Dark and Stormy Nights

Bill Loehfelm may have been best-known so far as a contributor to a book of reporting and one of fiction from post-Katrina New Orleans, and his debut novel Fresh Kills won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for 2008. Bloodroot uses the same Staten Island location of Kills, Loehfelm's hometown. Kevin Curran is a history instructor at a Staten Island college more or less stuck in a rut in life. His mother's developing Alzheimer's and his own growing professional burnout don't make anything easier. One day, he reunites with his brother Danny, a heroin user who had dropped out of sight several years earlier. Now clean, Danny would like to try to make amends with Kevin and their parents. But Kevin learns that "clean" doesn't necessarily mean Danny is living his life on the right side of the law, and is drawn into his brother's borderline activities, as well as several that cross that border. Looming around the caper into which Danny enlists Kevin is the abandoned Bloodroot Children's Hospital, loosely based on the Willowbrook State School closed by authorities in 1987. Bloodroot is choppy and unfocused, kind of like listening to a song you like on a car radio at the edge of a station's range, when the signal "picket fences," or drops in and out very quickly. Kevin is alternately paralyzingly wistful, stupidly macho, street-savvy or clueless, depending on what the situation calls for. Other characters yo-yo similarly and don't maintain distinct personae long enough to establish themselves, and the ending relies on a series of coincidences that thrust minor characters into suddenly major roles with little or no warning or buildup. Maybe Bloodroot suffers from a sophomore slump, but it's definitely a step down from Fresh Kills.

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Storm Prey returns John Sandford (the pen name of journalist John Camp) to the "Prey" series and the character that he's best known for, investigator Lucas Davenport. Davenport and his team begin investigating a drug theft at a Minneapolis hospital in which one of the pharmacists is killed. But it turns out that Davenport's wife Weather, a surgeon at the hospital,  may have seen the thieves as they were driving away. The thieves have an inside man at the hospital, who quickly learns that Weather did indeed see at least one of the men in the getaway car and police are now working to identify them. Davenport must track down the gang before they make a move to silence Weather, who is in the middle of a series of operations separating Siamese twins joined at the skull. Davenport is his usual tough-guy self, a walking advertisement for anger-management classes and he and his team wise-crack and sleuth their way through a series of leads to find the criminals. Meanwhile, Sandford also follows the gang's story as they try to figure out what to do about Weather -- and about each other, because they are no longer sure they can trust their own associates. That part of the story is almost more interesting, because even though the gang is deadly to several people they encounter, they're basically losers. Sandford spent many years on the police beats in St. Paul and in Miami and knows that, unlike the nefarious masterminds whose intricate plots decorate the television and movie screens, a lot of lawbreakers are none too bright. But even losers can be harmful to those who cross their paths, so Davenport can't waste any time running them down. Storm Prey is neither the best nor the worst of the Prey series, and Sandford's skill keeps things moving and doesn't bog down in clichéd situations or dialogue. "Weather" is still a really dumb name for a character, though.

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Mark of the Assassin is a kind of prequel to Daniel Silva's headliner series about Israeli spy Gabriel Allon. Allon's mentor and boss Ariel Shamron makes a brief appearance, but the protagonist of the story is Michael Osbourne, a CIA case officer drawn into the investigation of a terrorist-downed jetliner that provides at least one body dead with a familiar bullet pattern. An assassin leaving the same mark killed a woman Osbourne loved many years ago, and he wants a chance to catch the man now. At the same time, political operatives throughout Washington want to use the attack to suit their own ends, some of which wouldn't be helped if Osbourne gets his man. Osbourne is distracted by personal matters, as he and his wife are working with doctors to conceive a long-desired child and his wife wonders why other things always take the place of her and the baby they want to have. Silva's writing and characterization skills were already well-developed in this, his second novel. The story rarely, if ever, bogs down to relate details or explain things, but it doesn't need to because Silva knows how to bring a reader from point A to point B without going the long way. The story itself, which relies at one point on a kind of international cabal of shadowy figures, is weaker than the Allon stories will be when it leans on these kinds of tired conventions, but is definitely strong enough to see why Silva keeps selling books.