The Bean Dip Murder Case

The major theme of crime novels, crime doesn’t pay, often serves as a foundation for examining social problems. The motifs involving such problems are what make the novels enjoyable. In her first Tamara Hayle novel, When Evil Comes Stealing, Valerie Wilson Wesley dealt with the relationship between fathers and sons. The Devil Gonna Get Him, the second novel in the series, is about the relationship between mothers and daughters.

  

Lincoln E. Storey, who rose from the mean streets of Newark to become one of the first black investment bankers on Wall Street, hires PI Tamara Hayle to follow a lady’s man named Brandon Pike and find out what game he’s playing. The thirty-year-old Pike is dating Lincoln’s 23-year-old stepdaughter Alexa. Storey suspects Pike is after his money.

Tamara once dated Pike after her divorce from DeWayne Curtis, but she doesn’t remember what he looks like. Storey suggests she attend a fundraiser he’s having for deputy District Attorney Stella Pharr who is running for a seat in the New Jersey state assembly. The affair will be held in the restaurant that Jackson Tate, an old friend of Tamara’s deceased father, manages.

Shortly after everyone sits down to eat, Lincoln E. Storey drops dead. At Pharr’s request, the authorities test the bean dip and discover that it contained peanut butter. The autopsy showed he died from an anaphylactic shock. Tasha Green, who prepared the bean dip, becomes the prime suspect. A month earlier at another dinner she suggested the perfect way to kill Storey would be to put some peanuts in his food.

What will Tamara do now that her client is dead? In need of money, she wonders if she can still collect the $1,000 fee. Her friend Wyvetta Green, Tasha’s older sister, comes to her rescue. She hires Tamara to find the real killer because she doesn’t believe Tasha did it. She can’t pay Tamara’s usual fee but she will pay what she can for a week of Tamara’s time. Tamara doesn’t like working for a friend, especially one who doesn’t have the money to pay her going rate. She needs the money, so she takes the case.

Each of the other five people who were present at the earlier gathering had a motive for killing Lincoln: his wife Daphne, though she claimed they were reconciled; his stepdaughter Alexa who just plain hated him, Pike who wants his money, Jackson Tate, whose restaurant Lincoln now owns, and Stella Pharr who might have had a romantic interest in him.

In Devil’s Gonna Get Him, we learn more about Tamara’s childhood. During the investigation, her observation of the volatile relationship between Daphne and Alexa triggers the dark memories of her abusive relationship with her own mother. Her mother was cruel and beat her in an attempt to knock all the black off. The normal and caring relationship between Wyvetta and Tasha is like that of mother and daughter since Wyvetta practically raised Tasha after their mother died, but this doesn’t change Tamara’s feelings toward her dead mother. She isn’t sure she can ever forgive her mother. The exploration into Tamara’s background adds complexity to her personality that makes her truly believable and increases the verisimilitude of the story.

The body count in Devil’s Gonna Get Him is down to only two, which makes for a tighter plot. The tighter plot makes it more difficult to identify the killer before the detective does. I haven’t named the second murder victim because it would spoil one of the surprises. This second novel in the series is as powerful and exciting as the first. I’m anxious to begin reading Where Evil Sleeps, the third novel in the series.

The Sweetness of Revenge

I struggled to write my review of Astride A Pink Horse, Dr. Robert Greer’s eleventh novel and the fourth outside his CJ Floyd series. Greer uses the conventional detective story to explore the hatred of the United States government for its nuclear weapons policy and the taking of land from ranchers. This made it difficult for me to write the review without spoiling the surprise ending.

In the first chapter, a US postal worker finds the mutilated body of African American ex-Air Force sergeant Thurmond Giles hanging by his heels in the access tunnel of an abandon nuclear missile site in Wyoming called Tango-11. Giles was an expert nuclear missile technician and a womanizer. 

Beautiful OSI (Office of Special Investigations) Air Force Major Bernadette Cameron is assigned to investigate the breach but not the murder. She is the granddaughter of one of the Tuskegee Airmen and the daughter of an Air Force pilot who fought in Vietnam. She was reassigned from duty as an A-10 Warthog pilot to OSI because hay fever grounded her. Having to obey the orders of her ambitious superior officer, Colonel DeWitt, rankles her. He orders her to investigate only the breach at the abandon missile site and leave the murder investigation to the civilian authorities. She, naturally, disobeys because she thinks the two are connected.

Any time there is a beautiful woman in a story, you know there has to be a handsome man to romance her. Detective novels are no different in this respect from other genres. Elgin Delonero (Cozy) Coseia, an investigator reporter for the web-based Digital Registry News, which his friend Frederick Dames owns, is her love interest and together they investigate the murder of Giles. Though their relationship is predictable, they are complex characters whose emotional demons evoke just the right amount of sympathy without being sentimental. 

Trying to stop one of the suspects from exploding a nuclear device on Los Alamos briefly distracts Bernadette and Cozy and the reader from solving the Giles murder. To further complicate their investigation even further, one of the suspects is murdered.

Each of the five suspects, two women and three men, has a reason for wanting Giles dead. Giles was the love’em and leave’em type of womanizer. The question facing the two enterprising investigators is was the motive racial hate, antinuclear protest, jealousy, or the US Government’s taking of land to build nuclear missile bases? One of the men is angry that the US Government took his land in Nevada and another that Giles had an affair with his wife. Two Japanese cousins, a man and a woman, are angry that the government dropped atomic bombs on Japan. The other woman is angry that Giles’s affair with her mother might have caused her mother’s death. The relationship among the suspects and their connections to Giles is more complex than I have suggested. Although he is dead, his presence haunts the plot right up to when one suspect tries to blow up Los Alamos. To say more would be a spoiler. 

Astride A Pink Horse is a well-written novel of revenge.

Deadly Research

Published in 2000 between The Devil’s Backbone (1998) and Resurrecting Langston Blue (2005), Robert Greer's novel, LIMITED TIME, isn’t a volume in the CJ Floyd series. CJ Floyd plays an important part in the plot, but his long time friend from their days in Vietnam, Dr. Henry Bales, raises the tension. CJ has Henry’s back in this exciting scientific research thriller.

The body of microbiologist Neil Cardashian is found in the city waste dump in a lab freezer belonging to microbiologist Dr. Theresa Gilliam. Cardashian was supposedly trying to develop an anti-aging pill based on the telomerase enzyme. Dr. Gilliam, the co-investigator, noting he was not following protocol, was trying to determine what he was up to. Homicide detective Lieutenant Clifford Menton considers her the prime suspect because, he thinks, she will benefit  if the project is successful. 

During Menton’s intensive questioning, Henry, head of pathology and chief of diagnostic molecular biology at the University of Colorado, gets in his face and is in danger of being arrested himself. Dr. Gilliam was his mentor when he was studying medicine and is his close friend. Lucky for him attorney Julie Madrid, CJ’s ex-secretary, is present. She calls CJ to come calm Henry down. Once he has calmed Henry down and persuaded him to leave, CJ turns his attention to Dr. Gilliam, who hires him to find Cardashian’s killer. 

Dr. Gilliam is eliminated as a suspect when she is found dead sitting in her wheelchair in her lab. Henry vows to find her killer, but CJ persuades him to look for a motive that might have something to do with Cardashian’s research and leave the dangerous killer hunting to him.

In Cardashian’s office, CJ finds a box of Cuban cigars. Beneath the cigars are pearl-sized gel beads. Henry’s analysis reveals the gel beads are a telomerase concoction. CJ suggests maybe Cardashian was doing something other than trying to develop a longevity pill.

From the coroner’s attendant, a friend of CJ’s, Henry and CJ learn the autopsies of the brains of Leah Tanner, an olympic swimmer on the University of Colorado swim team, and Cardashian revealed pea-sized nodules. Henry concludes that both died from brain cancer due to overdoses of the telomerase gel beads. 

Their joint investigation soon leads them to four possible suspects involved with the university swim team: Leah’s boyfriend Anthony Montella, Leah’s father Nathan Tanner, the swim team doctor, David Patterson, and the coach Ellis Drake. CJ eliminates all in the death of Theresa because none had a reasonable motive. Henry refuses to accept that Anthony Rontella couldn’t be the killer because he had the most to lose since he was peddling the telomerase drug to coaches. Henry goes to his ranch in La Plata County with his lady friend Dr. Sandra Artorio to do more work on the telomerase puzzle.

What Henry and CJ don’t know is a mysterious voice on the phone using the name Sweets is the master mind behind whatever Cardashian was doing. Sweets orders Jamie Lee Custus, a hit woman working for her, to eliminate Henry and Dr. Arotrio who are close to solving the telomerase puzzle. She follows them to Henry’s ranch and attacks them. CJ and a neighboring rancher arrive just in time to rescue Henry and Sandra. Right behind them is Sheriff Booker Reardon. He takes over the situation and learns from Custus that she was to meet Sweets at the airport in Durango, Colorado. The sheriff agrees to let Henry and CJ watch the proceedings at the airport but warns them not to interfere. Henry is the most important person in the group when they arrive at the airport because he is the only one who can identify Sweets.

As I struggled to write this review, my critical antenna began to zero in on what bothered me about the novel. The structure is not tight as it should be. Although I didn’t mentioned them in the summary, scenes set in Cuba designed to set up the cigar box clue and identify relationships among some of the Cuban characters  could have been left out without disturbing the flow of the plot.

Invisible but They Exist

I often surf the Internet for reviews and critical articles about black crime writers. Sometimes I get lucky and stumble on an article that hits home with me. That is how I came across “Colored and Invisible” by Rachel Howzell Hall on the “The Life Sentence” website.

In her post, She observes

”If you’re a writer of color and you attend Bouchercon, Malice Domestic, or any of the writing conferences, you already know that there are more robots on Mars than there are colored folks in the banquet room.

Weird because the mystery genre has always been a great equalizer — you can’t get more equal than dead. And mystery writers are the ones who call out social ills and inequities. We kill the bad guys. But when it comes to diversity in the real-life room? Yeah, we have a problem.”

The absence of black nominees for the many awards for crime fiction certainly isn’t due to a lack of books by black writers. I have run out of room on my bookshelves and now put the books I buy in boxes on the floor. I sometimes have a difficult time finding reviews of books by black writers, but they are reviewed. In fact, Ms Hall’s novel Skies of Ash was reviewed in the June 21, 2015, New York Times Book Review. Why no black attendees and no black winners? As Ms Hall suggests, they are invisible to the white folks who select the attendees and nominees.

But, I’m optimistic things will get better. I say this because, when I was growing up the 1940s and 1950s, black writers in any genre were not a part of the curriculum in the segregated school system. They weren’t invisible, for invisibility means you’re present but not seen. They didn’t exist as far as the white school officials were concerned. Oh, we black kids knew about some of them, especially Langston Hughes, my favorite even today. We knew because during Black History Week (yes, it was only a week long before it became a month long) our teachers, not the white school officials, required us to study Negro history, including literature.

I didn’t know black crime writers existed until I entered college and read Chester Himes’s novels and Rudolph Fisher’s only detective novel, The Conjure-Man Dies. In the 1980s black writers entered the genre of crime fiction with amazing productivity. So, I’m optimistic they will sometime in this century attend the writing conferences and be nominated for and possibly win some of the awards. Ms Hall’s presence at the Bouchercon is evidence that my optimism is not misplaced.

During the era of Jim Crow in the south, the one thing that our teachers and parents and leaders inspired in us was hope. No matter how bed things were, we would overcome. 

As Ms Hall points out, the mystery genre is an equalizer.

Now go celebrate the Fourth of July! 

Curtesy of Hubpages

The Bizarre Game

I chose the title of this review based on the game a rich man plays in Robert Greer's fifth novel in his CJ Floyd series. To reveal the nature of the game my faithful readers would be a spoiler. However, It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the dangerous game in which the ex-bail bondsman CJ Floyd finds himself involves four photographs of the Golden Spike Ceremony depicting the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The fourth photograph is The Fourth Perspective. 

As he promised his lady friend Mavis Sundee, CJ is no longer a bail bondsman. He sold the business to his partner Flora Jean Benson. He is now an antique dealer. His new business, IKE'S SPOT: VINTAGE WESTERN COLLECTIBLES, is named after the uncle who raised him. 

From his first customer, Luis Del Mora, a young Nicaraguan man, CJ buys two rare books he suspects Luis probably stole from a private library. One is about Wyoming cattle brands in 1883. The second is about the history of medicine in Colorado. Evidence that something was attached to the back end board of the second book incites CJ’s curiosity. In satisfying his curiosity, he learns that the antique business is almost as dangerous as the bail bond business.

CJ’s excitement over obtaining the two books is deflated when Denver homicide detective, Sergeant Fritz Commons, visits the store and informs him the young Nicaraguan man was found dead in an alley. Commons confiscates the two books as evidence. He visits CJ again a few days later and asks him about another dead man, Oliver Lyman, a professor of American History at the community college. Luis had been one of his students. Luis’s mother, Theresa, wants to hire CJ to find her son’s killer. Having quit the bail bond business, he refers her to his former partner Flora Jean. 

Stolen books, two dead men, and a grieving mother put CJ back in the business of doing what he loves—chasing bad guys—when Flora Jean asks for his help. He dreads having to explain to Mavis why he is again chasing bad guys:

He still hadn't been able to figure out exactly where he was now headed in life, but he suspected that sooner or later a proper choice would surface. He hadn't fully abandoned the idea of continuing in the antiques business, but he knew for certain now that he couldn't completely turn his back on being a bail bondsman. He had no idea how he'd combine the two polar-opposite careers, but with Mavis's hesitant blessing, he was going to try.

To find the killer, CJ must find the owner of the two rare books he bought from Luis. His research revealed that the item that was attached to the end board of the medical book was a daguerreotype photograph of the Golden Spike Ceremony worth millions of dollars. The hunt for the killer leads to a confrontation with a “wealthy oil and gas baron, whose Western lineage stretched back to before Colorado's 1876 statehood...." Howard Stafford is a serious collector of books and owns an extensive library. To him, the conflict with CJ is a game he warns CJ he will lose.

Stafford is not the only danger CJ faces. His deadly nemesis, Celeste Deepstream, reappears just as I expected. After escaping from CJ when he rescued Mavis from her clutches in Resurrecting Langston Blue, she returns for another try at killing him. With her third appearance I realized her stalking of CJ adds tension to the story—no matter what case he’s on, he will always worry about when and where she will strike.

The former boss of the Denver mafia family, Mario Satoni, who was a friend of CJ’s uncle Ike, offers him a way to work as a bail bondsman and an antique dealer. If CJ comes into the antique business with him, he would “get to spend part of his time with Flora Jean doing what you’ve always done and the rest over here with me offering antiques and collectibles for sale—and a little protection.” Will CJ accept the offer? Read the next novel to find out.

The plot of The Fourth Perspective is much tighter than Greer’s previous three novels, which shows he is getting better at telling CJ’s stories. Best of all, we watch CJ develop over time. Unlike some detectives, he has personal problems, especially in the romance department. 

The Army Deserter

Resurrecting Langston Blue, the fourth novel in Robert Greer’s CJ Floyd series, is filled with some real nasty people in its exploration of an atrocity an American army special forces team called Star 1 might have committed during the Vietnam war. 

After his cabin in the woods of West Virginia is blown up, army deserter Langston Blue knows he is a marked man. The two men who helped him get back to the United States from Vietnam and paid him $20,000 a year for 30 years now consider him a liability. In his pocket is a letter from a daughter in Denver whom he never knew existed.

The daughter, Carmen Nguyen, knows about her father because her aunt Ket, her mother’s sister, knew what happened to him based on what her sister Mimm, Blue’s Vietnam wife, told her. For 30 years, Ket kept the post office box number for him that Mimm had given her.  Carmen hires CJ Floyd and his partner Flora Jean Benson to find her father. Before they can get on a plane to West Virginia, Langston Blue arrives in Denver. After they hear his story, CJ, Flora Jean, and Julie, CJ’s former secretary who is now a lawyer, take on the job of proving Langston wasn’t a deserter.

The murder of Democratic senatorial candidate Peter Margolin complicates Langston’s situation. Margolin was Langston's commanding officer of the Star 1 team of which Langston was a member. Five members of the team were killed on the last mission. Since Langston was one of the survivors, he becomes the prime suspect in Margolin’s murder. The three detectives must unravel a conspiracy surrounding the Star 1 team to clear Langston.

Two people complicate CJ’s attempt to clear Langston. The first is his former high school rival Lieutenant Wendall Newburn the homicide detective investigating the case who was a rival for Mavis Sundee’s affections. He still carries a grudge because Mavis Sundee picked CJ instead of him, and he isn’t too fond of Flora Jean.

The second is Celeste Deepstream. In The Devil’s Backbone, she vowed vengeance on CJ for sending her twin brother Bobby Two-shirts back to prison where he died. After serving five years in prison for killing bail bondsman Cicero Vickers she is released on parole. She returns to Denver with one thing on her mind—kill CJ Floyd. She decides the best way to get to him is through his ladylove Mavis Sundee. This parallel plot makes the novel longer than it should be and contributes nothing to the main plot. I expect to see her in the next novel.

In Resurrecting Langston Blue, CJ faces a dilemma I also expect to be resolved in the next novel. Mavis wants him to quit the dangerous bail bond business. He thinks about quitting and going into selling antiques. The dilemma adds depth to his personality, which I expect to observe becoming more complex over time.

Greer doesn’t describe in detail the pulsating life of Five Points so that you feel the heart and soul of the black community, but he does show in generic terms its ongoing decline:

The Points, the core of Denver's black community since early in the twentieth century, was a neighborhood in transition. Urban gentrification and increasing ethnic diversity were becoming more obvious every day. Longtime shades of black were making way for every color in the rainbow.

Greer again provides a history of black cowboys. Nat Love was one of the six black cowboys who participated in the Fourth of July Celebration in Deadwood City, South Dakota in 1876. He won the shooting contest and earned the nickname “Deadwood Dick.” (Reference: The Black West by William Loren Katz. A Touchtone Book, published by Simon & Shuster Inc. Copyright 1987, 1996 by Ethrac Publications, Inc. ISBN 0-684-81478-1) 

Although I think Resurrecting Langston Blue is about 100 pages too long, it is a well-plotted novel and shows that character and plot are inseparable.

The Dead Man in the Water Trough

The setting of the main action In The Devil’s Backbone, the third novel in Robert Greer’s CJ Floyd series, is in the area of the hogback referred to as “the Devil’s Backbone.” It is an ugly, brutal rock formation in Larimer County, Colorado that CJ’s uncle described as “a modern-day gargoyle, strategically placed at the mouth of the canyon to warn all who entered to beware.”  

 Hambone Dolbey, an ex-bull rider who mentored Morgan Williams, is found dead in a water trough dressed in a wet suit at the Greeley Stampede. Morgan and his friend Dittier Atkins ask the bounty hunting bail bondsman, CJ Floyd, to find the killer. CJ knows the two old rodeo cowboys don’t have the money to pay him. But because they once saved his life, he takes the case. I won’t spoil the story by telling you how they paid him, which surprised CJ and me.

CJ’s main adversaries in this adrenalin pulsating novel are Whitaker Rodgers, President of Pandeco Oil and Gas Company, his mother Virginia Rodgers, CEO of the company, and his girl friend Evelyn Coleman, chief engineer. Hambone had an arrangement with Whitaker Rodgers for an easement across Hambone’s property in the area around The Devil’s Backbone to where Whitaker believed diamonds were located on Pandeco property. Unknown to CJ, another player is Hambone’s son Aaron Baptiste and his mother Rebecca, whom Hambone got pregnant when she was a 15-year-old groupie. The final showdown between CJ and his many adversaries near The Devil’s Backbone increases the adrenalin high for CJ, Flora Jean, and the reader.

Bounty hunting becomes very dangerous when the hunter becomes the prey. Celeste Deepstream begins stalking CJ after he returns her bond-skipping twin brother Bobby Two-shirts to jail. CJ doesn't take seriously Bobby’s warning that Celeste will get even with him until an unknown assailant attacks him in his garage.

In addition to looking over his shoulder for Celeste and investigating Hambone’s death, CJ has to deal with Sheriff Carlton Pritchard whom he remembers from the time the sheriff helped take down a group of ecoterrorists. Sheriff Pritchard warns him not to interfere in the Hambone case. When Hambone’s girlfriend Nadine Kemp is killed, CJ thinks the two deaths are connected. Sheriff Pritchard again warns him not to interfere. Of course CJ doesn’t heed the warnings.

Meanwhile, CJ also deals with two personal problems not connected to the case. While his Puerto Rican secretary Julie is studying for her bar examination, she hires a six-foot, black female ex-marine named Flora Jean Benson to work as his secretary. His biggest worry, however, is how to explain to his girl friend Mavis that he has to postpone their vacation to New Mexico.

The novel has one glaring flaw. Neither CJ nor Sheriff Pritchard investigates why Hambone who was afraid of going into the water was wearing a wetsuit. If they had done so, they might have discovered the motive for the murder early on in the investigation. This failure of the investigators and their author do not spoil the enjoyment of the tight, action-filled plot.

Like most black crime fiction writers, Greer shows the history of black folks in the part of the country where his stories take place. In The Devil’s Backbone, he mentions Myrtis Dightman who “In 1966…became the first black cowboy to qualify for the Professional Rodeo Association National Finals.” Hambone was a contemporary of Dightman’s.