Police Procedurals

Hannah Griffin is a social worker with a caseload involving children neglected or abused by families. One day she receives a package at her office addressed to her as Hannah Logan Griffin. She is terrified, because she has not used her maiden name Logan for over 20 years and she didn’t know how anyone traced the name to her. When Hannah was a teenager, a fire took place on her family farm which killed her two brothers, and allegedly her mother. Hannah had done her best not to remember her past. Now, someone was forcing her to revisit her past. Hannah had never allowed the full impact of the horror of that night to take hold, so now memories began to surface. Hannah decides that she will not be able to rest until she determines what happened twenty years ago, and whether or not her mother died that night or is still alive. A very good book, action-packed with several twists and turns. This is a new author for me, but I will definitely read more books by him.

Four old men start the day by winning a modest sum of money which even split between them will be a nice little sum. They go out to celebrate. But, by the end of the day, one man is dead, murdered in his bed with 68 stab wounds. Another of the men has disappeared. And within a couple of days, the landlady from the apartment building of the murdered man also goes missing. Then, the man’s wife comes forward and confesses to the murder. She is convicted and hangs herself in jail. Munster and other officers don’t really believe the wife was strong enough to have inflicted the damage and Munster at least feels she’s protecting someone else, but who? And what happened to the other two people who disappeared? Are all these cases connected? A very good book.

First, to repeat myself for the thousandth time, I’d read almost anything Will Patton recorded, including the telephone book. James Lee Burke’s writing and Will Patton’s narration do not disappoint in this latest Dave Robicheaux book. Dave is in a recovery unit in New Orleans after his injuries from the last book, The Glass Rainbow. He’s been getting morphine and having weird dreams, so when a creole girl he knows shows up in his room and leaves him an Ipod with a blues song, “Creole Belle” recorded on it, no one believes him. Especially since the girl and her sister have both disappeared. But the girl, Tee Jollie Melton, keeps calling him even when he’s at home, still unbelieved, and keeps telling him about a horrible place where she is being held, but not able to tell him where that place is. Then her sister, Blue, turns up dead in the river in a block of ice. This book finds Dave and Clete involved with a group of mercenaries connected to a big oil spill. Clete’s daughter, Gretchen, shows up although she doesn’t know for a while that she’s Clete’s daughter. She and Allafair become friends. Dave is unhappy about the friendship as Gretchen seems to have connections to the mob, while Clete is very protective of his daughter. Again, this is a wonderful book which builds to a teeth-grinding climax. Very good as usual.