An Ace and Two Deuces

Robert B. Parker's "legacy" authors have been hit and miss so far, but it's not that complicated -- Michael Brandman's Jesse Stone novels have been pure miss and Ace Atkins' version of Spenser now has its second hit (the jury is still out on Robert Knott's Ironhorse, one of the Cole-Hitch Westerns, because I haven't read it yet).

In Wonderland, longtime Spenser friend Henry Cimoli, who runs the gym where Spenser and his companion Hawk work out, has some trouble at his condo. The people who want to buy out Henry and other condo dwellers have started to use high-pressure intimidation as a sales pitch, and Henry would like a little backup from his friend. Hawk is unavailable, so Spenser relies on Zebulon Sixkill or Z, the "apprentice" he began training in Parker's last finished Spenser manuscript. The buyout folks have some connections to newly-legalized casino gambling in Massachusetts, which means some connections to the kinds of folks Spenser is used to dealing with. Z has less experience in these circles, so he still has to learn how to handle temporary setbacks as well as people who may not be what they seem. Shady politicians will also get their look in and complicate matters.

Atkins' first Spenser outing was good and his second improves on it. I made the observation that he seems to have decided to try to write Spenser the character instead of imitating Parker, and the choice pays off with a set of characters, situations and dialogue that would sit in the top half of the Parker Spensers. Atkins' Spenser is more like the detective as Parker wrote him in the late 1970s and early 1980s, since Atkins is now the age that Parker was then and that colors his style. It's welcome and even if it isn't Parker, just like before it's still Spenser and it's better than a good three-quarters of the dead trees on the bookstore shelves.

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Once he got a handle on his own substance abuse, Dr. Lou Welcome decided he would try to help others in the same boat. One of them was Dr. Jon Meacham, who one afternoon seems to snap, killing everyone in his office before shooting himself. Welcome knows Meacham was doing well and can't understand his rampage, so he does a little investigating to try to see what happened and salvage his own work with medical personnel in recovery in Michael Palmer's medical suspense thriller Oath of Office.

But then a number of people in the Washington, D.C. suburb where Meacham lived seem to make similar inexplicably reckless choices, and Welcome finds himself with more of a mystery than he thought. Throw in a high-level White House connection and this iceberg may have secrets that some folks wouldn't hesitate to kill to keep.

Palmer writes with a smooth style and has a pretty deft hand at weaving medical details into his narrative. He creates engaging characters and relationships between them, especially Welcome and his teenage daughter Emily. But he telegraphs a lot of his endgame and derails that story with a very late-page expository memo about the science behind his villain's scheme, and more than one twist in the plot relies on Welcome either being high-octane stupid or never having read a thriller novel before. Or maybe both. Palmer also teases a relationship that has no possibility of going anywhere and just manages to take up space. Oath isn't critical, but it's hardly ready to be up and about.

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Jericho Quinn is an Air Force investigator tasked to a special operations unit used to seek out and either expose or neutralize terrorist threats that can't be addressed through normal channels. State of Emergency is his third tale.

When a Cold-War era backpack nuclear bomb goes missing and explosions kill dozens in the U.S. and Russia, intelligence points to a shadowy network led by a Latin American sociopath. Quinn and his team have to track down the nuke, the radioactive material smuggled to its intended user and see if they can thwart his plan. Much like James Bond might have to match wits with a villain out in the open, Quinn will have to do so in a grueling multi-stage motorcyle race through South America.

Cameron has no special standout flair for story or character and State more or less continues the trend. Quinn and his team have Character Traits that could have been randomly assigned from the Thriller Central Prop Department -- Quinn's a motorcycle buff, his friend Thibodaux has seven kids, and so on. He also doesn't believe there's any such thing as piling on when it comes to his villains doing Evil Deeds to indicate that they are mwuh-hah-hah eeeeevil, which leads to an overload of ugliness that permeates the rest of the book. Whatever good Cameron can muster, like a fast-paced story and a good action scene, is left smelly from the overdose of cruelty he layers on far too thick.