ShareThis"Long Lost." By Harlan Coben. Dutton, $27.95.
Sports agents are powerful people, able to extract millions from well-heeled franchises to support their muscled clients in multimillion-dollar comfort.
But, they wield their power on BlackBerries from the backseat of a limo, not on the front lines of the war on terror, like the clumsily named Myron Bolitar.
He's the unlikely hero of Harlan Coben's action-crime series, and his James Bond exploits put Jerry McGuire to shame.
In the latest installment, Bolitar ditches his New York sports business to chase an old girlfriend in Paris. Good thing, because he's just smashed a bully's face into a bloody pulp over a basketball game, only the start of 370 pages of mayhem, and needs to leave town.
Coben's talent is one shared by adventure writers from Franklin W. Dixon to Dan Brown: the knack for ending nearly every chapter with the hero heading over a figurative cliff.
Coben's books are a little more sophisticated than "The Hardy Boys," I'll give him that. This complicated plot lurches from France to America with foreign agents, diabolical torture of our sports agent and terrorists fiddling with chemistry to produce more terrorists.
For airport reading, "Long Lost" is a winner, long on action, short on logic and crammed with adolescent double entendres blended with the kind of snappy dialogue you hear in the line for Starbucks.
-- Bob Hoover
"All the Color of Darkness." By Peter Robinson. Morrow, $25.99.
Terrorists are on the minds of many crime action writers these days. For one thing, they're more exotic than the perverts, psychopaths and addicts who usually populate the landscape.
For another, terrorism involves the big guys, government agents with their sinister threats, who can reinvigorate a series gone stale, like Robinson's 17-book trek with the grim, humorless plodder, Yorkshire Inspector Alan Banks, and his uptight compadre, Annie Cabbot. It was in need of a kick in the pants.
The book opens with Banks in London boring his latest girlfriend with his depressive alcoholism as erratic Annie investigates a hanging, then a beating death back in Yorkshire.
Gradually, it dawns on the two local cops -- between drinks -- that these murders have caught the interest of MI6, James Bond's employer. Add to the story a local theater production of "Othello" -- Shakespeare's story of manipulative jealousy leading to killing -- and the story grows in complexity.
Complex is good, right? Not when it depends largely on conjecture and happenstance rather than logic. Bad things may or may not happen, but here, they always do, bringing a sense of heavy manipulation to the plot.
Still, the terror enhancement adds a jolt of freshness to a series that was approaching its expiration date.
-- Bob Hoover
"True Detectives." By Jonathan Kellerman. Ballantine Books, $27.
Jonathan Kellerman's psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware appears in his new book, but only briefly, and his contribution to the plot is marginal.
Even what seems to be the chief mystery gives way to a second crime involving a very colorful collection of Hollywood high-life and low-life characters.
Essentially, this is the story of two estranged half-brothers who are brought together by the mysterious disappearance of a young woman.
Aaron Fox is a private detective while Moses Reed is a Los Angeles police officer. Both wind up investigating the same case of the missing person.
Aaron approaches a reluctant Moses, and eventually the two work together. A lot of the novel is taken with the psychological crosscurrents between the two men who have the same mother. In most respects, Aaron is the good brother, wronged by Moses' surly refusals to reconcile. A series of flashbacks to their childhood, however, hints that he may have suffered as well.
The flashbacks are too many and the psychology rudimentary. And there's a touching if corny subplot.
Overall, "True Detectives" is well written and absorbing up to the ending, which is only a little bit predictable.
-- Robert Croan
"A Darker Domain." By Val McDermid. Harper, $24.99.
Scotland produces almost as many detective writers as it does sheep. There's William McIlvanney, Ian Rankin and, more recently, Kate Atkinson, to name a few. Val McDermid, who has written more than 20 crime novels, also ranks high on the list.
Her latest "tartan noir" moves back and forth between the present and the devastating British coal miners' strike of 1984-85.
The new book expands on a minor character from McDermid's "The Distant Echo" -- Karen Pirie. The officer works the cold-case beat in Fife when she's approached by a woman searching for her father, who has been missing since the strike. He may be the last hope for her son, who needs a bone-marrow transplant.
This plot line intertwines with another involving the kidnapping of a young heiress and her son, also during the strike.
Much of this novel conveys a visceral sense of place, time and custom -- especially life in villages in Fife. McDermid grew up near these mining towns, and she describes them in vivid, melancholy strokes.
Most of her characters are drawn well enough to elicit sympathy or shivers. But I use the word "most" because Pirie isn't among them.
Known for her fascinating sleuths, McDermid falters here. Pirie is dogged, fearless and smart-tongued, a promising if conventional start. We learn, too, she has a weight problem, but overall leads a "solid and comfortable" life.
Good for her, but my appetite for the offbeat, off-putting, often haunted figures of the Scottish school was largely sated by other characters in the novel -- not by the cop who should have given its center more, well, weight.
-- Peter B. King
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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