Tough Guys

Laird Barron made his name with primarily supernatural and horror tales, but with 2018's Blood Standard, he takes a spin into the world of hard-boiled crime fiction by introducing Isaiah Coleridge, a former mob enforcer exiled to upstate New York.

Isaiah crossed his immediate superior and it was only the intervention of his outfit's top man that kept him from being "retired" in the traditional manner. Working at a mom-and-pop horse ranch might make him wish he were dead, but instead he takes to the work and the people, beginning to build a new life. But the man he attacked and embarrassed hasn't given up the idea of vengeance, and when the ranch owners' granddaughter disappears, Isaiah's search will raise his profile enough to pinpoint his whereabouts and put him back on a target.

Standard drips tough-guy charisma, with Isaiah as a kind of typical bruiser-with-a-surprising-brain character. Barron alternates between Isaiah's violent encounters with local thugs and criminal gangs and short introspective monologues that highlight his intelligence. He handles both well, mostly not getting carried away with the self-reflection to the point it stalls the narrative. He also uses Isaiah's quick wit to highlight the same quality. The fight and action scenes hum along well, accelerating the story's pace while onstage before slowing back down once over.

Barron tries a little too hard in some places, offering a few too many threads of Isaiah's past for just one book to handle well. He also seems to want to flesh out details of the northern and northwestern crime syndicate Isaiah served more than Standard really needs. It could be unfamiliarity with a new genre or the need to establish the world in which Isaiah's going to operate, in case a series develops. Either way, the missteps don't overly weaken a strong first outing for a new tarnished knight whose search for redemption won't be easy.

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Video evidence seems clear: A small cell of Muslim terrorists commit a deadly attack with guns and explosives outside a Dallas NBA game, killing hundreds. Other evidence leads to the men as well, and tensions run high as politicians stake out tough positions on how to combat terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. President Vinnie Duto is not so sure everything is as it seems, and when he gets a tip that a South American asset has information that might uncover the inner layers of the scheme, he sends one of the few men he trusts, John Wells, to Colombia to retrieve the information. Sure, they hate each other, but both know that they share a commitment to the safety of the nation and the ability to get the job done.

Which is good, because the simple retrieval mission isn't all that simple, and Wells finds himself facing threats from a brand-new direction as shadowy players on the world stage try to take a hand influencing the upcoming U.S. presidential election in The Deceivers.

Berenson has set Wells up by now in mostly a troubleshooting mode, rather than as an active asset for the Central Intelligence Agency. It's a good move, since it allows him to pick and choose the kinds of things Wells can respond to rather than having regular overseas postings or tours of duty. It also reduces the bureaucratic infighting storylines, which is good because those wear thin quickly.

Although the idea of terrorist massacres as false flag operations from another malevolent actor helps lend The Deceivers more of a mystery than some other books in the John Wells series, the book as a whole seems to have wanted some more time for development. We spend a lot of time learning how the cell that commits the first attack is tricked into it -- which is fine as reader misdirection but still given more screen time than it needs. The foreign leader trying to manipulate events and the U.S. candiate he's trying to support are thinly veiled, if at all. The presidential candidate is so obviously a stand-in for Donald Trump -- and not a smart one -- that it pushes the story too far towards commentary instead of plot and narrative. Berenson had an interesting idea, but The Deceivers takes too many shortcuts on the way there for readers to keep up as well as they should be able to.

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In Silken Prey, Lucas Davenport faced off against Taryn Grant, a wealthy woman whose desire for power and lack of scruples propelled her to the United States Senate in spite of Lucas' best efforts. But Taryn's sights are set on higher offices, people are still getting in her way and she has just as much ruthlessness to take care of that kind of thing as ever. Plus the contacts with people who know how to "take care" in the kind of permanent ways that she prefers, in John Sandford's 28th Davenport novel, Twisted Prey.

As a United States Deputy Marshal, Lucas has resources as well, and he employs them to try to expose the ties between Taryn and the shady operatives she employs. For her part, Taryn shows ready to strike at Lucas from any angle, including his family. Making things personal, however, is probably a mistake where Lucas is concerned, because he operates according to his own limits, and those don't always stop at the edge of the criminal code.

Sandford wastes little time in slotting our familiar characters into their assigned roles, helped out in this instance by the re-appearance of an earlier villain in Taryn Grant. As in many Prey novels, the investigators know who's behind the crimes they're checking into, but they don't know what that connection looks like or have evidence to prove it. They keep turning over rocks until they find what they need to make their moves. As usual, he keeps things pretty lippy, as nearly every character displays nicely dried wit at one level or another. While it might have been interesting to see Taryn move against Lucas "the Washington way" rather than through the mercenaries she employs, Twisted Prey is as satisfactory a Sandford novel as you're going to find, and that's no faint praise.