Continuing Stories...

In his second outing as a now un-disavowed asset for the CIA, Court Gentry, "the Gray Man," becomes involved in a plot to aid Syrian expatriates trying to topple their dangerous dictator. He helps kidnap the dictator's mistress when she is in France and get her to the rebels, but discovers she will help no one unless she is reunited with her infant son. The baby has been kept secret by both the mistress and the dictator (who, by the way, is not named Bashar al-Assad), but without him she will not cooperate, no matter what the people holding her try to do.

So Court, against his better judgment but feeling a responsibility to help people against the murderous regime ruining Syria, agrees to try to get in and sneak the baby and his nanny out of the country in Mark Greaney's 2018 Gray Man outing, Agent in Place.

Greaney built the Gray Man series with a Court who was always on the run, having been targeted by elements within his old agency who believed he could threaten their positions with his knowledge. But he brought Court back into the fold in 2016's Back Blast, working for the CIA again but also allowed to take on some of his own outside projects. The kidnapping of Bianca Medina is one of those, but Court finds that the people he's dealing with are amateurs blundering around in a world that is far too dangerous for them. That's one of the reasons he decides to help them by rescuing the baby.

Unfortunately, Agent in Place is significantly weaker than earlier Gray Man novels. It's easily twice as long as it needs to be. Court's Syrian travelogue doesn't have nearly enough importance for the space it's given, and it's founded on a clunky premise that suggests not enough time taken to make it work. Scenes set in France and later Greece that describe what's happening with Bianca while Court is in Syria are also explored in much more detail than they need to be. Greaney opens the novel with a cliffhanger scene and switches to a "One week earlier" flashback for the meat of the story that makes you wonder if he also was unsure the main plotline would actually hook a reader.

The Gray Man is his habitual never-say-die, kicking-ass-and-taking-names self, usually a few steps ahead of his opponents and always much tougher. And it's interesting to see him so purely motivated by his knight-errancy, but the indifferent execution of Agent in Place saps that interest quickly over the course of a novel that needs both shortening and focusing.

-----

The body is in a suburban den of a family who found it when they came home from dinner. It shows no signs of where the murder had taken place, and the removal of the hands and shotgun blast to the face meant Los Angeles Police Lieutenant Milo Sturgis has no clues at all about the crime. His call to his friend Alex Delaware, a psychologist who helps him puzzle out the human factors of some of his cases, is a foregone conclusion. So begins Night Moves, the 33rd Alex Delaware novel by Jonathan Kellerman.

When Alex and Milo interview the family of the upper-middle-class suburban home that now houses a murder victim, they can't find any connection between the victim -- whoever he is -- and the homeowners. But the homeowners themselves present a curious picture to the pair, with their nuclear family surface showing several cracks. They set that aside, though, as they try to find out who their victim is, even though strange things keep drawing their attention back to the cul-de-sac where the body was found.

Different Delaware novels have different styles, depending on how Kellerman writes them, and Night Moves can be grouped with the procedurals. The goal of the story is finding out first who the victim is and then who killed him. The different leads and trails are spun out through Milo and Alex interviewing witnesses, spitballing possible theories of the crime and tracking down clues.

Night Moves spends a lot of time headed down a particular blind alley with a head-scratching payoff without any real purpose. In trying to stay ahead of the reader, it spins and reverses until the actual killer and motive comes from beyond the left field foul pole. It's not that Night Moves is particularly lazy or uninspired, but it does seem to try to wring a Shocking Twist out of what could have been quite a bit better as a plain-Jane procedural and the connection is not nearly organic enough to work.