Catching up with perennial favorites

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

ROBERT B. PARKER

Spenser and Hawk are at it again, backing each other up, battling the bad guys and bantering in their darkly funny, self-amused style, perfectly voiced here by Joe Mantegna. But all is not hunky-dory: just before Cold Service opens, Hawk was shot and nearly killed and it takes months to get this hardest of the hard-boiled back in fighting shape. Once there, he and Spenser have a growing list of toughs to take out, including some imported members of the Ukrainian mafia and the totally corrupt, homegrown mayor of Marshport, Massachusetts. Revenge, it's said, is best eaten cold, but the heat these two generate makes that all but impossible.


ROBERT CRAIS

Elvis Cole, the Hawaiian-shirt wearing, yellow-Corvette driving L.A. private investigator whose stone-faced best buddy, Pike, is just as tough as Hawk, makes a comeback in The Forgotten Man, vintage Crais narrated by James Daniels. Cole is still getting over the lingering ramifications of his last big case (check out The Last Detective) when he gets a call from the LAPD claiming his long-lost father has just been murdered. This is weird; Cole has never known who his father was, and this nameless victim, covered with religious tattoos, seems an unlikely candidate for the man he's been yearning to find. It gets a lot weirder as Cole, with a little help from Pike and ex-bomb squad detective Carol Starkey, digs into the case and begins to turn up a very disturbing picture of the dead man and what he may have been hiding. Noirish as always, with flashbacks that expose a side of the now-cool Cole he usually keeps under wraps.


GEORGE PELECANOS

Drama City is not part of Pelecanos' Derek Strange or Nick Stefanos series, but we're still on the mean streets of D.C., where crime, drugs and thugs are the norm and hope is hard to find. But two people, one a parolee, the other a parole officer, are trying desperately to keep it together and somehow beat the street. Lorenzo Brown did his time, eight impossibly long years, and now works hard saving mistreated dogs for the Humane Society and just as hard at not going to back to the "life." Rachel Lopez, his dedicated parole officer, loves what she does, but can't quite overcome the demons that drive her to bars, booze and anonymous sex almost every night. As a ghetto turf war builds, their intertwined fates hang in the balance, teetering on disaster. Redemption is not a common Pelecanos platitude, but you'll be pulling for both of them to find it. Affecting and effectively read by Chad Coleman.


DAVID SEDARIS

David Sedaris, that satiric genius and arch arbiter of the absurd, takes on a new role as editor and introducer (a riff on personal taste, lost and found) of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, a collection of short stories published to help support a non-profit tutoring center. Some of the stories are classic, some are by authors you might have missed and all are works that Sedaris, a self-described "pint-sized fanatic," would defend to the death. Included are five unabridged short stories by Patricia Highsmith, Tobias Wolff, Charles Baxter, Amy Hemple and Akhil Sharma, each read by an accomplished actor, Sedaris among them. He hopes they'll make you see the world in different ways and, perhaps, echo him in saying, "look at what these people have managed to do."


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