Trouble in Mind

June 1, 2016

Det. Daniel Turner investigates an unsolved 18-year-old homicide in this third outing (after Second Skin). Oren Jakobsen was eight when his father was killed and he was left for dead. Now, Oren has returned to Florida for revenge against his mother. This atmospheric Southern gothic uncovers unpleasant secrets for all involved.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020
Sam Kelson, the PI star of this thorny novel, takes the damaged-detective trope?divorced, unemployed, a boozer?to a new level. Owing to a bullet lodged in his brain, Sam cannot tell a lie. So when he meets a spiky-haired blond, he tells her she "looks like a toilet brush." His handicap goes in and out of a tale that begins with a classic gumshoe scene: a woman tries to hire him, setting off a funny tableau that begs for screen treatment. Did he ever kill anyone? Yes. How does he feel about that? Alive, which is more than I'd be "if I hadn't shot him." Later, Sam discovers the corpse of the man he's supposed to investigate, and Sam's prints are at the scene. And the woman who hired him doesn't exist. Sam untangles this in an overlong narrative perked up midway by Sam's massive colleague Rodman, deadpanning his way through menacing moments. "Sorry," he says to the fool who pulls a gun on him. "I thought you liked your teeth in your mouth." Sure to satisfy those who aren't pleased with the current decline of the hard-boiled PI novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2016
Poor Daniel Turner. He is the nominal hero of Wiley's gritty noir series set in and around Jacksonville, Florida, but he doesn't get a whole lot of screen time. Here the Jacksonville homicide detective's main job is to help set the premise: haunted by an unsolved disappearance years ago, he returns to the scene after hearing about a disturbance in the area. The focus then turns to the bad guys and the morbid, even slightly fantastical, revenge drama they are intent on playing out. Oren is a man out to destroy the man who murdered his father and married his mother. Yes, it's Hamlet in the country, but Oren is no prince. He leads a small squad of wannabe killers on a road trip from Georgia to Oren's family home, Black Hammock Island, in northern Florida. Once there, they encircle the house and begin a siege of torture and torment that evokes Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. The horrific action sometimes strains credibility, but no one will stop reading, so hypnotic is Wiley's writing. Perhaps the point here is the corrosiveness of revengeor the ability of a fine writer to make so outlandish a narrative so powerful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

November 18, 2019
This solid series launch from Wiley (the Daniel Turner series) introduces Sam Kelson, who was an undercover cop in Chicago until a bullet wound to the head in the line of duty left him with two unusual brain conditions: disinhibition, causing Kelson to speak his mind without hesitation, and autopagnosia, making him unable to recognize himself in a mirror. Two years later, Kelson is off the force, divorced, and struggling to support himself as a PI. His life becomes even more challenging after an attractive woman, Trina Felbanks, approaches him for help with her pharmacist brother, Christian, who’s been illegally selling prescription drugs to his friends. Despite Kelson admitting that he’s incapable of discretion, Trina retains him. After Kelson fails to find Christian at his pharmacy, he goes to his quarry’s apartment, only to find the man dead of a gunshot wound. Moments later, a Chicago PD team arrives and arrests Kelson for the murder. Once freed, Kelson must solve the crime to save his own skin. Wiley keeps the twists coming. Fans of differently abled detectives will look forward to the sequel. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary.

November 1, 2019
Noir specialist Wiley (Monument Valley, 2017, etc.) auditions yet another hero with an apparently crippling pair of twists: Getting shot in the head has left him with disinhibition and autotopagnosia. Three years ago, Sam Kelson, of the Chicago PD narcotics squad, went undercover to nail a teenage distributor called Bicho. All the doomy feelings Kelson and his CPD partner, Greg Toselli, shared with each other in advance turned out to be right on the money, and when the attempted bust ends, Bicho, ne Alejandro Rodriguez, has been shot dead and Kelson nearly so. Pulled back from the brink by his partner's timely aid, Kelson hangs out his shingle as a private eye who sometimes can't recognize his own body parts, still haunted by the question of who shot first, he or the kid. A distraction arrives in the person of Trina Felbanks, a hot-looking woman who wants Kelson to stop her brother, pharmacist Christian Felbanks, from dealing his product to lowlifes. The distraction factor here turns out to be monumental: When Kelson goes to the Lakewood Pharmacy, Raima Minhas, the druggist on duty, tells him that Felbanks isn't in, and when he goes to Felbanks' home, he finds him shot dead, with the police about to storm the place and arrest Kelson for his murder. It's a setup, of course, and although Kelson's soon out on the street, things only get worse when his client turns out to be (duh) an imposter and Raima Minhas is found fatally overdosed in Kelson's bed. Clearly, someone's out to get him good. Who is the nemesis the client, who keeps popping up to warn Kelson that more trouble is on the way, calls Mengele? The Chicago woods are so full of lowlifes that Kelson hardly knows where to begin looking. Working with an improbable team that includes ex-cop DeMarcus Rodman and Francisca Cabon, Bicho's girlfriend, he wades through a growing pile of corpses to a climactic revelation savvy readers will have seen coming. The hero, whose memorably disinhibited dialogue merely exaggerates the qualities of many another hard-boiled shamuses, deserves a stronger case.

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January 1, 2020

Sam Kelson was shot in the head during an undercover drug operation when he was a Chicago cop. Two years later, he's a divorced private investigator who suffers from disinhibition: he blurts out whatever he's thinking and tells the truth. That often gets him in trouble, especially when he talks to women. Trina Felbanks hires him anyway to investigate her pharmacist brother. Sam finds Felbanks dead in his bed, and he's arrested. His client isn't really Trina Felbanks. Then, Sam is arrested for another murder. Someone is out to get him, and Sam traces it back to that shooting two years earlier, and the death of a young dealer. When his former friends in the police department are exasperated, he struggles through with his own muddled thoughts as guidance, and the help of an unlikely cohort. VERDICT Wiley follows the success of Monument Road with a violent mystery that introduces a singular character guided by his sometimes twisted thoughts. Readers of L.L. Bartlett's "Jeff Resnick" mysteries may be intrigued by another sleuth who learns to cope with his brain injury.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.