The Housemaid

 

By Freida McFadden

The Housemaid, Book 1

Millie hopes her new job is also a new start for her, a young woman who has not had the easiest of lives so far. She has been hired as maid to the wealthy Winchester household which consists of Andrew, Nina and their little girl, Cece. 

Starting a new job is always a bit stressful but it's even worse when your boss is as capricious and unpredictable as Nina Winchester turns out to be. At times Nina is reasonable and understanding only to turn around and make crazy accusations against Millie. Eventually Andrew lets Millie know that Nina has been hospitalized for mental problems in the past. And that at one point she tried to drown baby Cece and kill herself with an overdose. 

As Nina becomes even more erratic and unreasonable, Nina finds comfort in Andrew's understanding and gentle arms. She never intended to fall in love with the handsome and wealthy spouse of her employer. Or he with her. In short order, loony Nina is sent packing and Millie finds herself the cherished object of Andrew's affection. 

Or so she thought. Because nothing is as it seems to be in the Winchester household. And everyone is playing a deep game, including the groundskeeper, the closed-mouthed giant from Italy, Enzo.

Overall, I didn't care for this story and I admit I skipped vast quantities of it. Turns out I don't enjoy reading about people treating other people like garbage for no reason. But I will say I greatly enjoyed the conclusion of the story where nearly every guilty party got their just desserts. 

In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

 

By James Lee Burke

The mutilated corpse of a young woman is found, stuffed into a metal barrel. Cherry LeBlanc was only nineteen when she was killed and dumped and it is detective Dave Robicheaux's job to solve her murder. And a movie star, in town to make a movie, also discovers the bones of a man while out boating. Dave, viewing the remains of the dead man, realizes he was a witness to the man's murder back in 1957, when Dave was a college boy. 

The movie star, Elrod, sometimes has mystical experiences and he shares with Dave his vision of a Confederate general and a warning the general wanted Elrod to give Dave. Of course, Dave dismisses Elrod's warnings until Elrod tells him something that no one, besides Dave himself, could possibly know. 

Before much longer, the Confederate general starts appearing to Dave too and gives him oblique advice that Dave doesn't know how to process. Dave tries to tell himself it's just his mind working through things but even his young daughter has seen the dead general though she doesn't realize he is not real.

So this Confederate stuff is woven all through the story and becomes part of Dave's struggle to bring justice to the two victims, Cherry LeBlanc and the man who was murdered back in 1957. 

The plots of a Dave Robicheaux novel are always rather tangled and hard (for me at least) to follow. But the ghost general sure added to the tangle, bringing an element of the supernatural that I didn't expect from a detective story. I really enjoyed his appearances, thought they added a lot to the story. 

Here is a review by Kirkus.

Mr. Mercedes

 

By Stephen King

Bill Hodges is a retired police detective. But he can't forget about the biggest crime he was unable to solve. A person drove a Mercedes Benz into a crowd of people gathered at a job fair, killing several. The police found the car and its owner but the woman who owned the car was not the person who committed the crime. She was pretty much hounded by the police and eventually killed herself. 

Then Bill gets a letter in the mail from someone claiming to be the killer. Instead of turning the matter over to the police, Bill starts an online correspondence with this person, hoping it will lead him to the one who got away.

This was an OK read. I sort of felt a bit sorry for the killer who had not had a happy life. Just a young person, but a lot of misfortune has left them twisted inside, full of anger at the world. 

There were parts of the story I didn't care for like the gruesome scene where the killer's mom accidentally ingests poison meant for someone else. And the death of Bill's new found love interest. That seemed unnecessarily cruel to me. 

I also felt the story was way too long. Over four hundred pages is too long. I swear writers these days all have word diarrhea. Or else editors have given up trying to rein in authors, especially successful authors like King.

For another opinion, check out this review by Publishers Weekly.

The Empty Chair

 

By Jeffery Deaver

Book 3 in the Lincoln Rhymes series.

Lincoln, who is quadraplegic, is in North Carolina for a surgical procedure he hopes will restore some of his lost function to his hands. But the local sheriff comes asking his help to find a murderer and the two young women he grabbed. 

Mary Beth McConnell is a college student studying archaeology and doing a little digging down by the river when she was taken by Garrett Hanlon, a sixteen-year-old kid with a reputation as a peeping tom and he is known for having an obsessive interest in insects. In the process of grabbing Mary Beth, Garrett killed Billy Stail, local high school boy, and is also being blamed for the death of a deputy who was injured investigating the murder site. Shortly after taking Mary Beth, Garrett grabbed another, young woman, Lydia Johansson, who had stopped by the murder site to place a sympathy bouquet of flowers.

Lincoln and his team agree to look into the matter and it turns out to be a real rat's nest of complications and betrayal and double dealing where almost no one can be trusted and everyone lies. 

I enjoyed this story a lot. But there is a trend in modern stories where no one is telling the truth and no one can be trusted and everyone is double-dealing. It's a trend I really don't like. It's really annoying to find out the good guys are actually the bad guys. Most of the good guys in this story turn out to be the bad guys, and the bad guys are the good guys. I guess the message we are being given these days is that you can't trust anyone, the age of paranoia. 

But even though I thoroughly dislike that trend, this was still a gripping and exciting story. However, I wasn't familiar with the Lincoln Rhyme character and even though I enjoyed the story, I doubt I will be reading another in this series.

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Hidden Pictures

 

By Jason Rekulak

Mallory Quinn became addicted to prescription pain relievers after being injured in a car crash. She hit rock bottom and overdosed in the back of an Uber and ended up in rehab. Now she's been clean for about a year and a half and is starting her first job in a long time as a full time babysitter for an upper middle class family living in a small, rural town. 

Caroline and Ted Maxwell and their child, Teddy, seem to be a lovely family. Their large house features a full-size swimming pool and a pool house that had been remodeled into an tiny home for the new babysitter. It will be the first time Mallory has lived alone in a long time. It will be a test of her commitment to staying off drugs. 

Of course, things are never quite as good as they appear. Teddy has been drawing pictures, pictures that become more and more skilled and more and more strange over time. In one picture, a man appears to be dragging a woman's body through the woods. In another it looks like the woman is at the bottom of a hole as the man stands above looking down. Teddy claims his invisible friend, Anya, tells him what to draw.

After listening to the local gossip, Mallory becomes convinced that Teddy is channeling the spirit of a woman who vanished back in 1948 who used to live at the house where the Maxwells now live. And the woman, Annie, was an artist who used the pool house as a studio. So Mallory begins looking into Annie's past, helped by her new friend, a local man, Adrian, because she is worried that Teddy is being damaged by Anya. And Teddy's parents just keep dismissing her concerns. But her and Adrian's investigations lead them in a totally unexpected direction. 

This was an interesting mystery/thriller/ghost story. At some point, Adrian and Mallory figure out that the spirit hanging around Teddy communicates by drawing because the spirit doesn't speak English and that Anya means mommy in her language. Which then leads them to a better understanding of the communication they received from her via a spirit board which they had first dismissed as gibberish.

I was totally not expecting the direction the story takes in last part. Frankly, I missed some clues the author gives that reveal the Maxwell family is not what they appear to be. It's always a pleasure to be surprised by the ending of a novel. For quite a while, I was beginning to think the evil doer in the story was actually Mallory, who lies to her new friend Adrian about her past. Which was a pretty good red herring. 

The novel includes Teddy's/Anya's drawings and it really adds a wonderful dimension to the story. They start out as typical little kid drawings but change into skilled artistic images that are just a pleasure to experience. Well done to the artists, Will Staehle and Doogie Horner.

Here is a review by Kirkus.

Big Trouble

 

By Dave Barry

Arthur Herk finds out his employer is trying to have him killed the night the bullet misses and takes out his new TV. It happened the same night that Matt Arnold was trying to "kill" with a water gun his classmate, Jenny, who is Arthur's step-daughter. But when Matt squirted Jenny, her mom tackled him and started beating him up because the water gun looked like a real gun.

The police are called and the bullet hole is discovered and Arthur realizes he is in Big Trouble. So he comes up with a plan that involves buying a missile from a couple of shady Russians. But the buy is interrupted by two inept robbers who mistake Arthur for a drug kingpin and the missile for a hiding place full of drugs. Actually, the missile isn't a missile and if the two FBI agents tracking it can't get possession of it, everybody in the whole metro area is also in Big Trouble.

This was a fun read, full of silliness and suspense. Of course, Dave Barry isn't going to explode Miami, he's not that kind of author. Spreading death and misery is not his thing. Even so, it was really engaging to see how he manages to rescue the hero and bring the bad guys to justice. Except for the two hired killers who botched taking out Arthur in the first place. They get to go back to New Jersey and they have no intention of every coming back to Florida in the future.

Check out the review by Publishers Weekly.

Ghost Moon

 

By Karen Robards

There is a kidnapper in southern Louisiana. He has taken several young girls who were never found again. 

After being away from her home in rural southern Louisiana for nearly a decade, Olivia has returned with her eight-year-old daughter, Sara. But her arrival is viewed by some as a bad thing and by others as a good thing. She is convinced to stay awhile and her daughter gets to know a girl about her age who is also living there, Chloe.

Olivia finds that she is developing feelings for Chloe's dad, Seth. Olivia and Seth didn't get along very well when she was a rebellious teen. But now that she has grown up a bit, she and Seth are getting along a lot better, despite the fact that Seth in engaged to be married in a few months. Added to that, Chloe, Seth's daughter, doesn't like Seth's fiancée and friction has been building up between the two. 

Meanwhile, there is the unresolved disappearances of several little girls about the same ages as Chloe and Sara. And Olivia's memory gaps relating to the time when she was a little girl and lost her mother who died  by drowning.

This was an OK story. I really didn't like the whole child murder part though. It was a gruesome frame for the story. But the author needed a traumatic event to give the child version of Olivia amnesia about the happenings of the night her mom died, I guess. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

In Odd We Trust

 

By Dean Koontz

A graphic novel

Odd Thomas is a young man with a gift. He sees ghosts. The ghosts don't talk but they do seem to communicate to Odd at times.

Odd lives in a town in California and has a job working the grill in a small restaurant. He has a steady girl friend and he likes his job and he is also trusted and liked in his community. 

But tragedy visits small towns too. And Odd is seeing the timid ghost of a small boy. The boy was home alone when he was attacked and slaughtered. But it soon turns out the boy was just killed because he was in the way of the killer's real target, the babysitter. 

For some time the babysitter, Sherry, has been stalked by a stranger who sends her messages composed of letters cut out of magazines. Who this person is, Sherry has no idea. And the killer is still stalking Sherry and clearly doesn't mind committing murder to gain access to her. The only clue to the killer's identity is locked inside the silent, shy ghost of a small, murdered boy that only Odd can perceive.

This was an OK read. Being a graphic novel, it lacks the depth you usually find in an Odd Thomas story.  I'm not really a fan of manga-style illustrations, though. I think that affected my perception of the story.

According to Wikipedia, it's a prequel to the first Odd Thomas novel and was published in 2008. 

Revelator

 

By Daryl Gregory

When Stella was ten, she was left with her grandmother who had a small farm in the hills of Tennessee. Motty, as everyone called her, was a hard woman who used brute force to discipline her granddaughter. 

It doesn't take Stella long to figure out that Motty and other members of the family have a secret they all share. And that the secret involves a small church located on Motty's property. Sneaking around, Stella discovers that there is a hidden chamber in the church that leads down into a cave. And in that cave is a strange creature that needs and takes and gives, but only to the women of Motty's and Stella's bloodlines.

The story then jumps to the about 10 or so years in the future. Stella no longer goes to the family church and attends its weird "god." She has become estranged from her family after the death of a teenage boy for which she is blamed. But when she finds out a new girl has come to stay with Motty, she feels she must intervene to protect this child, even though the girl, Sunny, seems completely enthralled by the church and its cave creature.

It took me a bit to get into this story, but once I did it really grabbed me. I didn't start out liking Stella much. But I began to understand her view point more and more as the story moved along. At first she seemed a real bitch. But she had her reasons. And her efforts to protect young Sunny were admirable if, it turns out, misguided. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

The Husbands

 

By Chandler Baker

Nora Spangler has a problem: her husband. She is a working mom and her husband, Hayden, doesn't put as much effort into helping out around the house as she would like. Basically she is tired of having to tell him what needs to be done. She wants him to pitch in without being asked or told. If there are dirty dishes in the sink, put them in the dishwasher. If laundry needs done, just do it. Pick up the toys, wipe your child's runny nose, stop at the grocery without being asked. He's a grown man, can he not see when there is spilled food on the floor? Or that the toilet paper roll is empty? Why does he need his wife to point these things out to him? It's not so much that Hayden isn't willing to help out. It's that he can't seem to figure out for himself what obviously needs to be done.

Nora also wants to move and has found a house she really likes in a subdivision called Dynasty Ranch. The homeowners association is really particular about who they want living there. The main leaders of the HOA is a group of professional women very much like Nora, all accomplished working mothers: authors, psychologists, surgeons, realtors. But unlike Nora, these women's husbands are helpful and self-motivated which puzzles and intrigues Nora. So when Nora and Hayden decide they could use some marriage counseling, one of the HOA women offers her services as a psychologist.

Not too far into the sessions with Dr. White, it becomes apparent to the reader, if not to Nora, the Dr. White is conditioning Hayden into becoming the ideal husband. When Nora finally grasps what is going on, she realizes that something deadly has been happening at Dynasty Ranch. And if she doesn't go along, it could be fatal for both her and Hayden.

This was a fun read. Nora is trying to make partner at the law firm where she works and all the stress of coping with her job and her child and her home life has her on the verge of a mental breakdown and yet she still decides this is the time to have another baby and shop for a new house and try to impress the ladies of the HOA. She just keeps piling more and more on her plate. No wonder she lies awake at night, crushed under the burden of unrelenting responsibilities. But life of the women she meets at Dynasty Ranch is everything she wants her life to be. Seeing her come to the realization that there is a steep price to pay to have that perfect life was an enjoyable journey and, I must admit, very beguiling. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

The Hostage Heart

 

By Gerald Green

Terrorists burst into an operating room and hold the patient and doctors hostage for $10,000,000. The terrorists have a couple of their people planted among the hospital staff who have been working at the hospital for several weeks which gives the terrorists an inside edge. 

Dr. Eric Lake is the heart surgeon who is forced to perform surgery on the wealthy man the terrorists have targeted for extortion. The funny thing is the patient, Tench, is already under anesthesia and remains unconscious during the whole attack. He won't know anything about it until he wakes up, if he is lucky enough to survive the surgery and the terrorists. 

The terrorist are a bunch of misfits who have decided they will reform capitalist society by arousing the downtrodden peoples of the world. They call themselves the Wretched of the Earth. Needless to say, the plan blows up in their faces when they try to escape the hospital with the ransom.

This was an OK story. Written back in the 1970s, one of the main characters, Dr. Lake, is constantly lighting up a cigarette and no one ever questions this heart doctor as to the wisdom of smoking when he knows, I assume, that smoking is damaging to the heart, among other things. So that was a bit of an off note. Was the author trying to make his novel appealing to big tobacco? 

But over all this is just another typical hostage-taking type thriller, nothing particularly special. It was apparently made into a TV movie starring Bradford Dillman as Dr. Lake in 1977 and Stephen Davies as the terrorist leader, John Trask.

I wonder if Dr. Lake was as much of a tobacco fiend in the movie as he was in the book?

The Patient

By Michael Palmer

Dr. Jessie Copeland is a neurosurgeon who is working on a robotic tool to assist in removing difficult tumors. Claude Malloche is a  terrorist with a brain tumor. He has hatched a plan to force Dr. Jessie to perform surgery on him by blackmail. Unless she does what he orders, his cohorts will release poison gas throughout the city.
Claude may be a smart, ruthless terrorist. But when it comes to brains, he has met his match in Dr. Jessie.

This was a pretty good story. One of the best things about it was Dr. Jessie. She is a true heroine and not only saves herself, she also saves the city, with a little help from a government agent, Alex Bishop, who has been trying to capture Claude for five years. Too bad he didn't have Dr. Jessie to help him back then.

Review by Publishers Weekly.

The Lion's Game

By Nelson DeMille

John Corey works on a New York team that fights against terrorism. The team has an important new case when a passenger jet arrives at the airport on autopilot with everyone on board dead. But one passenger is not among the dead, Asad Khalil, a terrorist who was being brought in to the USA by government agents. But the agents are among the dead and Khalil is missing.

Corey figures out that the plane load of dead passengers and crew are just the opening act in Khalil's revenge play. He's gunning for the bomber crews that wiped out his family in Libya. And he is also aiming for the man that authorized the bombing, the now-retired Ronald Reagan.

This was a pretty good story. However, the ending was disappointing. Spoiler alert: the terrorist gets away. For some reason, the author lets the man responsible for over three hundred deaths escape. Maybe it's a cliffhanger to lure the reader on to the next book in the series.

Review by Publishers Weekly.

Night Magic

By Karen Robards

Clara Winston writes romance novels. John McClain is a CIA agent in possession of vital national security information. His girl friend left one of Clara Winston's novels at John's place. For some strange reason, KGB agents who are after John find the novel and decide Clara is John's girl friend. (This part of the story didn't make any sense to me) So they come looking for Clara and grab her, thinking they can use her for leverage against John, once they get their hands on him, which they do. Of course, Clara and John are total strangers but the KGB thugs refuse to believe it.
Clara and John manage to escape and are on the run together. The relentless KGB are close behind, along with the police and the CIA who are now convinced John is a rogue agent and a murderer. And that Clara is involved too.
So Clara and John are being chased pretty much by everyone and find themselves escaping from the bad guys and the good guys by turns. Of course they end up naked and having sex in between escaping from their various pursuers. Clara's cat Puff is an important character in the most of the first part of the book, but gets put aside in the second half, which was too bad.

This was an OK book. Typical romance novel with the two strangers falling head over heals in love and who manage to have sex despite being constantly on the run and despite John being shot in the chest and nearly dying.

An Ice Cold Grave

By Charlaine Harris

Harper Connelly has a talent. She can locate dead bodies and tell how they died. She is helped in this by her stepbrother, Tolliver, with whom she is madly in love but won't tell him because she fears he only sees her as his sister.
They have been asked to investigate the disappearance of several teen boys in a small rural town. Paid by the wealthy grandmother of one of the missing teens, Harper soon locates the burial site of the boys, putting herself and Tolliver under suspicion by the local law enforcement.  Even though they couldn't possibly have had anything to do with the crime, the fact that Harper knows where all the graves are and exactly how they died has to be investigated. So, stuck in the small town by the demands of the police and then by bad winter weather, it isn't long until the killer seeks Harper out and tries to add her to the long list of victims.

This was a pretty good story. However, the subject matter is very gross and disgusting. So much so, that I very much doubt I will be reading another story in this series. This just went too far for my taste.

The Family Plot

By Cherie Priest

Dahlia is in charge of the salvage of an old mansion. It is a make or break situation for her father, who owns the salvage company. If it isn't successful, then the whole business is going under. So it is really important that Dahlia and her team of three men do a really good job of removing anything of value before the mansion is demolished.
Problem is, as they all soon discover, the mansion is haunted. There are four ghosts and one of them is crazy and evil. It fastens its sights on Dahlia because it identifies with her. Dahlia is recently divorced. She and her ex were friends from childhood and the collapse of their marriage came as a surprise to Dahlia who apparently never picked up on her husband's discontent.  The divorce left her feeling angry and it is her anger that has attracted the deadly lunatic ghost.
But Dahlia and the crew soldier on and strip the old mansion of all its most valuable and beautiful features, trying to cope as best they can with the uncanny occurrences plaguing them, mostly at night. But before it is all over, blood will be shed and lives nearly lost.

This was an OK story. Kind of a slow starter and the ghostly occurrences are few and far between until the last quarter of the story. Truly, just a typical ghost story, nothing very special at all and not really all that scary. But it does give one a good look at the salvage business, if that is what floats your boat. It didn't float mine.

Review from Kirkus Reviews.

Off the Grid

By C.J. Box

Nate Romanowski and his girl friend are living in a cabin on a ranch owned by a friend. They have no electricity and no telephone and are living "off the grid." This is because Nate is a wanted fugitive by the federal government. But when the girl friend has to call her gravely ill mother, Nate is back in the government's sights. And it isn't long after the girl friend goes off the visit her mother that the agents show up.
They have a deal to offer Nate. If he will do an investigation for them of a site in the back country of Wyoming, they will wipe his record clean and he can live like a normal person once again. So he agrees.
The feds want to know what is going on at an old abandoned ranch in the Red Desert of Wyoming. A gang of possible terrorists in up to something and they want Nate to take care of it. But when Nate tracks down the gang, it turns out he has more in common with the leader's plans and goals than he does with the people who sent him there.
Meanwhile, his old friend Joe Pickett, the game warden, has been given a heads up by the Governor that Nate might be headed for trouble. He sends Joe to the same area to figure out what the feds are up to as he feels they are overstepping their bounds and he doesn't like it.

This was a very interesting, exciting book as the reader roots for the good guys and hopes for the worst for the bad guys. And the terrorist plot is very scary and unsettling.

Publishers Weekly review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-399-17660-9.

The Chemist

By Stephenie Meyer

She was called Juliana until she found herself in the crosshairs of a corrupt government agency. Now she sleeps with one eye open and a pocketful of fake identities. Currently going by the alias Alex, she is a young, brilliant scientist, best at what she did for the government, but apparently someone decided she knew too much and needed to be silenced.
Alex hates her new life on the run, never trusting anyone, always looking for her assassin. So when her old boss tracks her down and promises to call off the dogs if she will do one last job for him, against her better judgment, she agrees, pressured by the desire for a normal life and by the even stronger desire to prevent a terrorist from releasing a virulent, deadly disease upon the nation.
Her old boss points Alex in the right direction and she is able to locate the terrorist. But he just doesn't look like the kind of man who would be a mass-murderer. In fact, he seems kind, gentle and basically decent. (Also very good-looking.)
So she kidnaps the man, Daniel, using her particular set of unique skills and interrogates him. But no torture she inflicts upon with her chemical potions is able to get him to confess where he has stashed the deadly disease. And he continuously denies any knowledge of anything about a disease, insisting he is a just an ordinary guy who teaches school for a living. The interrogation is interrupted by hired killer who crashes her torture session to rescue Daniel. Turns out the new guy is Daniel's black-ops twin brother Kevin whom Daniel thought was deceased. And he is highly upset that Alex is torturing his brother. In the struggle that follows, Alex's hidden defenses take Kevin (and his killer dog) down and she is able to secure him and his dog.
Like Alex, Kevin used to work for the government and then became a liability. His old boss and her old boss got together and hatched a scheme that would have the two of them efficiently eliminate each other. Poor Daniel was nothing but a pawn to lure the two of them in. But due to Alex's foresight, they both survive the encounter and put their heads together to take on the bad guys who are trying to take them down.

This was a gripping, exciting story. Alex is a very resourceful, highly competent heroine who, despite her diminutive size, comes out the victor, eventually. She usually is the one who saves the day in any deadly encounter. Together, she and Kevin are a match for anything their ex-bosses try to throw at them.  Yet, despite her deadly past, she and Daniel fall hard for each other, with brother Kevin looking on in disgusted bemusement.  So this is part thriller, part spy novel and part romance story and a really fun and engaging read.

Kirkus Reviews rated it "B for Badass": https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephenie-meyer/the-chemist/.

Tricky Business

By Dave Barry

Extravaganza of the Seas is a cruise ship whose main purpose is to deliver drugs to organized crime boss, Lou Tarrant. Its cover is that of a floating casino, taking its passengers out beyond the three mile limit and out of the jurisdiction of the government.
Wally and his band members have a steady job performing on the ship. These guys, all competent musicians, have never hit the big time, to their disappointment. Wally has recently left his wife and moved in with his mom. He feels like his life is going nowhere good.
Fay also works on the ship as a cocktail waitress. Like Wally, she is also struggling and coping with life after marriage. She too has moved in with her mother.
Bobby Kemp is a sleazy businessman who owns the ship, but in name only. He purchased the ship, thinking it was a good investment. But then mobster Lou Tarrant muscled in on Bobby, revealing the true purpose of the trips out to the three mile limit, the transfer of money and drugs. In fact Tarrant muscled in on all Bobby's questionable businesses and this has made Bobby very unhappy. So unhappy that he has come up with a plan, a plan that he will put in force on a night when the Extravaganza of the Seas sails off into a dangerous tropical storm, loaded with its usual complement of devoted gamblers, Wally and the band, Fay the cocktail waitress and two old guys who have escaped from their retirement home. A good time will not be had by all.

This was a very entertaining story, although at one point I put it down when it got a little too gruesome for me. Lots of action, lots of humor, complicated plot and a satisfying ending add up to a very enjoyable read, except for that one really nasty part.
For another review see http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-399-14924-5.

Swan Peak

By James Lee Burke

Dave and his wife and Dave's best friend Clete are staying with a friend of Dave's who owns a ranch in Montana. Dave and Clete have no intentions beyond enjoying some fishing and relaxing in the great outdoors. But of course, that is not what happens.
The neighbors are not friendly and Clete has a run in with them when he accidentally trespasses on their land. These people, the Wellstones, come from Texas oil money and are used to having their own way. So just avoid them, right?
Then two college kids turn up dead near the ranch and before they know it Dave and Clete are up to their necks in trouble. Throw in a long-dead gangster, a beautiful country singer, an escaped convict, a prison guard looking for revenge, a serial killer, PTSD and you have a complicated mess that will challenge even the finely honed skills of Dectective Dave Robicheaux and PI and ex-cop Clete Purcell.

This was an enjoyable story and a nice departure from Robicheaux's usual stomping grounds of Louisiana. The plot was rather complex and I still don't understand [Spoiler] what happened to the real Leslie Wellstone.
For another review, see https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/james-lee-burke/swan-peak/.

We in the United States are facing a troubling election this year 2016. We have two candidates, a woman who has been unfairly maligned for decades and a man who practices deception, bigotry, racism, and sexism. Burke says something in closing his story that I think applies very well to this election: "A confidence man chooses only one kind of person as his victim -- someone who, of his own volition, invites deception into his life."  Thus the candidacy of Donald Trump and the willingly-deceived who follow him.