In These 4 Novels, the Detectives Have Killer Instincts

By James Grippando

A veteran best-selling legal thriller writer has a new book out this month featuring his signature defense attorney character. No, not that one — I mean James Grippando, who, over a 30-year career, has written 19 books starring the criminal defense attorney Jack Swyteck. In GRAVE DANGER (Harper, 320 pp., $30) Jack takes a pro bono client in an unusually perilous situation: She says she has fled Iran for Florida with her daughter because their lives would be in unfathomable danger if they stuck around. Her husband, who wants his child back, has sued for custody in Miami.

“The case was filed under seal at the request of the U.S. State Department,” Jack is told, because “the woman … is a political hot potato in U.S.-Iranian relations.” He soon realizes everyone involved is lying, maybe even his F.B.I. agent wife, Andie, who is pressuring him to drop the case. “I’ve seen the State Department’s confidential dossier,” she tells him.

Grippando’s years of experience shine brightest, naturally, in the courtroom sequences. But I was also taken with the dynamic between Jack and Andie as they grappled with the conflicts created by their jobs — questions which will be taken up, no doubt, in the next installment.

By Laurie L. Dove

Carrie Starr, the main character of MASK OF THE DEER WOMAN (Berkley, 336 pp., $29) wasn’t supposed to return to the reservation where she was born and raised. She’d gotten out, established roots in Chicago and risen up the detective ranks in the city’s police force. But her daughter’s death altered her calculus. Going home, and becoming the rez’s new tribal marshal, was the only option left.

Once there, Starr learns that young Indigenous women have been going missing over the past 10 years, some of them turning up murdered. The latest is the college student Chenoa Cloud, and when Starr begins to investigate, she’s bedeviled at every turn — including by the spectral figure of a woman with deer antlers: “She could clearly see the silhouette of a beautiful woman turned to the rising sun, her crown of antlers glorious and deadly.”

Dove, a reporter and creative writing professor in Kansas, sensitively tackles the systemic crisis that has ripped apart so many Native American communities. Solving one mystery, as Starr eventually will, only opens the door for others: “She was always looking for a body; she wasn’t always sure whose.”

By Amy Jordan

THE DARK HOURS (Mira, 320 pp., $30) subverted my expectations at almost every turn. In 1994, the Irish detective Julia Harte gets assigned to a serial killer case that eats away at her until she retires and leaves Cork for a “secluded village on the east coast of Ireland.” There she lives quietly, certain that the nightmares — which swallowed up the life of her detective partner — are finally past.

They aren’t, of course. In 2024, Julia’s former boss calls her with terrible news: Two people have been murdered, their bodies staged just like those of the victims three decades earlier. “It’s happening again,” he tells her. Julia doesn’t want to go back to Cork, but there’s no one else who can connect the past with the present in the case, no one who can finally lay all those old demons to rest.

Jordan shows how the aftermath of violence affects all those who witness it. She writes Julia with particular fire, bringing us a woman who has chosen invisibility but who cannot escape what once made her visible.

By Walter Mosley

Easy Rawlins, Mosley’s first detective, is still his best and most iconic; Leonid McGill, his second, is more idiosyncratic but wasn’t built for many installments. His latest, Joe “King” Oliver, is back for a third time in BEEN WRONG SO LONG IT FEELS LIKE RIGHT (Mulholland, 336 pp., $29). It feels like King is still finding his footing, but he’s getting there.

It helps that the investigation that occupies most of his time in this book is personal: His beloved Grandma B has a malignant tumor and she wants to see her son, Chief — King’s estranged father, who’s keeping a low profile after a long prison sentence — once more.

“I know how you feelin’,” his grandma tells him. “But this is somethin’ I need. I wouldn’t ask if you wasn’t the only one could help me.” Complicating the task is a work obligation — tracking down a missing heiress — that turns personal.

King’s chasing after a father who loved women well but not too wisely, and finds himself in a similar predicament, one that Mosley has captured in almost all of his fiction. At the sentence level, Mosley’s language thrills, but he’s mostly repeating his grooves here, rather than inventing new ones.