A Mendoza Line Trio

There are two components to a baseball player's game; offense and defense. The number of players means that someone who is defensively skilled but offensively less so can still be kept on the team because other bats will make up for the low production. But below a certain line, even defensive brilliance can't keep someone on the starting lineup (pitchers excluded). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, shortstop Maria Mendoza gave that border a name, "The Mendoza Line," by being fantastic in the field but mediocre at the plate.

His batting average of .214 was generally considered about the lowest acceptable

to keep a great defensive player on the field. The three novels following are some

seriously Mendoza-ish works by their respective authors.

-----

Mystery author Thomas Perry took over the "co-author" role of Clive Cussler's Fargo adventure series in 2012. His initial outing was pretty strong, as he helped sketch a little character development into the tales of the Nick and Nora Charles-influenced archaeologists Sam and Remi Fargo. The Fargos are independently wealthy, supremely confident and even more capable than confident. In The Mayan Secrets, their decision to help stranded victims of an earthquake leads them to an incredible find -- a long-lost but incredibly well-preserved Mayan book, complete with descriptions of Mayan religions and maps showing once-great cities now buried in Central American jungles. But a vain and ruthless woman wants the Mayan book for herself and her own aggrandizement, and her connections to organized crime mean the Fargos will have to call upon some non-archaeological skill sets to make sure the discoveries the book represents are properly recorded, explored and kept in the hands of the local governments to whom they now belong. Fortunately they have just such skills, and a couple that they may have even hidden from each other.

The Fargo novels have always been lightweight, even by Cussler adventure standards, so Perry's work in The Tombs was a nice breath of substance. Unfortunately, he reverts to previous series standards with Secrets, crafting a story that isn't much more than a low-rent Republic serial full of cliffhangers and escapes strung together for not much more reason than that the Fargos can't resist poking their noses into things and they don't take failure well. The lead villain is such primarily because she wants greater fame and notoriety and believes making archaeological discoveries will be the way to get them (she apparently does not watch much television). Most thrillers require a suspension of disbelief, but a villain who is a lot more punchline than psychopathic baddie makes The Mayan Secrets some information that didn't need to be shared.

-----

Although character and story are two essential elements of noir and noir-inspired fiction, atmosphere is another key. The murky morality of the characters and their decisions exists in a murky and shadowy world, where tone of narrative and description help maintain the uncertainty for both the characters and the readers.

T. Jefferson Parker has made a career on being able to set such moods and tones, offering a string of good guys who have some tarnish in their pasts and bad guys who have more than a little human in their makeup -- and for whom the mixture makes each of them that much better or that much worse than any kind of black and white identity they might have had. Los Angeles Sheriff's Deputy Charlie Hood is one such good guy -- on loan to federal officials trying to stem the flow of guns and narcotics across the California-Mexico border, Charlie has a few obsessions of his own that sometimes bring him to act as a little less shining of a knight than his superiors might like. Over the course of several novels, Parker has been bringing Charlie closer and closer to a confrontation with Bradley Jones, a career criminal who also works for the LASD and who is the son of a woman Charlie once loved but who was herself a rather notorious bandit.

Now Bradley's wife Erin has been kidnapped by a cartel that knows about his illegal activities, and although he will use his connections to try to rescue her, he enlists Charlie to help run interference. Charlie agrees because he knows Erin knows nothing of her husband's illegal activity and is an innocent pawn in this game.

Parker switches between three narratives -- Charlie as he obeys the kidnappers' ransom instructions, Bradley as he collects allies and information, and Erin herself as she tries to maintain her resolve and sanity in the unreal world of her abductor, a rival cartel leader.

But even so, he does almost no storytelling -- rather than using mood as a tool for his narrative, Parker does almost nothing except set moods -- the madness of Erin's captor, Charlie's dogged determination, Bradley's increasing desperation. The Jaguar seems to have little point beyond setting up an increasingly supernatural finale in the next novel and doing so slowly, clumsily and unconvincingly. The earlier Charlie Hood novels were well-grounded crime thrillers, but with The Jaguar, Parker takes a bizarre turn that does nothing for either his longer series narrative or his immediate one.

-----

Like Tom Clancy's "Ryanverse," Dale Brown's military-flavored thrillers are now set in a world that is similar to ours but different in key respects because of the events of earlier novels. A limited nuclear strike by a rogue Russian general has left the United States crippled militarily and economically, and there are no shortage of enemies who want to insert themselves into the vacuum of power. Chief among them, of course, is China, whose decision to aggressively expand its territorial waters forces a confrontation between weakened U.S. forces and advanced Chinese weaponry. Retired USAF General Patrick McLanahan and some of his former colleagues have the private resources to thwart the Chinese plans, but will they be allowed to do so, and can they tip the balance before it's too late?

Brown is strictly meat-and-potatoes when it comes to his prose -- his characters vary little from each other despite age, gender and role, meaning their names aren't much more than labels to help identify who's speaking. His action and battle sequences are taut and top-notch and nearly everything else is run-of-the-mill bland, acting as filler to keep the flyin' and shootin' parts from overlapping one another. With one important exception, nearly everything at the end of Tiger's Claw is the same as it was when the book started, meaning there's been little or no point to the whole thing. And so little or no reason to read it.