A Bad Night's Sleep

Starred review from March 28, 2011
Fans of gritty PI novels will relish Shamus-finalist Wiley's third mystery featuring Chicago detective Joe Kozmarski (after 2010's The Bad Kitty Lounge). Early one morning, while staked out at a construction site to prevent thefts of building materials and equipment, Kozmarski spots two uniformed patrolmen pull up in a police cruiser. When he observes the cops helping a gang that arrives soon after make off with spools of copper wire, the gumshoe calls 911. Four squad cars pull up within minutes, and a firefight erupts. One of the resulting deaths puts Kozmarski, a former cop who was cashiered from the force in disgrace, in a difficult position. His only way out of the mess involves him infiltrating a wide-ranging conspiracy. Kozmarski, a well-developed flawed hero, would be right at home in a Chandler or Hammett novel. The relentless pacing makes the pages fly by, and the hard-edged prose is bracing.

June 15, 2011

The bent cops are straight, the straight cops are crooked, and ex-cop Joe Kozmarski (The Bad Kitty Lounge, 2010, etc.) must somehow figure out which is which, and who and when, in order to stay alive.

Private eye Joe is minding his own business, which happens at the moment to be a stakeout assignment on behalf of one of Chicago's more prominent property developers. Slippery thieves are battening on a variety of items vital to property development, and the long-suffering Southshore Corporation has finally hired Joe to catch them in the act. He doesn't relish the gig, but his languishing bank account does. The November night is cold, and his beloved Skylark's heater, on full blast, has commenced a serious attack on his attention span when suddenly Southshore's installation experiences an explosion of cops, including among their number the very crooks Joe's being paid to catch. For reasons that make perfect sense to him—unfortunately a minority view—he shoots one of them, rendering himself persona non grata to all the others. Now practically everyone in the Windy City has the leverage to make Joe do a variety of things he desperately doesn't want to do.

Fast, furious and fun. Readers who like them hard-boiled will love this 22-minute egg.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2011
Calling a thriller subtle seems an odd way to praise it, but hold on. Wiley constructs his tale atop one of the familiar foundations of the classic hard-boiled PI novel: the heros history of both staggering failurehe lost his cop job by driving drunk into a newsstandand hopelessness with the ladies. He speaks of one woman as smarter and quicker than he is, and that says it. The requisite gunfights and chases are here, too. But theres an underlying meditation, there if the reader wants it, on identity and the need for endless curiosity about it. Chicago PI Joe Kozmarski announces the theme when he confesses that his failure to identify a treacherous informant got his partner shot. Then Joe nails a couple of bent cops, killing one of them but learning hes made an awfulthough maybe unavoidablemistake. To put things right, he infiltrates the ring of bad apples, moving into a world where shifting identities blur like blades of a fan. He triumphs but not before the wrong people die. Dark, brooding PI fare.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2011

The bent cops are straight, the straight cops are crooked, and ex-cop Joe Kozmarski (The Bad Kitty Lounge, 2010, etc.) must somehow figure out which is which, and who and when, in order to stay alive.

Private eye Joe is minding his own business, which happens at the moment to be a stakeout assignment on behalf of one of Chicago's more prominent property developers. Slippery thieves are battening on a variety of items vital to property development, and the long-suffering Southshore Corporation has finally hired Joe to catch them in the act. He doesn't relish the gig, but his languishing bank account does. The November night is cold, and his beloved Skylark's heater, on full blast, has commenced a serious attack on his attention span when suddenly Southshore's installation experiences an explosion of cops, including among their number the very crooks Joe's being paid to catch. For reasons that make perfect sense to him--unfortunately a minority view--he shoots one of them, rendering himself persona non grata to all the others. Now practically everyone in the Windy City has the leverage to make Joe do a variety of things he desperately doesn't want to do.

Fast, furious and fun. Readers who like them hard-boiled will love this 22-minute egg.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)