Reviews: 2025 Mysteries Include Some Real Gems
My reading in the first third of 2025 included some new crime fiction, and I found a couple of fantastic novels and two others that left me a bit disappointed. Here are my thoughts on the 2025 thrillers I’ve read so far:
Jo Nesbø
384 Pages
I love Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole novels but this one just didn't do it for me. The problem is I never warmed to the narrator, Carl Opgard and his brother Roy, two ruthless businessmen-cum-thugs in the small Norwegian town of Os. When their spa, hotel and gas station are threatened by a new highway that will circumvent Os, they are determined to stop it by any means possible. There are some great plot twists in the story – too many, in fact. The Opgards face all kinds of problems, some of which are resolved just too smoothly or conveniently to be believable. The big problem is that Roy Opgard is such an unlikable central character. Harry Hole is a complex and flawed character but after all is said and done the reader likes him and roots for him. This Opgard guy is just plain nasty, and as a reader I really didn't care what happened to him. You’re better off rereading The Snowman or The Leopard.
Adam Plantinga
400 pages
I’ve been a fan of Adam Plantinga for a while, largely because he’s an SFPD sergeant who’s also an author, bringing the rare perspective of a beat cop to his craft. After two non-fiction books about police work, Plantinga last year put out his first novel, The Ascent. This highly imaginative work (one of my favorite books of 2024) introduced us to Kurt Argento, a retired and widowed Detroit cop who is wrongly jailed in a private state prison in the Midwest, just when there's a system failure and everyone's trapped inside. The only place to use a cell phone is the roof, so the cop is part of a group that has to ascend the building, passing through six floors of increasingly dangerous convicts. Now Argento is back and still meandering into corrupt towns. He’s joined literature’s growing ranks of Jack Reacher clones – former cops/spies/paramilitary types who wander into corrupt towns and battle platoons of high-performance and low-moral operatives. In Hard Town, Argento is housesitting in Arizona when a young mother asks him to help find her missing husband, last seen in a town that seems to have been taken over by a group of special forces soldiers. This book is good, and Argento is a solid character. But I was hoping for more of the high-octane vibrancy and brilliant imagination that Plantinga showed in his first novel.
Belinda Bauer
336 Pages
Like many people, I began to read Belinda Bauer because the British media cast her wonderful novel Snap as a crime novel nominated for the Booker Prize. But it’s a mistake to pigeonhole her as a crime writer. Actually, it’s wrong to pigeonhole her in any genre. She is plain and simple a wonderful novelist with an endless stock of well defined, lovable characters. You could say The Impossible Thing is a mystery, but the puzzle to be solved is unlike anything I’ve found in any whodunnit: who stole the scarlet egg belonging to Weird Nick, a young Call of Duty aficionado? Nick had found the ancient egg in his attic in an elegant wooden box. He put it up for sale on eBay, and days later masked men broke into his home, tied him up and took it. Now Nick and his autistic friend Patrick Fort stumble into the bizarre world of collecting and trafficking rare eggs. (It’s actually a thing.) Bauer takes us back to the Yorkshire cliffs in the 1920s when a penniless girl took the magnificent scarlet egg from a marine bird, and traces its path through wealthy collectors until it ends up in Nick’s attic. The author strings the tale with her customary eye for detail, wit and warmth. A splendid little novel.
Harlan Coben
352 Pages
This is a thoroughly enjoyable read. It’s a Coben novel, so you expect an affable, wisecracking hero and a propulsive, hard-driving plot. Check, and check. Former detective Sami Kierce recognizes a woman in New York in 2024. It was Anna, the young beauty with whom he’d had a torrid romance in Spain 22 years earlier. The fling had ended when he woke after a drug-infused night to find a bloody knife in his hand and Anna dead beside him. Now she’s alive in New York and he has to find out what happened all those years ago in Spain. It’s a rollicking yarn, and what struck me was the human touches. I loved a little anecdote about the golfer who ruined his life when he succumbed to the temptation to cheat. So why four stars and not five? The end left a few loose threads that needed to be tied up, and a few too many mental leaps in reaching the conclusion. I’m being a tough marker because expectations are high with a novelist of Coben’s stature. But if you want to get lost in a novel for a few days, this is a good one to choose.
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