Voodoo River - by Robert Crais

Voodoo River is the fifth book in the Elvis Cole series.  Jodie Taylor is an actress who hires Elvis to help her discretely locate her birth family in order to get details about her medical background.  For those familiar with the series, in this installment, Cole meets and works with Lucy Chenier, who is Jodie Taylor's attorney, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, near the small town where she was born.  This job is almost too easy for the world's best detective and Elvis quickly finds the answers he was paid to find and more.  When things grow unexpectedly complicated, Joe Pike and Elvis Cole must step in.

I have read a number of the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike stories by Robert Crais and really like them.  While this is not my favorite of the series, I was certainly not disappointed.  In general, the plot had a good number of twists and turns and was well paced.  The characters and dialogue were interesting.  Elvis is always a somewhat humorous and very likable main character.  Joe Pike is not very conversational, but he is very good at what he does and is a very loyal friend and partner to Elvis.  If you like this brand of crime mystery fiction, I think you will enjoy this book.

Tick Tock - by James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge

New York City is experiencing a wave of terror-inducing crimes reminiscent of some of the most prolific in its past.  Detective Michael Bennett is on a beach vacation with his family at nearby Breezy Point.  As always, the call of duty does not respect his personal life and he is forced to spend much of his vacation working this high-profile case.

"Tick Tock" is the fourth book in the Michael Bennett series written by Patterson and Ledwidge.  As with previous installments, this is a fast-paced crime thriller with a good dose of suspenseful twists and turns.  This book also places significant focus on potential love interests for Detective Bennett.  His relationship with his nanny, Mary Catherine, has been heating up.  FBI agent Emily Parker re-enters the scene to help on the case   with the romantic evolution of their relationship all but inevitable.

In my opinion, if you like James Patterson books, this is a very good one.  If you don't care for his previous works, however, this one is based on a similar formula.  As these types of crime fiction novels are right up my alley, I really enjoyed this book and found it hard to put down.

Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President - by Eli Saslow

In an effort to stay connected with his constituents, President Obama has his staff select ten letters for him to read that are representative of the enormous volumes of correspondence received by the White House each day.  For this book, Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow tracks down and profiles ten American letter writers whose letters were personally read and answered by the President.  Each of them had very personal reasons to engage their President with their views on an issue that deeply concerned them.

This book could certainly be considered by many to have a political bias.  It certainly covers letters about politically charged topics, as well as a reaction and response representing President Obama's perspective.  To me, however, this book was much less about the positions taken by the letter writers and/or our President and more about the personal stories of each of the letter writers that led them to actually share their viewpoint with the highest ranking elected official in their government.  These stories provided some examples of national issues having direct and personal impact on the lives of everyday citizens.

In Harm's Way - by Ridley Pearson

This is the fourth book in Ridley Pearson's Sun Valley, Idaho, Sheriff Walt Fleming series.

The story opens with Fiona Kenshaw's heroic rescue of a child trapped under a tree limb in a swift-moving river. Fiona is Walt's photographer that he has developed romantic interest in. She asks him to try to keep her picture out of the press, and when he fails to do so, she is upset about it, but won't explain why.

Kira Tulivich is a 21-year-old girl recovering from the pyschological trauma of a violent assault two years earlier. Fiona has taken her under her wing and the two of them are house-sitting for a wealthy couple. When someone start's raiding homes in the area and trying to make it look like the work of a bear, Walt sees the crime for what it is and determines that a prowler is on the loose in Fiona's and Kira's neighborhood.

A football team owner, Marty Boatwright, and a famous sports agent, Vince Wynn, both have homes in Sun Valley. Walt responds to a call where Vince was shooting his gun to scare away retired professional linebacker Martel Gale. Not long afterwards, the large and imposing Gale is found dead from a strike to his head, near the side of the highway. Seattle homicide detective Lou Boldt, from another of Pearson's series, is working the murder of Caroline Vetta, a woman with a history of dating sports figures. The trail on his case intersects with Sun Valley, and ultimately Walt's investigation.

Fleming is a divorced father of two girls and his best deputy lives with his ex-wife. The woman who helps him with his girls (a friend) confides in Walt about her suspicions that her pregnant teenage neighbor is being sexually abused by her father.

Walt has crimes to solve with personal and emotional implications. Their solution is not predictable. This story provides many interesting and sometimes even suspenseful twists and turns. Much of the plot, however, involves Walt wrestling with his feelings, emotions, and morals. This adds depth to his character but may be a little "sappy" for some. Personally, I liked the book a lot, but not enough to rave about it. Certainly enough to recommend it, however.

Forced Out - by Stephen Frey

Jack Barrett used to be a big-time scout for the New York Yankees, but now he and his daughter are barely getting by in Sarasota, Florida.  He has a new mission in life, however, when he discovers the talent of Mikey Clemant, a local minor league player who can occasionally do amazing things on the baseball field but otherwise seems to be an uninspired player with bad attitude. Johnny Bondano is a hit man for the Lucchesi crime family asked to find and kill the man blamed for killing the crime boss's only grandson.  The lives of these three men (and others affiliated with each of them) converge in ways not hard to figure out, but somewhat complicated and unexpected, nonetheless.

In my opinion, this was a good, but not great story.  It was well constructed and somewhat suspenseful.  It kept me turning the pages and wanting to find out what happened.  The ending was not exactly what I suspected.  In my personal opinion, I would not give it a raving review.  I certainly wouldn't complain about it either.  I enjoyed reading it and I'll leave it at that.

Edge - by Jeffery Deaver

Corte is an elite Federal protection officer.  In the vernacular of his agency, he is a "shepherd."  In this story, he is responsible for safeguarding the family of a Washington, D.C. police detective.  Intelligence has revealed that the "lifter," Henry Loving, who six years earlier tortured and killed Corte's mentor, Abe Fallow, is targeting them.  An academic and and aficionado of board games, Corte matches wits with Loving in a dangerous duel of strategy, deduction, deception, and calculated risk-taking.

I am not a big fan of Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series, but I loved this book.  The suspense, the action, and the pace of events combined to produce a very enjoyable plot.  The characters were well developed and interesting.  The reader experiences events from Corte's viewpoint and familiarity with the Federal officer protagonist grows as the story progresses.  I appreciated both the view into his reasoning skills that make him so good at his job and the glimpses into his background and  inferences about his personal life that make him fascinating as a person.  In my opinion, this is one of the better books that I have read recently.

The Cut - by George Pelecanos

Spero Lucas is a young veteran (ex-Marine) of the Iraq war who now works as a freelance investigator.  He is good at finding things and his standard fee is a 40% cut of the recovered property.  After doing some good work to help Washington, DC, lawyer Tom Petersen get car theft charges dismissed against a good kid who made a bad decision, he meets with the boy's father, Anwan Hawkins, who is currently in prison on drug charges.  Hawkins explains to Spero the FedEx scheme he uses to smuggle his marijuana.  Recent losses of two shipments, however, have been costly and he wants Lucas to find them for him.

In my opinion, this is a very good book.  Pelecanos spins an origanal and suspenseful tale, set in the neighborhoods surrounding our nation's capital with a cast of interesting and well-developed characters.