Here’s a twofer today of superb books by two talented mystery writers whom I just couldn’t choose between because both stories have lousy endings.
Crazy Love You by Lisa Unger was going to be my pick for this edition of Murder Ink until I got six pages from the end. Unger opted for the easiest and, consequently, most disappointing conclusion after slaving over 300 pages of some of the more exciting and deftly edited crime fictions of the year.
I was impatient for the denouement that Unger was winkling out to the last few pages. Then, exactly six pages from wrapping up all the cleverly hanging innuendoes – splat! The story slammed closed with players hastily sutured up and left to bleed.
Crestfallen, I immediately turned for relief to a March 2015 release by Mysterious Press of James Carlos Blake’s The House of Wolfe, seeking a good old-fashioned shoot-’em-up by a tried-and-true crime fiction writer in the mold of the pulp American hard-boiled detective stories, where every character is only an alleyway or door-opening away from being pumped full of lead.
The House of Wolfe is a mob vs. mob story. The Wolfes of El Paso are a mafia family of smart gun runners and drug smugglers honchoed by three lawyer brothers who operate an international syndicate with cousins in Mexico City.
They’re smart. They’re respected. They’ve been shrewd enough for long enough to have operated under the radar – neither crooks nor cops know if they really exist, nobody’s been to prison, nobody shoots anybody.
They’re lovable, until lovely cousin Jessie goes to Mexico City to attend an old friend’s wedding and gets kidnapped, along with the entire wedding party, by amateurs seeking $5 million in ransom.
When the El Paso Wolfes mobilize to rescue Jess, it’s an exciting story in the mold of “Mission: Impossible” until the smart Wolfes become dumb Wolfes.
Blake is a clever writer who wants readers to think he’s rough around the edges by offering up rough stories and rakish characters. But he’s quite accomplished, and The House of Wolfe is a page burner right to the end, when the flame flickers and extinguishes a smoldering pile of pages as the ending collapses from poor architecture.
Unger’s Crazy Love You is a masterful psychological thriller about a boy who grows up with Priss, a secret childhood friend with whom he shares love that’s not to be found in either of their families.
Priss protects fat, clumsy Ian – bullies have accidents, a house is burned. Nobody but Ian knows or has ever even seen Priss, and she gets him in trouble by keeping him out of trouble then vanishing.
Ian becomes a successful New York writer and illustrator of a dark series of comic books, “Fat Boy & Priss.” Priss is in and out of his life until Ian meets a girl he wants to marry – more accidents, police, who’s this Priss? Nothing is as it seems, or is it?
Unger has written a brilliant suspense thriller, right up to the last six pages. But it’s worth the final disappointment – and good endings are rare, anyway.
Jeff@jeffMannix.com. Jeff Mannix is a local journalist and author.
