Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Michael Simon
Body Scissors
Viking
The year is 1991, the city is Austin, and a young black girl is killed by a stray bullet meant for her political activist mother, Virginia Key. So opens Body Scissors (Viking), the notable second thriller from MICHAEL SIMON featuring the Capital City’s lone Jewish homicide detective, Dan Reles. The gunman is a junkie, and his trail leads to a predictably druggie underworld. Reles, clever lad, soon connects the dots between the planes returning from the Middle East to Bergstrom Air Force Base (remember Operation Desert Storm?) and the sudden appearance of high-grade heroin on Austin’s streets. Simon captures the dark side of a city being whipsawed by construction booms and oil busts, and distinctions between good and evil fade to an undefined gray in Reles’s world-weary, cynical eyes.
Milton T. Burton
The Rogues’ Game
St. Martin's
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
Aspiring writers embarking on their first caper novel will find much to emulate in The Rogues’ Game (St. Martin’s), a rollicking debut by Tyler’s MILTON T. BURTON. It features all the excitement that a 1947 West Texas oil town can muster: a mysterious out-of-towner in a Lincoln convertible, a sassy blonde named Della, a crooked sheriff, and one Clifton Robillard, a banker who might be playing fast and loose with his depositors’ funds. The erudite stranger with the Ivy League manner claims to be in town for the high-stakes poker game at the Weilbach Hotel, but he seems to have bigger prey in mind, and Robillard, a supposed pillar of the community, is always getting caught in his crosshairs. Burton’s nuanced depiction of the post-WWII era is a delight and as crucial to the story as his tidy denouement.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
In Perfect Light
HarperCollins Publishers
El Paso’s BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ doesn’t do easy. Death, racism, child molestation, and U.S.-Mexico border issues are just a few of the topics he grazes in his dignified but heart-wrenching novel In Perfect Light. Meet Andrés Segovia and Grace Delgado. Segovia is a conundrum, an intelligent and en-gaging man whose private demons have led him to fatally beat an apparent stranger. Delgado is his pretrial counselor and therapist, and her own tribulations (a dead husband and a cancer diagnosis) seem daunting until she delves into Segovia’s story: He lost his parents as a child in El Paso and then ended up in Juárez’s red-light district, where things only got worse (as if they could). Sáenz has plotted In Perfect Light impeccably, but it’s the horror of Segovia’s life that gives the book true resonance.
