El Paso novelist James Carlos Blake loves crime and criminals of a certain vintage, so it's no surprise that he returns to the thirties with Handsome Harry (Morrow), historical fiction based on real-life partners-in-crime Harry Pierpont and John Dillinger. Set in Chicago and the Midwest, this lit noir imagining of a bank robber's life told from Harry's perspective features tough-guy talk and hard-nosed characters. And true to the record, the crooks spend more time behind bars than pulling stickups. Blake eschews flash, but his brand of gritty poesy serves well over the long haul. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Though not as unusual as 2002's Black Jack Point, Austinite Jeff Abbott's Cut and Run (Onyx) is another solid thriller. The ante has been upped—more crooks, more subplots, more shooting—in the third novel in his Edgar- and Anthony-nominated Whit Mosley series. Young Judge Mosley believes he's found the mom who abandoned his family three decades earlier. She might be mobbed up and running numbers for a strip joint, but her maternal instincts appear to be in full force—or maybe she's just pulling another fast one on her trusting son. Reviewed by Mike Shea
It was 59 years ago that a group of U.S. Navy escort carriers, destroyer escorts, and destroyers took on the biggest and baddest of the Japanese fleet off the Philippine island of Samar in a pivotal World War II battle, but Austin writer James D. Hornfischer's retelling—The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (Bantam)—reads as fresh as tomorrow's headlines. The American "tin cans" (so called because of their thin, ineffective armor) were outnumbered 23 to 13 and physically dwarfed by the enemy battleships—the largest warships of the era. But the tiny flotilla inflicted massive damage (suffering its own horrific casualties in the process) and turned back the Japanese fleet to effectively change the course of the war. Hornfischer's captivating narrative uses previously classified documents to reconstruct the epic battle and eyewitness accounts to bring the officers and sailors to life. Reviewed by Mike Shea
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