Book Review - Rest for the Wicked by Ellen Hart

Thanks again to Carl Brookins for sharing his reviews. Blogger was not cooperating earlier today when I tried to post this. Sigh.....

Rest for the Wicked         

by Ellen Hart

ISBN: 978-1250001863

A Minotaur hardcover and Kindle

2012 release

So readers know, the author and I are friends, often travel together as the Minnesota Crime Wave and occasionally consult about writing crime fiction. I believe I retain my critical abilities at a sufficient level to fairly judge her novels as well as those of other author-friends and acquaintances. This is an interesting novel from several directions.

As is the case with nearly all Hart’s novels, this one is smoothly and carefully written. The characters are alive, interesting and, at least in the case of three in this novel, people I think readers will continue to want to follow. Two of them are old friends, Jane Lawless and her alter ego, Cordelia Thorne. The third is Jane’s new love interest, Avi. I hope we’ll see more of her in the future.

The setting for this story is a new one for Jane who has acquired her Private Investigator’s license and is now discovering that owning restaurants and being a PI requires even more than two full lives. It will be interesting to see how her creator handles this new development in Jane’s life. I particularly liked the running theme in which Jane has to deal with restaurant personnel who don’t operate quite the the way she did.

The main setting is a strip club in central Minneapolis called Gaudy Lights. The many absorbing scenes in the club are potent, rich with meanings and possibilities. They amply demonstrate the skills of the author, as do her character sketches. The major plot deals with murder, murder with roots reaching back fifteen or twenty years to terrible acts. Yet the initial murder which opens the book serves mainly to bring Jane into the case, since the victim is related to her mentor and hospitalized PI partner, AJ Nolan.

That killing and the subsequent fallout are, in my view, plenty strong enough to carry the book. Other material, particularly some that involving a relatively minor character, a pilot, I found to be distracting and unnecessary.

The novel is well-written and moves almost entirely at an appropriate pace. I really enjoyed the book, although in my view it is not as strong as The Lost Women of Lost Lake. However, I have no hesitation in recommending Rest For the Wicked to the widest possible audience for crime fiction.
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Carl Brookins www.carlbrookins.com  BLOG:  http://agora2.blogspot.com  -BOOKS:  Case of the Great Train Robbery, Reunion, Red Sky

Book Review - Lost Women of Lost Lake by Ellen Hart

Thank you Carl Brookins for introducing us to another good read.

The Lost Women of Lost Lake
by Ellen Hart
ISBN: 978-0-312-61477-5
2011 hardcover release from
Minotaur Books, 320 pgs.


It is interesting how these things come in multiples. Libby Hellmann recently released a novel with its genesis in the riotous summer and fall of 1968. The Minnesota History Center has just opened an elaborate exhibit focused on 1968, and the History Theater in Saint Paul has mounted an original play, “1968, The year That Rocked The World.” And now here we have a powerful, emotionally intense novel by that excellent Minneapolis writer, Ellen Hart. It is a story of two women who are unable to divorce themselves from that same year, 1968 and the decisions and actions they took then.

The story is another event in the evolving saga of Minneapolis restaurateur, Jane Lawless. This time she and bosom chum Cordelia take what they intend to be a short vacation trip into Minnesota’s benign northern wilderness to the Lawless family lodge on a lake north of the Twin Cities. It’s a common enough activity, and bucolic time on placid water amid peaceful forests is expected to provide calm and rejuvenation. Jane is trying to decide whether she can commit to working with a close friend toward becoming a professional private investigator.

The peaceful appearing forest, like so many lives, conceals dark doings and Jane is drawn into a maelstrom of murder, revenge, drugs and double dealing. The multiple threads of this complex story intersect, divide, and then reweave. At times the action is high with tension, the pace frantic. At other times, the story becomes thoughtful, calm, like the smooth waters of the lake itself, allowing readers moments to reflect, perhaps, on their own lives and paths not taken. The women of lost lake, must, in the end, decide for themselves, and take for themselves the heart-rending consequences of their lives.

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Carl Brookins www.carlbrookins.com  BLOG:  http://agora2.blogspot.com  -BOOKS:  Case of the Great Train Robbery, Reunion, Red Sky

Book Review: The Cruel Ever After by Ellen Hart

Thank you, Carl, for sharing yet another book review with us.....


The Cruel Ever After
by Ellen Hart
A Minotar (St. Martin’s Press)
2010 release. Hard cover, 320 pgs.
ISBN: 9780312624768

This, Hart’s nineteenth Jane Lawless mystery, is probably the darkest and most shocking of the series. The book is full of painful, difficult relationships and actions. The extensive cast of characters, many of whom fans   have met before, are almost all revealed to have seriously dangerous dark sides. And even when those troublesome and even illegal dimensions of their characters are  confronted by others in the book, they persist in their ways, ways that sometimes tread close to the abyss.

The shocks begin very early when Lawless’s former husband, a man she hasn’t seen for twenty years, appears in Minneapolis. Not only are we more than a little surprised to discover that Jane was married many years ago, she is upset by his appearance, supposedly ‘simply for old times sake.’  It becomes quickly apparent that Chester Garrity, one of the most facile liars and con men you’ll ever meet, has a specific personal agenda. Garrity is a user of anybody and everybody within reach. That he is such, should, it seems to
this reader, to be more apparent to Jane than appears to be the case.

That Garrity is also fairly incompetent also becomes obvious. Part of the tragedy is that his incompetence brings appalling harm to the people around him. Almost immediately plans go awry and spiral out of control. Murder results. Garrity demonstrates such a high level of impotence in the face of disaster that it is hard to believe he has managed to stay alive and out of prison for this long.

At roughly the same time that Garrity begins his ill-managed plan to sell antiquities of questionable provenance, a lethal cabal of shadowy vigilantes makes its presence known by murdering a popular gallery owner.

Is there a link here?  Of course there is, but readers will require almost infinite patience to figure out the links and resolve the tangle of threads and relationships. Patience is particularly important in the first half of
the book.  After that, with the background and setup in place, the action and the pace pick up.  Logic takes firm hold and as the complications and resolutions of the many plot lines become clearer, the author’s grip on her story becomes firmer. The second half of the novel, as revelation bangs in on top of revelation and explanations explode, is all vintage Hart, an excellent writer who is almost always in full command of her work.

There were times however, when I wanted to scream at Jane Lawless, and wondered who was really managing that usually incisive and clever mind.
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Carl Brookins
www.carlbrookins.com, www.agora2.blogspot.com
Devils Island, Bloody Halls, Reunion, Red Sky
more at Kindle, Smashwords & OmniLit!