Readers and writers: An array of protagonists power these crime novels
We’ve got three crime/mystery novels today that show the wide range of this genre, with protagonists that include a television reporter, a psychic and a scientist, and a Fish & Wildlife agent. All recommended for good summer reading.
“On Nowhere St”: by Ron Handberg (Hawk Hill Literary, $14.95)
“No, you hold on! I may be a kid, but I’ve been on the street long enough to know about dudes like you. So leave me the hell alone, okay? Find some other little chick”. — from “On Nowhere St”
Ron Handberg spent most of his career at WCCO radio and television, so it’s not surprising the protagonist of “On Nowhere St” is a TV reporter. Gabby Gooding is the station’s star reporter who’d come from California to Minnesota, and even those who don’t much like her have to admit she’s got what it takes to dig out news.
One morning Gabby finds Jennie, a freezing street kid, in the station’s lobby. Jennie is desperate to find her missing friend Hannah. Although Gabby hesitates, she also sees a big story in how many kids are living on the streets, often because of physical, sexual or mental abuse in their homes.
Gabby becomes friends with Jennie and when a young male intern is beaten up trying to interview the street kids, it’s obvious this isn’t going to be a routine story. Especially when Jennie gets a phone call from an unidentified man who says: “You have a life. Don’t give it up.”
When Hannah’s beaten body is found they discover folks in her hometown of Delroy don’t believe the story she told Jennie: that her stepfather molested her and that’s why she tried to kill him. But Jennie and Gabby believe the dead woman.
Gabby’s investigation widens to Nebraska, where Gabby thinks Hannah’s stepfather hired someone to kill the young woman.
Handberg, who was WCCO-TV director of news and public affairs, then vice president and general manager, writes with authority about backstage activity in the newsroom and reporters’ prep for being in the spotlight. Gabby’s determination to follow every lead is reminiscent of the work done by WCCO’s I-Team, begun by Handberg and reporter/anchor Don Shelby, at a time when few local stations were doing investigative work.
Handberg also raises interesting ethical questions in his book. Should Gabby and Zach, her fiance, allow Jennie to live at their apartment when she is part of a news story? When is a reporter getting too close to her subject?
This is a police procedural with no overt violence. When Gabby wants to put herself in danger, she’s pulled back (sometimes) by Zach, a news photographer at the station. Her boss, a sort of Lou Grant-ish guy, sometimes seems to give her a lot more leeway than real-life editors would, but this is fiction.
“To Catch a Storm”: by Mindy Mejia (Atlantic Monthly Press, $28)
” ‘You said you see things at a distance. So you identify as clairvoyant?’
‘And occasionally telepathic, if I am close to someone. For extra fun.’ I flipped through the notebooks. There was something about paper. Bound paper, Ink. I focused on the contact I’d had with the girl. I felt determination, but it was hollow. A steel barrier surrounding a void. The paper had been an important object to her. It was all she had.”
When Minnesotan Mindy Mejia’s psychological thriller “Leave No Trace” was published in 2018, Publishers Weekly said Mejia “remains a writer to watch.”
PW obviously kept an eye on Mejia, now giving a starred review to her fifth novel, “To Catch a Storm,” calling it “her best work yet, (a) propulsive, intelligent page-turner.”
“To Catch a Storm” begins a new thriller series featuring two most unlikely partners — Eve Roth, a physicist who studies storms, and Jonah Kendrick, who claims to be a psychic detective.
When Eve returns from flying her $3.2 million mobile air lab she finds the police with her disabled father-in-law and learns her husband’s car has been found on fire in the middle of a rainstorm. Fire and rain? How could that be possible? Eve is also the primary suspect in her husband’s disappearance because he was suspended from the University of Iowa for inappropriate conduct.
On her doorstep comes Jonah, who tells her he can dream of the lost and has been finding them his whole life. He “sees” her husband, bound and bleeding, in a barn where a young woman was also trapped months earlier and is still missing.
Eve, grounded in hard science, thinks Jonah is a nut and tries to drive him out of her house with a baseball bat. But when their investigations collide, Eve has no choice but to believe in Jonah’s powers. As Iowa shuts down because of a storm, the partners race across the state to find a much bigger story than a missing husband.
Mejia has given us two fully formed, intriguing characters. Eve is tough, piloting her plane in the worst weather and grounded in the laws of nature, but vulnerable when it comes to her husband’s past. Jonah, who wears headphones to shut out the world, is tentative with other people because so few believe in him. His personality blooms when Eve says she believes in him.
This new series about a psychic and a physicist can go in so many directions. It will be interesting to see where Mejia takes them in future books.
The author, who is a CPA, has degrees from St. Catherine University and the University of Minnesota and an MFA from Hamline University.
Mejia will launch “To Catch a Storm” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 1, at Once Upon a Crime, 604 W. 26th St., Mpls., and 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 2, at Totally Criminal Cocktail Hour, Lowell Inn, 102 Second St. N., Stillwater, presented by Valley Bookseller. $10. For tickets go to valleybookseller.com/event. She will also sign copies at 1 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 5, at Excelsior Bay Books, Excelsior.
RELATED from 2018: Mindy Mejia’s psychological thriller is set in Boundary Waters
“Killing Monarchs”: by Cary J. Griffith (Adventure Publications, $16.95)
Sam Rivers had always felt a visceral appreciation for wild places. He still remembered seeing his first wolf, moose, bear, and the rare woodland caribou. He had been raised in Northern Minnesota, and the one thing he knew for certain was that special manifestations of flora and faun had always summoned a state of reverence that made him feel — for a few stolen moments — grace and awe. That’s just one of the things Sam Rivers, special agent with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFW), appreciated about being in the wild. — from “Killing Monarchs”
There are two meanings to “monarch” in Cary Griffith’s third thriller featuring U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service agent Sam Rivers. “Monarch” refers to the butterflies who overwinter in northern Mexico, flocking so they turn “normally deep green fir trees into orange-skirted brilliance.” It is also the name of a Mexican drug cartel seeking to open new territory in the northern United States to sell brown Mexican heroin, leading the way by providing fentanyl-laced heroin that is killing Minnesotans.
Rivers is giving a presentation about monarchs to a class at Hopkins Elementary when the janitor’s body is found in the school basement. Gray, Rivers’ 100-pound wolfdog hybrid with one blue eye and one yellow, sniffs out a box that held monarch pupa, but there was nothing in the box’s false bottom.
Nothing seemed right about this scene. The corpse has a needle in his arm, but it didn’t look as though he died of a drug overdose. And it was the wrong time of year to be shipping monarch pupa.
Soon Sam, accompanied by his slightly overweight partner Mac, and Gray, a rare canine who can sniff everything from drugs to cadavers, are on the trail of a group of men and women who served time together in a juvenile facility selling small amounts of meth. The leader, who works for the Mexican cartel, is bent on revenge after losing a lot of money. He delights in torturing his old partners before killing them. (Cue the scorpions!)
Even though Rivers’ position with Fish & Wildlife doesn’t mean much to local cops, some of whom deride his career, Sam keeps tracking the killer, the man’s Mexican female driver who doesn’t like the killings, and their enforcer thug.
This fast-paced story is made doubly interesting because of intelligent Gray’s abilities, especially when he needs to take action when guarding Sam against the bad guys. There’s also information about endangered monarchs and their long migration to Mexico.
Griffith, who grew up outdoors in eastern Iowa, holds a master’s in library science degree from the University of Minnesota. He will introduce “Killing Monarchs” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 8, at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls., in conversation with Mary Logue. Free. Go to magersandquinn.com/events.
