Book Notices | Mr. Monk is in Business by Hy Conrad / Moving Day by Jonathan Stone / The Shield by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore

Hy Conrad, Mr. Monk is in Business

Amazon   I suppose I have to resign myself to the fact that we're living in a new age. Hy Conrad's Monk books are not going to be the same as Lee Goldberg's, and I shouldn't expect them to be. So far, Conrad's stories are not as funny or as poignant as those of his predecessor--the series' main selling point, in my opinion--but they're still  good and worth reading. This time out there's a pair of mysteries--thematically related, it ultimately turns out. One of them I had mostly figured out early on, the other not at all. I'm not usually very adept at solving these things before the principals do, so I have to assume Conrad telegraphed the solution more than is customary.

Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

Amazon   A plot summary of this one would suggest that what you're getting into is an edge-of-your-seat thriller: seventy-something Stanley Peke is conned out of a lifetime of possessions in a sophisticated moving truck scam and decides to get his own back. But what the author delivers is both less thrilling and more thoughtful than you might expect. Stanley, in the tense hours he passes in the book, has a lot of time to think about his past, and he and the reader explore how being a survivor of the Holocaust has impacted his life. And that turns out to be not as straightforward as you'd expect. An interesting book.

Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore, The Shield

Amazon   Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore have brought retired OSI agent Maxine Decker back in this follow-up to The Blade. This time Maxine is pulled out of retirement to track down some pieces of extraterrestrial tech that enemies of the U.S. are attempting to weaponize. It's been a while since I read The Blade, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed this book more. I think the storyline involving alien tech was just more interesting to me than the religious fanatic who wanted to level Las Vegas in book one. Turns out that Maxine Decker inhabits the same universe as Cotten Stone, the protagonist of the authors' previous series. References to Stone in this book were a bit jarring as they pulled me out of the narrative, but readers unfamiliar with the Cotten Stone books won't notice anything odd.