Human Predators

In the bird kingdom, large predator birds prey on smaller birds. The same holds true in the human species. Human predators prey on the vulnerable in our society for their personal gain. In Blackbird, Farewell, the seventh novel in his CJ Floyd series, Robert Greer explores how young, vulnerable athletic phenoms are always in danger of being corrupted by unscrupulous individuals who falsely display an interest in their careers.

Shortly after signing a 3.5 million dollar contract with the Denver Nuggets who picked him second in the NBA draft and a 4 million dollar shoe contract with Nike, 22-year-old basketball phenom Shandell Bird is shot and killed. Two-seconds later the reporter he was meeting on an outdoor basketball court is also killed. 

The bail bondsman and sometime amateur detective CJ Floyd and his new bride, his long time girl friend, Mavis Sundee, are on their honeymoon in Hawaii. In his absence, Damion Madrid, the 22-year-old son of  CJ’s former secretary, decides to find out who murdered his best friend since grad school. He also wants to disprove the rumor that Shandell sold performance-enhancing drugs and was involved in a point-shaving scheme while attending Colorado State University.  An inexperienced 22-year-old wannabe detective trying to be like his idol CJ Floyd naturally puts himself in a dangerous situation. 

Suspects are plentiful. Shandell’s father, Leon Bird, who left Shandell and his mother when Shandell was only 6-years-old, shows up for some father-son bonding. He will receive $250,000 from the insurance policy he persuaded Shandell to take out. 

Shandell’s white girlfriend Connie Eastland saw him as “her little lapdog,” and “booster rocket to the good life.” She helped the gentleman mobster Asalon Garrett persuade Shandell to shave points on some games. 

Professor Alicia Phillips, a sports psychologist, treated Shandell. She was planning to use the information about him and other athletes to write a tell-all book about college athletes, hoping for a bestseller. 

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Wordell Epps also was hoping to profit from the book. 

Asalon Garrett doesn’t want Shandell to reveal his illegal gambling operation. 

Rodney Sands, the CSU trainer, persuaded Shandell to be his mule delivering drugs to Leotis Hawkins to sell in the Five Points neighborhood. 

Jackie Woodson, point guard on the CSU team, was in on the point-shaving scheme and used performance-enhancing drugs given to him by Sands. 

Each one of the suspects expected to profited off Shandell’s fame. So, why would any one of them want to kill the proverbial goose is the question Damion must answer if he is to find the killer.

Although he learns surprising things about his best friend Shandell nothing differentiates Damion from other headstrong 22-year-olds. This makes him a generic character, and no major character in a novel should be generic. Minor characters yes, major no. I confess I’m biased when it comes to 22-year-olds with little experience in life investigating murder. Such young men don’t make good detectives. 

I enjoyed the novel despite my bias and the fact I identified the killer about halfway through. Greer’s deft handling of a very sensitive subject kept me reading. To say what the subject is would be a spoiler for it would reveal the secret that drives the plot.

In TV series when the central character gets married, you know that is the end of the series. This may also be true of a detective series in novels. If so, CJ's marriage to Mavis signals an end to the CJ Floyd series. However, Greer published a prequel, First of State, so I guess it’s fair to say the eighth novel is the last in the series. Yes, I’ll review it next month.

The Last Man Standing

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” 

     William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

On November 22, 1963, an assassin shot and killed President John F. Kennedy. The assassination generated several conspiracies theories: it was the CIA; it was Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, it was Cuban President Fidel Castro; it was the KGB; and it was the Mafia. In his sixth CJ Floyd novel, THE MONGOOSE DECEPTION, Robert Greer suggests it might have been the Mafia and “The High Cabal” of 11 men who "were the power behind government and corporations and organized crime."  

Greer’s bail bondsman/antique dealer, CJ Floyd, gets involved in the conspiracy theory that the Mafia assassinated President John F. Kennedy when some 30 years after the Eisenhower Tunnel was completed in the 1970s a frozen arm is found behind the tunnel wall following an earthquake. Based on the tattoo on the arm, Cornelius McPherson, the worker who found the arm, identified it as belonging to a fellow worker named Antoine Ducane who disappeared in 1972. Cornelius is later killed when he attempts to locate Antoine’s next of kin. The gruesome find and the McPherson killing set in motion a series of events that everyone involved thinks might lead to the real JFK assassin. 

CJ tries to protect his long time friend, 86-year-old, former Denver mob boss Mario Satoni, the last Mafioso who might have knowledge of the assassination. The three mob bosses who allegedly planned the operation are dead. Once evidence connects Antoine Ducane to the assassination, an FBI agent goes after Mario Satoni. Mario’s nephew Rollie Ornasetti, who supervised a failed assassination attempt in Chicago in 1963, tries to frame Mario. Carmine Cassias, the young boss of the Louisiana crime family, wants Satoni and Rollie dead for fear they will reveal the Mafia’s role in the assassination.

As he searches for the hitman Rollie sends to kill Satoni, CJ finds himself working with Satoni’s enforcer Pinkie Niedermyer and Gus Cavalaris, the Denver Homicide detective investigating the murders of Ducane and McPherson. Eighty-year-old Willette Ducane travels to Denver from Louisiana and hires CJ to find out what happened to her son Antoine.

The unknown villains manipulating events behind the scene don’t want the truth about the assassination revealed either. CJ, however, believes he might change history: "…I think we might have stumbled across something that could put a new twist on history." He thinks he “can shed just a little bit of truth on that killing…”

The Mongoose Deception is a good “what if” novel. What if it was the Mafia and some leaders in industry and government who wanted President John F. Kennedy dead? The novel is an entertaining fantasy with unknown villains manipulating the known villains. Greer does a good job of keeping the plot tight, not going off on a tangent exploring other theories.

If you are a member of a “who killed JFK” conspiracy club you will enjoy The Mongoose Deception more than the previous five novels.

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.

Rambling Thoughts On This and That

As I kiss the old year goodbye and welcome the New Year, my mind rambles like boogie-woogie, searching for, well, I don’t know what it’s searching for.

When I first began writing this blog in 2007, I searched the Internet for blogs and websites on crime and mystery fiction by African American writers, and ones in which the stories, though written by White writers, featured Black protagonist. For this post I searched for new websites and found at least two that might interest you, dear reader: Myst Noir is devoted to “African-American Mysteries: Mysteries written by African-Americans and/or featuring African-American sleuth.” You can also find links to authors, books, and mystery websites African American mystery writers on Angela Henry’s website.

The Evanston Library in Evanston, Illinois has a list of African American mystery writers and their novels for readers who, like me, are interested in African American crime and mystery fiction.

I rarely mention my pet peeves in this blog. Well, I feel the need to do so because this one has bedeviled me for years. I hate the book reviews and columns that, at the end of each year, list the best books of the year, the best books of the century, and the must read list of classics. My question is this: do the people who make the best this or that list read all the books published in a year or the century? No, they don’t. Now, I don’t mind someone telling me what books they liked during the year or even what books they enjoyed in the past century, but don’t tell me that the books were the best.

By the way, why doesn’t someone list the worst books of the year? I read a list last month about the worst movies, why not one listing the worst books?

A reminder: drop by my old stomping ground the SleuthSayers blog.

In February, I’ll return to Denver, Colorado to see what new devil the bounty hunting bails bondsman, CJ (Calvin Jefferson) Floyd, is facing.

The Blues is Dangerous

In Robert O. Greer’s first novel, THE DEVIL’S HATBAND, in his CJ Floyd series, the bounty hunting bail bondsman tangled with some maniacal environmentalists bent on destroying the cattle industry. In the second novel, THE DEVIL’S RED NICKEL, not only does Floyd face some bad guys hell bent on killing him, his beautiful, sexy client, who "looked every bit the part of an Ebony fashion-fair model..." at times gives him as much trouble as the bad guys. Her sexy beauty belies her real personality. For CJ she "was a black woman with money who was turning out be volatile, manipulative, and unpredictable."

  

At the Juneteenth Steering Committee meeting, Vernon Lowe, the part time chief morgue attendant at Denver General Hospital and full time undertaker in Five Points, Denver’s Black community, hands CJ one of CJ’s business cards that he found in the pockets of a man recently brought into the morgue. CJ has no idea who the man is or why he had his card.

Shortly after the meeting breaks up, the sexy beauty, Clothilde Polk, the dead man’s daughter approaches CJ. The dead man was LeRoy Polk. She hires CJ to find his killer and gives him the names of five people she believes might be responsible. The first is LeRoy’s ex-wife Mabel Pitts, who was like a mother to CJ, and is a surprising suspect. The second, also a surprise, is her half brother Tyrone, Mabel’s and LeRoy’s son. The third suspect is a gangster named Lawrence Hampoli now living in Pueblo, Colorado with whom LeRoy was in business. Juney-boy Stokes, a transsexual from whom LeRoy stole songs, is the fourth. LeRoy stole money from the fifth suspect, Roland Jefferson who invested in his Stax of Wax Recording Company.

Given Clothilde’s nasty attitude, CJ doesn’t like working for her but he needs the money because he’s broke. The last man he bailed out skipped town, leaving him with no money to pay bills. Before the job is over, CJ and Clothilde are almost killed as they arrive at Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen just as a bomb goes off wrecking the place. Later, he and his cowboy sidekick, Billy DeLong, will be run off the road near Pueblo, Colorado and shot at in Chicago.

LeRoy Polk was a DJ known as Daddy Doo-Wop Polk and built the music business Stax of Wax in the 1950s. He worked and fronted for the mob in Chicago and amassed a fortune that he used to start his own record label. He may have made some master tapes that the mob didn't know about. The tapes are the key to who killed him and Mabel.

The red nickels of the title were coins with a red strip that owners who rented the jukeboxes were forced to use. They gave customers change in red nickels, and the customers used them to play songs on the jukeboxes. The gangster who operated the jukebox business collected the money.

I don't usually test my detecting ability against that of the sleuth. I prefer to watch him or her as s/he collects and assembles the clues. However, in The Devil’s Red Nickel, I found myself trying to identify the killer before CJ. The killer’s elusive identity, held back until the penultimate chapter, is a real surprise.

What I really liked about the novel is the brief history of Juneteenth and the background setting of the rhythm and blues industry during the 1950s. It brought make memories of my youth growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee and listening late at night to the DJs on the black radio station in Memphis.

If you enjoyed The Devil’s Hatband, you’ll enjoy The Devil’s Red Nickel even more, especially if you are a rhythm and blues fan.

I hope all of you had a scary Halloween and are looking forward to a Happy Thanksgiving.

The Bounty Hunting Bail Bondsman

In the next months, I’ll be discussing the novels of Dr. Robert O. Greer. In an earlier time, Dr. Greer might have been considered a renaissance man. In addition to writing novels, he is a professor of dentistry, dermatology, medicine, and pathology at the University of Colorado and owns a large cattle ranch in Wyoming. I became acquainted with Dr. Greer, the writer, when I read his unpublished short story “Oprah’s Song,” featuring CJ Floyd, in the anthology BLACK NOIR: MYSTERY, CRIME, AND SUSPENSE FICTION BY AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS. The short bio shows he has written several novels featuring CJ Floyd, “a tough, often curmudgeonly, cheroot-smoking African-American bail bondsman and occasional bounty hunter.”

I became acquainted with CJ (Calvin) Floyd In Greer’s first novel, The Devil’s Hatband. Floyd is the only black bail bondsman on Denver’s bails bondsmen row. A Vietnam vet, he is six weeks away from his 45th birthday, worries about being in a middle-aged crisis, and resents the way bailbond business seems rigged against black bondsmen. He has a quick temper that he struggles to control. His trademark dress is a “jet black riverboat gamblers vest" and a stetson straw hat. He owns a "pampered '57 Chevrolet Bel Air.”

Floyd gets his first case as a detective when two well dressed black men enter his office and offer to pay him $150 a day to find and bring back Brenda Mathison, daughter of  federal judge Lewis Mathison, and retrieve some documents she stole from Carson Technologies, Inc., a corporation located in Boston. She is the leader of a radical environmentalist group called The Grand River Tribe. He has 30 days to complete the job if he wants to get paid.

The Brenda is not wanted by the police, there is no warrant out on her, and CJ is not a private investigator. He points out that bringing her back could be considered kidnapping. He wonders why they want to hire a bounty hunter when the case seems to require a private investigator or lawyer. He is suspicious but takes the job because he needs the money.

CJ finds the Brenda in a cabin in the mountains in Wyoming. He can’t bring her back because she is dead. The Sheriff of the county will not allow him to search the cabin, and CJ doesn’t reveal why he wants to search it. Back in Denver, when he reports her death to Judge Mathison, the judge immediately offers to pay him $10,000 to find her killer.

To earn the $10,000, CJ finds himself dealing with a manic, the second in command who became the leader, upon Brenda’s death, of the Grand River Tribe. Unlike Brenda who only wanted to turn the ranchers’s cows loose, Denver Deere, using information stolen from Carson Technologies, has developed a deadly virus he plans to use on the cows and possibly people. As if tracking and stopping Deere weren’t enough, CJ has to deal with a gangbanger named Razor D with him he had a run in when Razor threatened his ex-girlfriend Mavis.

Once a detective takes a case, he is expect to complete all phases of it. In the wrap up, Greer fails to explain why CJ didn’t find the documents and the reason for the time limit for finding the killer. The significance of the title escaped me. There is a hat band in the last chapter, but it doesn’t belong to any of the villains. It is a gift from one of CJ’s friends to Mavis. But the title has a nice ring to it, and invites you to read the novel.

Greer effectively uses the two conventions of detective fiction. He introduces a dead body in the first chapter, which will keep the reader reading to discover who did it. He delays until the penultimate chapter to reveal the identity of the super villain.

The promise Greer shows in this first novel encouraged me to read the others, and I expect to have fun doing so because I like the bounty hunting bails bondsman and sometime detective.