mercedes
King’s memorable “An Agreeable Wife
for a Suitable Husband,” an abused wife
who grew up “on a farm in Kentucky,
slaughtering hogs” decides she’s had
enough. Another strong entry is Laura
Bickle’s “The Dead and the Quiet,” in
which a young woman tries to score drugs,
even “some Percs, not as good as Oxys, but
she was desperate at this point.” The five
tales in “Buckeye Betrayals,” the third and
final section, might lack the hard edge of
the rest of the book, but, overall, noir fans
should be well satisfied. (Mar.)In the Absence of Miracles
Michael J. Malone. Orenda (IPG, dist.), $15.95
trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-912374-79-3
In this formulaic mystery set in
Glasgow from Malone (A Suitable Lie),
John Docherty is rooting around in the
house of his elderly mother, recently moved
to a nursing home after having a stroke,
when he comes across a photo of two boys,
one of whom appears to be him. After John
shares his find with his younger brother,
Chris, they realize that he isn’t the older
boy in the picture—and that they had an
older brother whose very existence has been
a secret. Further digging yields a newspaper
clipping describing a search for 14-year-
old Thomas Docherty, who vanished while
on an errand decades earlier, when John
was a baby. The Dochertys’ mother is no
condition to provide answers, and John
predictably dismisses advice to leave the
past alone and seeks to discover Thomas’s
fate, which he suspects is connected to
several other disappearances linked to athe place to start for newcomers. (Mar.)Rinn’s Crossing
Russell Heath. Koehler, $19.95 trade paper
(350p) ISBN 978-1-63393-886-1
In this gripping novel set in Alaska
from Heath (Broken Angels), Kit Olinsky, a
lobbyist for the Rainforest Conservation
Council, gets into legal jeopardy after a
maintenance man on a logging operation
is killed by a booby-trapped generator,
apparently an act of ecoterrorism. Despite
Kit’s innocence, she’s falsely charged with
the crime in what may be payback from her
political opponents, whose agenda she has
successfully thwarted. Those foes include
a state senator who’s scheming to link
passage of a subsistence amendment, which
would enable the region’s Natives to live
off the land, with other bills that restrict
union activity and a woman’s right to an
abortion. Besides exonerating herself, Kit
must sort out a complicated love life,
which includes an ex, Rinn Vaness, who
has committed nonfatal acts of sabotage
like spiking the engine of a front-end loader
with sand. The political machinations
are as suspenseful as the murder inquiry.
Though Heath’s prose, plot, and charac-
terizations aren’t at the level of a PaulLess than a Moment:
A Posadas County Mystery
Steven F. Havill. Poisoned Pen, $15.99 trade
paper (304p) ISBN 978-1-4926-9909-5
Havill’s rambling 24th mystery set in
New Mexico’s Posadas County (after 2018’s
Lies Come Easy) provides an update on Miles
Waddel’s NightZone, his “astronomical
mesa-top development,” complete with a
planetarium, futuristic hotel, and five-
star restaurant. The project, dedicated to
ensuring a light pollution free zone, is
now drawing birdwatchers and ecotourists
from around the world. It has also
attracted the attention of real estate
entrepreneur Kyle Thompson, who has
bought a large tract of adjoining land.
The purchase has Waddel and most of the
residents of the county worried, as the
addition of new electric lights would
destroy NightZone’s raison d’être. When
Thompson’s body is found in a pool of
blood at the bottom of a cliff, Undersheriff
Estelle Reyes-Guzman suspects he was
murdered. The investigation goes down a
bunch of false trails until a sudden, violent
resolution. As usual, the main pleasure lies
in time spent visiting old friends, like
former sheriff Bill Gastner and Estelle’s
large circle of family and friends. This isn’t★ The Last Tourist
Olen Steinhauer. Minotaur, $27.99 (384p) ISBN 978-1-250-03621-6A
decade ago, the CIA’s Department of Tourism, a
corps of highly trained assassins, went defunct, but
now something similar has emerged from its ruins
in bestseller Steinhauer’s stunning fourth thriller
featuring ex-CIA operative Milo Weaver (after 2012’s An
American Spy). As chief of the Library, a stealthy espionage
operation buried within the UN’s bureaucracy, Weaver
has been attempting to serve as a reasonably honest broker
of sensitive information, but a series of increasingly
violent assaults drives him into hiding in the Western
Sahara. Milo eventually figures out that he’s being
pursued by a darkly plausible, utterly ruthless assassins
corps created by multinational corporations acting beyond the reach of any country’s
laws to lock down global dominance. No dummies survive in this twisty shadow
realm, and Weaver’s wits keep him alive as the complex, layered plot reaches a
shrewd, nuanced climax at the World Economic Forum, leaving the reader
with the hope that global elites can’t rig the rules of every game. The author
does a masterly job of evoking dingy desert cities and the rarified air of Davos,
Switzerland. Steinhauer reinforces his position at the top of the espionage genre.
125,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Co. (Mar.)