Trouble in Mind

June 1, 2016

Det. Daniel Turner investigates an unsolved 18-year-old homicide in this third outing (after Second Skin). Oren Jakobsen was eight when his father was killed and he was left for dead. Now, Oren has returned to Florida for revenge against his mother. This atmospheric Southern gothic uncovers unpleasant secrets for all involved.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020
Sam Kelson, the PI star of this thorny novel, takes the damaged-detective trope?divorced, unemployed, a boozer?to a new level. Owing to a bullet lodged in his brain, Sam cannot tell a lie. So when he meets a spiky-haired blond, he tells her she "looks like a toilet brush." His handicap goes in and out of a tale that begins with a classic gumshoe scene: a woman tries to hire him, setting off a funny tableau that begs for screen treatment. Did he ever kill anyone? Yes. How does he feel about that? Alive, which is more than I'd be "if I hadn't shot him." Later, Sam discovers the corpse of the man he's supposed to investigate, and Sam's prints are at the scene. And the woman who hired him doesn't exist. Sam untangles this in an overlong narrative perked up midway by Sam's massive colleague Rodman, deadpanning his way through menacing moments. "Sorry," he says to the fool who pulls a gun on him. "I thought you liked your teeth in your mouth." Sure to satisfy those who aren't pleased with the current decline of the hard-boiled PI novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2016
Poor Daniel Turner. He is the nominal hero of Wiley's gritty noir series set in and around Jacksonville, Florida, but he doesn't get a whole lot of screen time. Here the Jacksonville homicide detective's main job is to help set the premise: haunted by an unsolved disappearance years ago, he returns to the scene after hearing about a disturbance in the area. The focus then turns to the bad guys and the morbid, even slightly fantastical, revenge drama they are intent on playing out. Oren is a man out to destroy the man who murdered his father and married his mother. Yes, it's Hamlet in the country, but Oren is no prince. He leads a small squad of wannabe killers on a road trip from Georgia to Oren's family home, Black Hammock Island, in northern Florida. Once there, they encircle the house and begin a siege of torture and torment that evokes Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. The horrific action sometimes strains credibility, but no one will stop reading, so hypnotic is Wiley's writing. Perhaps the point here is the corrosiveness of revengeor the ability of a fine writer to make so outlandish a narrative so powerful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)