Galway's Edge by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 4, 2025

Jack Taylor’s life is not quite as miserable in Galway’s Edge as it often seems to be. He takes a few beatings but his dog is left alone. He interacts with nuns but none of them are murdered. Two women break up with Taylor but he doesn’t have to kill either of them. Series fans will understand that any day without the death of a dog or nun or girlfriend counts as a good day for Taylor.

Taylor takes on his usual causes in Galway’s Edge. A vigilante group called Edge that has assisted Taylor in the past is now headed by five people, including a priest. Father Richard, special envoy to the Archdiocese of Galway, Tuam, and Athenry, asks Taylor to find the vigilante priest “and dissuade him of his activities.”

Father Richard thinks “Edge has mostly been a force for good, but lately, its members seem to have drifted off into matters personal, neglecting their purpose. The Vatican feels they are now more of a threat than a help.” Edge got on the wrong side of an Englishman named Benson when it rejected him for membership. He retaliates by doing away with Edge’s members. The church can’t have a British protestant going after Edge, so Father Richard hires Taylor to solve the problem.

Benson gets on Taylor’s wrong side by stealing a jeweled cross from a convent. Taylor enlists a thief to recover the cross and a hacker to make trouble for Benson. Taylor’s actions will doom at least one of those men. They will also doom a promising relationship with a new lover while making him unpopular with a neighbor who is shagging Benson.

Taylor visits two brothers who stole a client’s dog and introduces them to his hurly. He takes on a cop who is beating his wife. He takes on another kiddie fiddling priest. A cancer victim wants Taylor to kill him. In other words, the plot is typical of a Jack Taylor novel: seemingly random events all connect in the end.

Bruen’s unconventional writing style is all about the rhythm he creates with paragraph breaks. Bruen writes wonderful and surprising sentences. My favorite in Galway’s Edge: “I had to dial it back not to smack him in the mouth, but in my experience no good comes of beating the clergy, they keep coming back.”

Bruen grounds his stories in current events and references to pop culture. He quotes song lyrics, sentences from novels, and lines from movies that relate (more or less) to Taylor’s life. Taylor sometimes comments on the news. More often he lets the news sit — thousands of deaths caused by an earthquake in Turkey, a shortage of housing for refugees from Ukraine — to illustrate the larger tragedies that overshadow his smaller ones. There may be no character in crime fiction more tragic than Taylor, but he never loses his understanding that he is living a small life in a big world — and a good life, despite the beatings he takes, compared to earthquake victims or Ukrainian refugees.

I particularly enjoy Taylor’s discussion of the books he’s reading. “I have always found calm, solace, and comfort in books. When my mind is on fire and I’m not quelling it with booze, I rely on books,” he says. I don’t drink much these days, but I can relate to finding solace and comfort in books. I always find entertainment, if not comfort, in Bruen’s novels. Galway’s Edge isn’t as edgy as some, but it’s still a good read.

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Battle Mountain by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 25, 2025

C.J. Box is capable of writing decent thrillers when he isn’t distracted by the need to feed red meat to extremists. To be fair, Box might not be pandering to a particular audience. He might simply be writing about the kind of people he meets in Wyoming. Joe Pickett, the game warden who is the series’ protagonist, studiously avoids expressing political opinions. On the other hand, Pickett never denounces the crazy views that other characters espouse, including the conspiracy theories embraced by his best buddy, Nate Romanowski.

I’m a bigger fan of the early novels in the series, but some of the later ones, including Battle Mountain, avoid culture wars and remind readers that Box is a capable storyteller. The latest Joe Pickett novel’s downside is its focus on Romanowski rather than Pickett.

A governor who used Pickett as his errand boy before leaving office has won another term. That’s unlikely, given that the governor is a Democrat. It’s been fourteen years since a Democrat held that office in Wyoming, but this is fiction. I welcome the governor’s return and hope he’ll help the series revisit its roots.

The governor sends Pickett to the southern part of Wyoming to look for his son-in-law, who has (at the governor’s urging) taken a gig as an assistant to an elk hunting guide. The son-in-law, Mark Eisele, hasn’t checked in with his wife for a couple of days. Neither the governor nor Pickett know that Eisele and his boss stumbled upon a group of armed men who are holding them as prisoners.

The armed men intend to attack a gathering of people who call themselves Centurions. The Centurions are leading members of the military-industrial complex. They gather at a resort in Wyoming every year so they can make deals, get drunk, wear silly costumes, and bang prostitutes. The armed men who want to kill them are a collection of left-wing anarchists and right-wing disgruntled ex-military.

The grievances of the former soldiers are hard to understand. They complain that America sent them to wars they weren’t allowed to win. That sounds like Vietnam to me, but the former soldiers aren’t that old. One of them is unhappy about the way America withdrew from Afghanistan, a complaint that would be more legitimately voiced by abandoned Afghanis than American soldiers. None of their complaints seem like persuasive reasons to attack military leaders at a resort, but again, this is fiction, so I accepted the premise for the sake of being entertained by the unlikely plot.

Pickett will eventually encounter the domestic terrorists, but not before Romanowski finds them. Romanowski is a psychopath. He’s been on a revenge tour ever since his wife was killed. Earlier in the series, Romanowski killed three of the four men he blames for her death. The object of his wrath in Battle Mountain is the fourth man, Alex Soledad.

Romanowski left his daughter Kestrel with Pickett so he could run around killing people. Not ideal parenting behavior, but Pickett and his wife are responsible adults, which is more than anyone could say of Romanowski. Kestrel might have a chance at a normal life if she isn’t raised by a psychopath.

Romanowski is joined in his quest by Geronimo Jones, another disgruntled veteran who wants to make Soledad dead. In the kind of unlikely coincidence that is common in modern thrillers, Soledad is leading the domestic terrorists in their attack on the resort.

Some parts of the novel are just silly. Romanowski has acquired the power to mind meld with his falcon, allowing him to enter a trance that allows him to see terrain through the falcon’s eyes. Romanowski and Geronimo gun down anarchist “hippies” (meaning young liberals) but spare terrorists who once served in the military because they share Romanowski’s delusional belief in conspiracy theories. Ivy League universities are condemned as bastions of liberalism without acknowledging that Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts — conservatives all — graduated from Ivy League law schools. So did Scalia, for that matter. But the novel is accurate in its depiction of irrational thought that drives so many nutcases, so I can’t complain that Box populates his novels with the kind of lunatics who are drawn to sparsely populated states like Wyoming.

The plot generates some excitement on its way to a predictable ending. The story moves quickly. While the descriptions of Wyoming's mountains might be more enjoyable than the standard thriller plot, Battle Mountain is worth saving for a beach read when summer arrives.

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The Garden by Nick Newman

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 18, 2025

Global warming stories dominate the current crop of post-apocalyptic novels, perhaps because the harm that will inevitably result from climate change is obvious to all but the willfully blind. The Garden, however, is more a novel of domestic drama than one of survivors struggling with the consequences of an overheated planet.

Evelyn and Lily are sisters.  For many years, they have lived together in the kitchen of their family home. Apart from the kitchen, boards have been nailed over all the windows and doors. The sisters spend their days alone, tending a large garden and harvesting honey from beehives. Occasionally they play a game of hide-and-seek. They don’t recall how old they are, but they are feeling the effects of aging. They take direction — when to prune the trees, when to plant and harvest — from an almanac compiled by their mother. The sisters quarrel and bicker but they’ve been doing that their entire lives. They particularly argue about whether they have wasted their lives following their mother’s instructions.

The backstory reveals something of their history. At some point in the past, fierce storms required them to dig out and replant their garden. There were once several people living on the estate, apparently operating as a co-op, but they all left, perhaps at their mother’s insistence. Their mother apparently went mad before she died. Their father abandoned them, or so their mother told them. Their mother boarded up the rest of the house and forbade the sisters from entering it because it is filled with dangerous things — men’s things. Their mother had a bug up her bum about men. The sisters only knew one man (their father), and their mother viewed him as an exemplar of poor male behavior.

A wall around the estate needs repair. The sisters know nothing of the outside world because their mother told them that they shouldn’t look over the wall. “The land outside was so dry and so bright it could blind you at a glance, Mama had said.” The sisters are certain that danger lurks inside their boarded house and outside the walls of their estate. “Their mother forbade them from even thinking about exploring the countless halls and rooms that made up the rest of the house.” Nick Newman eventually supplies a plausible explanation for their demented mother’s instructions.

The sisters finally meet a male when a boy of indeterminate age makes his way over a collapsed section of the wall. The sisters debate whether to kill him (he’s emaciated and would be easy prey), but Evelyn feeds him, thinking they need an able-bodied worker now that their aging bodies are less adept at performing chores. Lily eventually takes a shine to him, leading to another round of quarrels and setting up the novel’s defining conflict.

The story is slow-moving and only sporadically interesting. It fails to build tension and the sudden arrival of tense moments is insufficient to give the story the weight Newman must have intended. The apocalyptic background is underdeveloped, I suppose because it is only a means of setting up the odd relationship between the sisters. The story contains only one surprise, but it’s a good one. Another unexpected twist in the story is less surprising but sets up a final confrontation between the boy and the sisters.

Nick Newman’s prose is stylish. I can’t say the story seemed plausible. Nor can I say that I cared much about the sisters, both of whom seem intolerable, although I suppose post-apocalyptic isolation would not be a formula for a winning personality. Still, Newman didn’t make me warm up to the sisters. The boy is a more sympathetic character but he’s more an empty vessel than a clearly defined character. In its effort to give literary heft to post-apocalyptic fiction, The Garden is a cut above the dreck that permeates the genre but it never gives the reader a reason to care about its characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Untouchable by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 25, 2025

The Joe Demarco series follows but sometimes lags behind the current political world, particularly when elections change the party that controls the House. Whether series regular John Mahoney, the Democratic leader, holds the position of Speaker depends on the result of the most recent election. Mahoney is the minority leader in Untouchable and would have been even if the novel took place after the most recent election because Republican control of the House didn’t change. Mahoney would like to be Speaker again because, like nearly all political leaders, he craves power. His fixer, series protagonist Joe DeMarco, doesn’t care which party controls the House. He’d rather be golfing than working.

Untouchable imagines a wealthy friend of politicians and celebrities who has been indicted for sex trafficking a minor. A 15-year-old girl accused Brandon Cartwright of throwing sex parties and hiring young prostitutes to hook up with guests. Cartwright is plainly based on Jeffrey Epstein, while Maxine Barkley, the woman who procures underage prostitutes for Cartwright’s parties, is the fictional analog of Ghislaine Maxwell.

The novel opens with two men, Shaw and Burkhardt, breaking into Cartwright’s home and killing him. They also shoot Cartwright's lover. The men steal every document they can find but leave valuables and the two bodies behind.

The president has a hobby of doodling during meetings, often without realizing he’s taking notes. On the back of a speech, he wrote “Cartwright a-hole!!! Pardon? No f-ing way!!! Pay? Too rich $$$. Doyle’s way? Only way.” The draft speech made its way to National Archives but it took months for the cryptic note to come to the Archivist's attention. He interpreted the note to mean that Cartwright asked the president for a pardon that the president refused. The president countered with a payoff that Cartwright refused because he didn’t need the money. From this, the archivist concluded that Cartwright was trying to blackmail the president to obtain the pardon. “Doyle’s way” is an expression used by pundits to refer to the national security advisor, who routinely ordered the assassination of terrorists and others he considered to be a threat to the country without regard to the collateral damage a missile or bomb might cause. The implication is that Doyle had Cartwright killed to protect the president.

The archivist shows the note to Mahoney but won’t let him keep a copy. Her hope is that Mahoney will take some action that will bring the president to justice. He won’t go to the press or the FBI himself because he’s breaking the law by sharing the president’s document and doing so publicly would destroy the integrity of the National Archives.

Mahoney assigns Demarco to search for evidence that the president was being blackmailed. Being the person he is, Mahoney is less interested in bringing the president to justice than in gaining leverage over him.

The story follows Demarco’s investigation. He quickly realizes that the FBI slow-walked its investigation of Cartwright’s sex trafficking and refused to investigate his death. The DC police chalked up the death to a robbery but a young, disgruntled detective tells Demarco that her boss refused to allow her to conduct a real investigation. Demarco interviews the 15-year-old (who is now a chubby adult alcoholic), tracks down Barkley (who is too frightened to confirm that Cartwright was blackmailing the president), discovers the president’s indiscretions that fueled Cartwright’s blackmail attempt, and tries to find witnesses who can confirm Cartwright’s relationship to the president.

Doyle has Shaw and Burkhardt follow Demarco. More people die at their hands as Doyle tries to puzzle out the source of Demarco’s knowledge of the blackmail attempt. Demarco enlists the help of the mysterious Emma, a former NSA official who is now a series regular. Shaw and Burkhardt will try to kill them both before the story ends. Will they succeed? Will Demarco get the goods on the untouchable president? Will Doyle get away with his crimes? The novel takes a suitably cynical view of power-mad politicians and the political appointees who enable them.

While some Demarco novels are more engaging than others, this one captivates. The story moves quickly and gains credibility by drawing on real-world events that would be difficult to believe if they weren't so well documented. Mike Lawson writes these novels in a breezy style, but the style doesn't detract from his ability to build tension as Demarco follows clues that lead to danger.

Although Demarco has a well-established personality, he gains a bit of darkness by the novel’s end. Demarco has always had conflicted feelings about his father, a contract killer for the Mafia who nevertheless lived by a moral code that prevented him from killing the innocent. The key question at the novel’s end is whether Demarco is also willing to kill someone who, in his moral judgment, is likely to escape justice and deserves to die for his sins. The answer is surprising. It also sets up the next novel in the series. As always, I look forward to reading it.

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Midnight Black by Mark Greaney

Published by ‎ Berkley on February 18, 2025

Readers who have followed the Courtland Gentry novels know that Gentry was a CIA assassin before he became an independent contractor. Since then, when the CIA isn’t trying to kill Gentry, it sometimes hires him to do a job.

At the end of the last novel, Gentry’s lover was captured by Chinese agents. Zoya Zakharova was a Russian agent before she defected and starting shagging Gentry. China barters her to Russia, where she spends some time in a Moscow prison before being transferred to an isolated woman’s labor camp in Mordovia. Also housed in that camp is Nadia Yarovaya, the wife of Natan Yarovoy, who is housed in a men’s prison a few kilometers down the road. Yarovoy is a surrogate for Alexei Navalny, a popular dissident who might threaten the Russian president’s tenure if he were to run in an election. The president is Vitaly Peskov, a surrogate of Vladimir Putin.

The CIA is confident that Zoya was executed, but Gentry believes she’s alive. Gentry intends to find a way into Russia so he can rescue Zoya. Each Gray Man novel sends Gentry on a more unlikely mission than the last, but I have to admire Mark Greaney’s ability to make them seem plausible. Or perhaps I get so caught up in the action that I just don’t care about the plot’s unlikely nature.

The novel begins with Gentry causing mayhem in Bulgaria and Romania as he tries to get smuggled into Russia. By the time he makes a plan that succeeds, Gentry has the support of his old boss, the former deputy director for operations at the CIA, Matthew Hanley. Thanks to his past involvement with Gentry, Hanley is now the deputy station chief in Columbia. The new DDO, Trey Watkins, put him there.

The coincidence of Gentry heading to a prison near the one that holds Yarovoy is too good for Watkins to pass up. Hanley persuades him to use Gentry as an asset and to enlist the military support of Ukraine in an attempt to liberate Yarovoy from one prison and his wife from the other. Much of the fighting will be done by an armed organization of Russian dissidents that is funded by an oligarch who would like to see a regime change. Watkins turns to series regular Zach Hightower (who is serving a relaxed confinement in a CIA safe house) to train a Russian assault team.

With that background, the story should almost write itself in the reader’s mind. Fortunately, Greaney did the writing instead, assuring that the reader will be treated to an escalating series of action scenes, culminating in military assaults on two prisons, pitched battles between Russian dissidents and FSB agents, chases, shootouts, explosions, daring escapes, and all the fun of a James Bond movie. Few writers can pull off such an ambitious plot, but Greaney never gives the reader time to question Gentry’s ability to survive while killing dozens of bad guys.

An interesting subplot pits the FSB, the GRU, and the SVR against each other. Another follows Zoya as she attempts to escape before realizing that she’s being played.

Greaney builds suspense through relentless action. That the reader will be confident of a favorable outcome never makes the story less exciting. The moving parts are described in such detail that the reader might feel like a participant in the final assault. Midnight Black is another fine entry in a thriller series that never disappoints. It might, in fact, be the best Gray Man novel to date.

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