Last Ragged Breath by Julia Keller, Minotaur, 384 pages, $25.99
The tragic past dies hard in former Tribune writer Julia Keller’s latest effort featuring West Virginia prosecutor Belfa “Bell” Elkins. In 1972, more than 120 people died and thousands were left homeless in the Buffalo Creek flood, a real-life disaster that resulted when heavy rains collapsed a dam unsafely built on coal slurry sediment. When he was 2, Royce Dillard saw his mother and father — who gave up his life to save him — carried away by a torrent of black waste water. Now the reclusive Dillard, who as rascally as he is has never shown signs of violence, is being held for bludgeoning a harassing developer who was after his land. Having struggled to overcome violent events in her own past, Bell has a hunch that Dillard’s surprising act sprang from a case of early trauma. Reeling from the shocking decision of town sheriff Nick, a childhood friend with whom she worked closely, to quit and become head of security at the Highway Haven convenience store chain, she’s a bit distracted. She’s also mooning over her ex-boyfriend Clay. But one of the things that sets Bell apart is her ability to use personal pain as a tool for understanding. As a thriller, “Last Ragged Breath” is a bit on the “lite” side. The connection between the historical disaster and unexceptional murder is tenuous, and nothing else in the plot is all that compelling. But Bell’s natural appeal, seen in her relationship with a dog she reluctantly takes possession of, carries the day.
Make Me by Lee Child, Delacorte, 416 pages, $28.99
As long as he has a diner to go to where a waitress can keep pouring him coffee, there’s no place Jack Reacher would rather be than in the middle of nowhere — especially when, inevitably, he’s threatened by locals telling him to stick his do-gooder’s nose in someone else’s dirty business. In “Make Me,” Lee Child’s one-of-a-kind drifter detrains at a no-horse town in the far reaches of Oklahoma City because he’s curious about its name, Mother’s Rest. His interest is aroused even more by the appearance of an attractive private eye, Michelle Chang, who is looking for a missing co-worker. Something unsavory is going on here, but it’s not until Reacher and Chang fly off to Los Angeles and Chicago to collect clues that they realize just how monstrous the secrets being kept in Nowheresville are. No one writes more compelling thrillers than Child, who is at the top of his form with “Make Me.” But he’s also an abstract stylist of the first order. Before putting his usual limb-shattering, brain-splattering hurt on opponents, Reacher sizes them up with the cold precision of a scanner; physical objects take on the heightened meaning they do in the novels of the great surrealist J.G. Ballard. I choose to believe that Reacher’s finding a great romantic partner in Chang and ending up with a bad headache are not related (particularly since she is rather deferring). We’ll learn more the next time they’re stuck in a place without cellphone coverage.
Pursuit by Steve Monroe, Open Road, 259 pages, $13.99.
When a prosecutor guarantees that with one final arrest “mob activity will cease to exist” in Chicago, as grandstanding U.S. attorney Richard Denton promises in Steve Monroe’s “Pursuit,” it’s a good idea to double lock your doors. And even that may not keep you safe, as a single mother who has just moved into a house in northwest Edgebrook learns when a golem-like Russian thug named Gorski kills her and then her 10-year-old son and newly divorced husband. It doesn’t take long for Det. Wally Greer to link these murders to those of mob king Francis Costa’s brother and a Chicago cop in Lincolnwood around the same time. But Martin Lowell, the FBI special agent who heads up the organized crime unit in the city — and who unwisely called off a key surveillance — stands in the way of Greer’s investigation. A classic Midwestern guy, Wally is more likely to turn droll than excitable. But with the feds in his face, lives at risk and his early-onset Alzheimer’s wife getting dragged into the case, the man in blue sees red. True to its title, “Pursuit” is in constant motion (the subsections are marked by time stamps: 6:17 A.M., 6:58 A.M., etc). And Monroe, author of the well-reviewed “’46 Chicago” and “’57 Chicago,” gives this tightly wound thriller a pungent local flavor with his streaming references. “You should’ve been a coach, Wally,” a colleague tells the detective. “That speech there …. You’re a real Lee Elia.”
Lloyd Sachs, a regular contributor to Printer’s Row Journal, recently completed a book about producer and songwriter T Bone Burnett.