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The idea of a James Bond adventure written by Donald Westlake stirs the imagination, and the veteran author was approached about the idea after Pierce Brosnan took on the role with Goldeneye. Eon Productions didn't buy the treatment, so Westlake reworked it some and filed it away. The good folk at Hard Case Crime publishers printed it earlier this year as Forever and a Death, but without the presence of any Bond-like character.

Engineer George Manville suspects something about his employer, multi-billionaire Richard Curtis, because Curtis seems to have it in mind to "remove" an environmentalist who survived the test of a brand new way to demolish and clear land for construction. Manville and the survivor -- student Kim Baldur -- find themselves on the run from Curtis and his minions when it becomes clear to them that the magnate has a more lethal demonstration of his technique in mind, in concert with the theft of billions of dollars from Hong Kong banks.

It's hard to imagine that Westlake, famed for his direct and unadorned storytelling style, would have felt that Forever was ready for publication. The protagonists set up by the first half of the book largely disappear in much of the second half, and it clearly demonstrates the need to be trimmed of several repetitive scenes and a latter half that wanders away from the people we've spent a couple hundred pages getting to know.

Forever features an interesting villain, a fascinating villainous plot to gain power and more than one great gem of a Westlake scene. But for whatever reason, the author did not revisit it before his death to pare it down and perhaps retool several spots for better narrative flow and to make more sense.  This is one case in which the unsolved mystery of what a Westlake-written Bond would be like is far better than the solution that his estate and Hard Case Crime have offered.

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After a detour to the Jack Reacher of the past in Night School, Lee Child brings us back to the present-day travels of the drifting knight-errant in The Midnight Line, days after he and Michelle Chang broke up a seedy internet-based murder ring in Make Me. Reacher has continued to drift around as he wishes, and Chang has decided she can't do that, so she has gone home to Seattle. Reacher hops a bus and at one of the courtesy stops, he spies a woman's West Point class ring in a pawn shop window. A Point graduate himself,  Reacher wonders what would bring someone to part with something that signified years of hard work and achievement. So he starts to ask about it, first with the pawn shop owner and then with the person who brought it to him, and so on. Although most of the people he speaks to are reluctant to answer him and seem to have more to hide than just a simple transaction, Reacher is a persistent questioner. The trail takes him to Wyoming and people with other kinds of secrets to hide as well.

Line is surprisingly intimate for a Reacher novel, with a small cast and a lot more focus on other people involved the story. While there is a villain whose greed starts the whole mess into which Reacher pokes his nose, much less time is spent on the bad guys of the story and some of the ones who fill that role turn out to be less bad than unfortunate. Reacher's trademark fights are sprinkled much more lightly through the story and he more frequently uses the threat of violence to get what he wants. These factors make it a much more introspective and thoughtful outing than we're used to with the big fella, offering a different flavor to what has more often than not been a formula in some of his books.

Child still drops in a couple too many descriptive digressions in which Reacher or someone else analyzes something for several pages, and his writing of Reacher's thought processes in setting his travel directions, in both the front and back ends of the novel, feel artificial and mannered. Midnight Line is a really good Reacher novel and a good candidate for the series' top two or three, but a little fine tuning along those lines and others could have made it something really special.

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Michael Connelly has given Harry Bosch a long history of chasing criminals in the Los Angeles area, first with the LA police department and then, more recently, as a part-timer with the San Fernando PD. In Two Kinds of Truth, Connelly brings the two strands together, as new developments in an old case threaten the conviction of a murdering rapist and a double homicide in San Fernando points to a much larger and more dangerous scheme.

Back in his earliest days as a detective -- before we met him in The Black Echo -- Harry and his partner arrested Preston Borders in a rape/homicide case. Borders was convicted but a modern DNA test of the evidence suggests another man committed the crime. Harry doesn't believe this, so he decides to investigate the matter himself despite official disapproval from his old department. In the meantime, a double murder at a storefront pharmacy in San Fernando shows signs of connections to illegal drug rings and organized crime. Harry has to decide how much risk he will take in order to unravel those connections and hold the top crooks responsible.

The parallel tracks of the two cases make for an interesting contrast, as Harry remembers his days as a new detective, learning under a veteran partner. In the current case, he is the seasoned veteran teaching young detectives how to work the crime and draws from the lessons he has learned. A short time undercover on this case offers a new experience for him, opening a window into the lives of people he has frequently dismissed. There are great supporting player appearances by his half-brother, lawyer Mickey Haller and Haller's lead investigator, Cisco, and also Harry's former partner Jerry Edgar.

Although the story is good and offers some good development for Harry as a character, it's weighed down by uncharacteristically second-rate writing by Connelly. In several places, he commits the cardinal sin of telling us something about a character or event instead of showing us or putting the information in the mouth of someone in the book instead of his authorial voice. There's a third minor mystery that feels far more like a padded epilogue than part of our story; it needed some much stronger connections to fill any useful role. Truth is not a bad book -- Connelly may not be capable of anything lower than a "meh" -- but it works under the weight that some more effort could have made it much better than it turned out to be.