Mission Road

May 16, 2005
The past collides explosively with the present in Edgar-winner Riordan's relatively weak sixth Tres Navarre novel (after 2004's Southtown
) when Navarre's boyhood friend, reformed criminal Ralph Arguello, appears on his doorstep wearing a blood-soaked guayabera
barely one step ahead of the San Antonio police. The cops believe Arguello's wife, cold case detective Ana DeLeon, is about to name her husband as the prime suspect in the 18-year-old unsolved murder of Franklin White, son of a local organized crime boss—and, more incredibly, that Arguello shot her to slow down the investigation. Arguello convinces Navarre he's being set up, and the two of them struggle to evade a citywide manhunt and discover the real killer's identity. Riordan jump-cuts between the present and the mid-1980s to tell the story of White's murder and to provide background for the main characters, including Ana's mother Lucia, one of the city's first female cops. While the parallel narrative adds much needed depth, it dampens the pace and momentum. But the book's biggest flaw is the sitcom-like familiarity of the characters, including Navarre himself—the self-deprecating, wise-cracking PI who could only exist as a fictional trope. Agent, Gina Maccoby
.

May 1, 2005
Tres Navarre might get top billing, but Riordan's latest San Antonio crime story really stars Maia Lee, the PI's cool, compassionate girlfriend. When the wisecracking Navarre's best friend is wrongly accused of shooting his cop wife, Tres goes on the lam with him to track down the real killer. But because Maia's not a police target, she has a much freer hand to crack the case. So she employs her own considerable investigative skills to work through a cold-case murder file involving the shot officer's mother, who happened to be the SAPD's first decorated woman officer. Between brief calls to Maia, Tres and his pal flee from one dangerous situation to another as the dragnet tightens. A satisfying exploration of passion's dark powers, the story moves along at a cracking pace. And although Riordan seems to telegraph the plot payoff almost from the outset, he ends up delivering several nifty twists. What had seemed to be merely an entertaining crime novel reveals itself as a clever mystery, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)