We first meet Norwood Pratt, a red-haired twenty-three-year-old from Ralph, Texas, as he’s being discharged from the Marines on account of family hardship. His father has just passed away, leaving his sister Vernell with no one to care for her. Vernell “was a heavy, sleepy girl with bad posture. She was old enough to look after herself and quite large enough, but in many ways she was a great big baby.”

Norwood leaves his California Marine base in such a rush, he forgets to collect the seventy dollars owed him by his friend, Joe William Reese.

A number of readers have commented on Goodreads and Amazon that my detective Freddy Ferguson reminds them of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. I had never read Parker, so I picked up a copy of The Widening Gyre at the library book sale and gave it a go.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Meade Alexander, a US congressman who is running for Senate, is being blackmailed by his opponent. Alexander is a devout Christian wooing deeply conservative voters. His wife, Ronni, who is a devoted wife in public and a heavy drinker in private, has had a tryst with a young college boy and someone recorded the whole affair in a graphic X-rated video. Alexander hires Spenser to ensure the tape never goes public.

David W. Maurer’s The Big Con provides a fascinating look into the carefully orchestrated scams pulled off by early 20th century con men. The “big cons” were truly elaborate, involving a large cast of con men, carefully scripted stories, props, role-playing and more.

A typical big con started with a roper identifying a mark. The roper was a smooth-talking, respectable looking traveler who kept up with the news and could converse fluently on any number of topics. The mark was the intended victim, usually traveling by train or ship.

This is the first Elmore Leonard book I’ve read that just didn’t do it for me. One of the great strengths of crime fiction is that its characters’ motivations are always clear. The criminals and the people pursuing them are driven by the most fundamental human desires: greed, lust, ambition, resentment, revenge, justice.

Crime fiction can be compelling because these desires drive us all, to some extent, and because characters who personify the extremes of these desires act out in flesh and blood the battles that most of us struggle with internally. They’re like the old Greek gods, each personifying some aspect of the psyche, and each in conflict with the others.

Elmore Leonard’s Glitz opens with Miami Beach detective Vincent Mora getting shot by a dopesick junkie in his way home from the grocery store. The bullet goes all the way through Mora, just missing his hip. After surgery and a brief hospital stay, the main character seems to disappear from the story.

We next find ourselves, inexplicably it seems, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, following an American tourist and the cabbie who has become his full-time chauffeur. The tourist is polite, generous and curious. He wants to see the city as a native. He takes a lot of photos. The cabbie is happy with his reliable, well-tipping fare, but the cabbie’s wife has a bad feeling about the pale-skinned American who seems to have taken a shine to a local prostitute named Iris Ruiz.

The unnamed narrator of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold pieces together a picture of events that unfolded on an infamous day twenty three years prior. In a small town at the mouth of a river on the Caribbean coast of Columbia, in what appears to be the second decade of the nineteen hundreds, a wealthy young man with no apparent enemies was murdered in broad daylight, in front of a crowd that included most of the town’s citizens.

Meursault, the main character of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, is so passive and indifferent, he simply lets life happen to him, and what happens isn’t good. He tells his story as if he’s an uninterested and slightly befuddled spectator watching things happen to someone else.

Meursault lives in Algiers. The year is around 1942, though the events of the war in Europe don’t impinge on the story. Meursault lives in a simple apartment and, working as a clerk in a shipping company, earns just enough to get by. He doesn’t much care for his job, or anything else.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker examines the central and unique tension of the human creature: we are going to die, and unlike other animals, we know we’re going to die. This is the fundamental source of human anxiety. It’s not culture-specific. It’s universal to the species, affecting all humans everywhere.

We’re born into a world we don’t initially understand. We arrive helpless and dependent, and we know that. Bewilderment, helplessness and dependency are terrifying. Soon, we also learn that we and everyone we know will die. How can anyone function in the face of such terror?

This book came to my attention when the Independent Book Publishers Association named it as a finalist for the 2023 Franklin Award. It describes the grassroots effort to rebuild rural communities in Sierra Leone after its bitter, decade-long civil war ended in 2002.

The war left the country wounded and deeply polarized. Neighbors had committed atrocities against neighbors. Communities broken by distrust were barely functioning, and there didn’t seem to be a path forward.

The Kindle edition of The Reisman Case is free April 21-25, 2023. Grab a free copy at Amazon.com.

We’ll also be featured on Free Kindle Books and Tips this Saturday.