4 new crime novels full of menace – DNyuz

If you’re going to write about seedy underbellies and weird subcultures, follow the road map that Scott Phillips laid out: Make it funny, make it crude, make it memorable. That’s what Phillips has been doing since his acclaimed 2000 debut, “The Ice Harvest.”

THE DEVIL RAISES HIS OWN (Soho Crime, 368 pp., $27.95) is his latest novel, which centers on photographer Bill Ogden, first seen in “Cottonwood,” set on the Kansas frontier in 1872.

Now, more than four decades removed from his “Cottonwood” shenanigans, he lives in Los Angeles, still able to work (and score), if more slowly. His granddaughter, Flavia, who just murdered her husband in Kansas (“I just caved in Albert’s skull,” she says), has taken on partner/successor duties in his photography studio. Both are drawn into the “blue movie” industry — milder in 1916, to be sure, but still prone to violence — where they encounter a lively, sharp cast of villains and con men, from a movie star named Magnolia Sweetspire to a mousy postal inspector named Melvin de Kamp.

Phillips always strikes a delightfully dryly comic pose, but beneath his dark humor lies a steely emotional core. “The Devil Raises His Own” is a wacky affair, but it’s also a gripping exploration of chosen families, broken homes and desperate dreams.

Hollywood junk also plays an important role in Morgan Richter’s films. THE DIVISION (Knopf, 292 pp., $28)a wild ride of a novel that never quite goes where it should. Jenny St. John has been haunting the fringes of the film industry ever since her supposed big break—the lead role in an independent film called “The Divide”—evaporated. She can only make so much money scamming people as a psychic life coach.

Then Serge Grumet, who directed the film she hoped to star in, turns up dead and his ex-wife, Genevieve, disappears. The problem is that the police think Jenny is Gena because they look remarkably alike. When shown a photo of Gena, Jenny felt “that jolt of recognition you get when you see a photo of yourself that you didn’t know existed.” As she’s drawn into her doppelganger’s world, a world filled with other strivers and schemers and—it seems—a murderer, Jenny understands that their resemblance has a biological connection, if only she can figure out what it is.

Richter, an industry veteran and pop culture critic, writes with the energy of a freshly charged battery, full of bright sparks, quick wit, and vibrant colors. Even though I didn’t believe every plot twist, I found Jenny to be devilishly fun company.

The opening line of Snowden Wright’s THE KONINGINSTAD DETECTIVE AGENCY (Morrow, 270 pp., $30) sets the tone right away: “On New Year’s Day 1985, Turnip Coogan, serving 20 years to life for first-degree murder, decided he’d have to be as dumb as a post to stay out of prison, and his mother didn’t raise a post.” Turnip, a small-time mob boss from Dixie, is eventually found dead, shortly before the small town of Meridian, Mississippi — better known as the Queen City — is overrun by people who make a living out of crime, and people who want to.

After Coogan falls from a roof, his mother hires Clementine Baldwin, owner of the Queen City Detective Agency, to find his killer. Clementine is capable and confident, her skin thickened by too many instances of everyday racism, but as the case takes unexpected and disturbing directions, she discovers the price of digging Queen City’s skeletons from their hiding places.

Wright writes sentences that beg to be quoted. He has clearly studied the pacing and syntax of hard-boiled fiction. And yet, as enjoyable as this book was, I wished it were more in tune with itself than with the rhythms of an entire genre.

Finally, in my bookselling days, over 20 years ago, I was recommended the Jamie Harrison mysteries with Jules Clement, published between 1995 and 2000, but it wasn’t until their reissue — and the publication of a fifth, THE RIVERVIEW (Counterpoint, 334 pp., $28) — to read them all in one go.

Over the course of the series, Jules goes from being a doctoral student and archaeologist on the East Coast to sheriff of Blue Deer, Mont. — the position once held by his father, who was murdered when Jules was a teenager. “Perhaps Jules chose archaeology because it was the perfect profession for confronting the enormity and inevitability of death,” Harrison writes, “but when it came to his father’s death, he wanted nothing of the past.”

As the new book opens in 1997, Jules, married with a young child, has quit his job at the sheriff’s office and is working as a PI. He’s also dabbling in archaeology, unraveling the mysteries of ancient bones—even his father’s—as he tries to make peace with Blue Deer and forge a new path. I can’t help but wonder what he’s up to in 2024, and I hope Harrison brings readers up to speed on the present soon.

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