Believe Me

A Mystery/Thriller Roundup

Little Girl Lost by Wendy Corsi Staub (William Morrow, $7.99, 400 pages)

This classic two-story thread mystery/thriller that draws from events in 1968 and 1987 makes the most of what can happen when serious life choices are made. Author Staub combines smooth writing, some shocking violence and lurking evil to keep her readers’ attention.

Well recommended.

Bleak Harbor: A Novel by Bryan Gurley (Thomas & Mercer, $24.99, 395 pages)

It’s a terrifying kidnapping of an autistic teenager at the center of this tale. The location is a small seaside resort on the Atlantic Coast where the year round families are deeply entrenched. Most of these folks accept the public personas of the neighbors they’ve come to know over the years. Guess again, danger is lurking!

Highly recommended.  A stay up all night reading page-turner.

39 Winks: A Maggie O’Malley Mystery by Kathleen Valenti (Henery Press, $31.95, 296 pages)

A third-person narrator shocks the reader on the first page, a very gory first page. A cosmetic surgeon is found at the breakfast table, face down in a bowl of Life cereal. To make matters worse, he’s gluten-free.  Quirky characters and plenty of pop culture references make the story feel connected to “the real world.”

Well recommended.

Believe Me: A Novel by J P Delaney (Ballantine Books, $27.00, 352 pages)

You guessed it, another violent prologue and this one is a flashback. The author employs a unique form of dialogue that’s as if it is taken from a theatrical script. An undercover call girl, no pun intended, works for suspicious wives who want to catch their philandering husbands. The writing is beautiful with amazing timing that creates tension, anxiety and confusion; in other words, a true thriller.

Highly recommended.

Ruta Arellano

Review copies were provided by the publishers.

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Suspicious Minds

The Adversary by Reece Hirsch (Thomas & Mercer, $14.95, 382 pages)

Attorney Chris Bruen is the central character in this, author Reece Hirsch’s second thriller. The timing of the premise couldn’t be better; cybercrimes are rampant as of this reviewer’s read. Between the Target credit card debacle over Christmas 2013 and the outing of the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden, the believability of this story is high.

Chris Bruen is an intellectual property attorney whose career path has moved him from being a federal Department of Justice prosecutor for computer crimes to private practice in San Francisco, California where he has traded public service for greater pay. His work is basically the same; although his clients are in the private sector.

The client paying for Bruen’s time and expertise this time around is BlueCloud, a giant in the operating systems universe. While in the short term a dead hacker in Amsterdam halts his search for the company’s problems, the trail that opens up provides Bruen with nearly unlimited challenges. The cast of characters expands as the plot thickens. There are constant reminders of shifting values and allegiances among the people he must move to arrive at a solution to BlueCloud’s dilemma.

Along the way, Gruen visits many locales in addition to Amsterdam, including Barcelona and Paris. Everywhere he goes doubt and suspicion are his companions. The tech talk used by the characters seems reasonable and its accuracy appears to be spot on. The shifting scale of universality of technology is a stark contrast to the scale of warfare raged among a small number of human troops that dominate the world in which Bruen labors.

Author Hirsch keeps the pace moving smartly with mounting tension and lurking evil. Although Bruen’s cancer diagnosis reveal in the early pages of the book plants a seed of doubt for the reader, it is hopefully not the last we see of him as he is an entirely agreeable character. Please keep us supplied with new stories Reece Hirsch, Esq.

Highly recommended.

Ruta Arellano

“Reece Hirsch is writing and running with the big boys.” John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author.

A review copy was provided by the author. Reece Hirsch is also the author of The Insider: A Novel.

Coming Up Next…

A review of The Adversary: A Novel by Reece Hirsch, author of The Insider.