Rag and Bone

April 15, 2019
After almost a year on the run as a murder suspect, Jay Clifford returns home to Ashton, N.H., in Clifford’s impressive fifth crime novel featuring the unlikely investigator and former estate clearer (after 2018’s Broken Ground). When Jay visits the Ashton PD, he’s relieved to hear that the real killers of Owen Easton, a rival in the estate clearing business, have been identified, allowing him to reconnect with his ex-wife, Jenny, and their seven-year-old son, Aiden. Financially strapped and still viewed with suspicion by his neighbors, Jay accepts an offer to do odd jobs from an acquaintance with whom he’s smitten, Alison Rodgers, who used to run a rehab clinic, after he learns she’s divorced. Besides repairing a fence and other physically demanding work, Jay must figure out who is harassing Alison with such acts as leaving a coyote with its throat slit on her property. Clifford makes his lead’s complex backstory accessible for newcomers and doesn’t shy from having him engage in bad behavior, including assaulting Jenny’s new husband in front of Aiden. Steve Ulfelder’s fans will be pleased. Agent: Elizabeth Kracht, Kimberly Cameron & Assoc.

May 6, 2019
In Lyle’s ingenious third mystery featuring retired major league pitcher Jake Longly (after 2017’s A-List), Jake, who runs a restaurant in Gulf Shores, Ala., is again roped into working for his father Ray’s PI firm. An attorney has contacted Ray on behalf of Billy Wayne Baker, a convicted serial killer. Though Baker pleaded guilty to strangling seven women, he insists that he killed only five of them, and wants that assertion validated. When Jake meets Baker in prison, the murderer refuses to name the other killer, claiming that doing so would lead to accusations that Jake’s inquiries were biased. The investigator’s task is made even harder by Baker’s not even identifying which of the dead women were killed by someone else
. (To his credit, Lyle makes this complicated scenario credible.) Along with his girlfriend, Jake travels to Pine Key, Fla., the scene of three of the strangulations, where the couple pretend to be researching a documentary examining the impact of the killings on the small community. The clever plot twists will surprise even genre veterans. This entry is the best in the series so far. Agent: Kimberly Cameron, Kimberly Cameron & Assoc.

December 1, 2018
A third case takes the ever reluctant "sort of a P.I." Jake Longly and his girlfriend, Nicole Jamison, from Gulf Shores, Alabama, to a tiny Florida town on what sure looks like a fool's errand.Billy Wayne Baker, who's doing seven consecutive life sentences in the Union Correctional Institute for a two-year spree of rape and murder, insists that he's the victim of rank injustice: He only killed five of those women. Ordinarily, his protestations would fall on indifferent ears, but they've managed to intrigue a wealthy fan who's willing to pay Longly Investigations, the brainchild of Jake's father, to revisit Billy Wayne's checkered history. There are a couple of caveats that would turn away anyone but Jake, whose professed distance from his father keeps getting overridden by his willingness to work with him (A-List, 2017, etc.). Ray Longly's client wants to remain anonymous, and Billy Wayne refuses to reveal which of his two alleged victims were actually somebody else's. His averral that he doesn't want to prejudice the investigation makes no sense, but it does set up the promise of a highly original kind of mystery that, sadly, Lyle resolves before you can bleat "wrongly accused," narrowing the field of possible outlier victims with indecent haste so that Jake, Ray, and his behemoth operative, Pancake, can get down to the infinitely less interesting business of ignoring more than half the murders in order to place virtually every citizen of Pine Key, Florida, under a microscope, provoking an eighth homicide along the way, so that they can determine whodunit.If you can overlook the wildly implausible premise, medical specialist Lyle provides suitably gossipy small-town atmosphere, straightforward plotting, a likable, wisecracking hero, and, of course, solid forensics. But that's an awful lot to overlook.

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May 1, 2019

In Lyle's third "Jake Longly" story (Deep Six; A-List), Jake, former major league fastballer and now sometime PI for his father's detective firm, and girlfriend Nicole pursue a bizarre case. Convicted mass murderer Billy Wayne Baker wants his crimes reexamined, claiming he didn't kill seven women, only five, even though he confessed to all the killings. He cheerfully admits he's a murderer but doesn't want his record besmirched. Nicole and Jake head to the small Gulf Coast town of Pine Key, FL. Three killings occurred there, not one, Billy Wayne's modus operandi was to kill once, then move on. So who might have murdered the other two, and how can they get people to talk? Working for Billy Wayne won't do it. Enter Nicole's Uncle Charles, TV producer. The PIs arrive in town posing as an advance team for a proposed television documentary on the lives of the victims, not the murderer. Here Jake proves his worth: people like talking to him, and he and Nicole need them to talk. That and the 80-mile-an-hour remnant of Jake's formerly 100-mile-an-hour fastball are Jake's strengths: both of which he uses to his advantage in this loosey-goosey detective story. VERDICT This attractive PI thriller should appeal to lovers of detective fiction.--David Keymer, Cleveland

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