Two Memorable Crime Novels for Winter Reading: Con Lehane's THE RED SCARE and Cara Black's HUGUETTE (December Releases)

New York City in 1950 held neighborhoods far more separate than they are today: From Hell's Kitchen, where Mick Mulligan is starting his new chapter as a private investigator (PI), to the neighborhood where a black cab driver's family lives, means Mick's white Irish self steps into danger, threat, and abuse. But this isn't just his first case—it's his only case, dangled in front of him by organized labor leaders, which Mick's already aware means just a doorway away from organized crime. 

Besides, Mick can't work his own trade any longer, thanks to the anti-Communist rage sweeping the nation:

This was the reasoning—I went to meetings with Communists, I ate lunch with Communists, I agreed with Communists on certain things—that got me fired from my job as a cartoonist (we liked to call ourselves animators) at the Disney studio, won me a place on the Hollywood blacklist, and brought me back to New York City, where I hung out my shingle as a private investigator.

Mick's investigation and his own safety are tangled with union politics and high-powered maneuvering by men ready for serious power. He's not a serious "Red" himself, although he believes every working person should get a fair deal. But that's enough to paint a label on him, leading into what author Con Lehane calls THE RED SCARE MURDERS (release delayed to Dec. 16). 

And the label can swipe in all directions, as his taxi driver, an old friend of the man on death row that Mick's trying to exonerate, makes clear:

"You one of them fellas who go out and save the guy the cops thought done it? ... That's what Harold needs. Harold didn't kill no one. ... Maybe it was them Communists he got himself mixed up with."

Lehane's language is perfect for this page-turner crime novel, with phrases like "his tone as sincere as a priest in a pulpit," and plenty of Irish immigrant heritage tossed in.  One of Mick's helpful allies even mentions Hollywood detective fiction author Dashiell Hammett, in an effort to encourage the would-be PI: "I guess he told me this because Hammett had been Red-baited too."

Swing along for the smart and sometimes devious women, the men puzzling out the politics of the time, the darkness of urban angers and the gentle efforts of friendship. THE RED SCARE is a classic of the urban noir genre, with plenty of quick twists and not much gore. Besides, there are such strong parallels in the social politics of Lehane's 1950s and our own 2025 that you could imagine this feisty crime novel was just written last month. Great fun and good reading.

THE RED SCARE is one of the November releases from Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press, and definitely has a place on the winter to-be-read (TBR) stack, for both nostalgia and good feelings.

Another December release from Soho Crime, HUGUETTE by Cara Black (Dec. 2), might qualify for some "trigger warnings." Set in Paris at the end of World War II, it's jammed with rape, everyday sexual and physical abuse, and messy violent deaths of nice people. 

But for any reader of Black's excellent Aimée Leduc Paris PI series, this is a must-read. The first few chapters flip back and forth between 1947 and 1945, not always smoothly. About a third of the way into this 300-page historical police and crime novel, the name Leduc comes up, and Cara Black fans know we're on our way into a significant "back-story" to the popular series. How much trust can Huguette Faure place in the "flic" (cop) who offers to help her? Who murdered her father and stole the family business? What are the secrets behind the grown children who now surround her, and who don't know what was stolen -- or, more poignantly, WHO was stolen -- from this attractive, determined, and impoverished young woman who'd been given such a bad hand by history and crime as a pair?

"These cocky soldiers needed to be shown they couldn't treat her like a kid," Huguette thinks as she puts herself in fresh danger with more questions. "Establish authority, her father would say, when dealing with black marketers."

But Black's double epigraph to the book includes a quote from Benito Mussolini's foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, and it's one Huguette should keep in mind: "Victory finds a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan."

If you can keep reading, with hope, through Huguette's grievous losses, Black's portrait of postwar Paris and her backstory to Aimée Leduc will be a gift to your mystery-loving soul. Buy two copies: one for a friend's holiday gift, and one to treat yourself to some willing Parisian distraction as you keep checking your lists. 

Three Kinds of Crime Fiction/Mystery, 3 Settings: Hamburg, Fiji, Maine

Catching up a bit ...

I picked up HAMBURG NOIR over the summer, as it had an August release date. Part of the top-notch and provocative Akashic Noir series, it's edited by Jan Karsten and mostly translated -- 11 out of the 14 stories -- by Noah Harley. The book's presented in three sections: Water & Schnapps, Dream & Reality, Power & Oblivion. The 10-page introduction is extraordinary in itself, an introduction to the German city from a lover's lips.

When I opened the book, I expected to taste something of the city where my father was born, in 1925, to parents "just Jewish enough" to need to leave their homeland. But that Hamburg is not in the book, and the reason's clear in looking at the author biographies: Most of the authors were born in the 1960s, long after war had changed their landscape. I was eager to read what Zoë Beck would contribute ("Abreast Schwartzonnensand"), as I'd read some of her other fiction. Hers turned out to be a courtroom scene shaped as a play, all dialogue, one of the most interesting works of crime fiction I've read. Other stories, more conventional in form, range from a handful of pages to a story of almost 30 pages by Matthias Wittekindt. And all of them, as expected, are dark, often twisted, even malicious.

I liked this passage from Katrin Seddig's tale, set in the Altona district:

I wasn't Miles Davis. The world wasn't a film noir, the world was gloomy and foolish, it had no beauty. That was the difficulty: to track down the beauty in it all. Wasn't that the essence? Everything always looked like something else to me—that, or I was left searching for it something that I already knew and hoped to find in what I was seeing.

If Hamburg is one of your love languages, pull this onto your bookshelf. If noir is how you wrestle with the world, ditto. And if you just want to play tourist -- well, this book will prevent you from going to Hamburg. So maybe take a pass, unless perhaps you're longing to feel better about New York by contrast.

Nilima Rao's second Fiji mystery featuring Sergeant Akal Singh came out in June. SHIPWRECK IN FIJI (Soho Crime), set in 1915, with the Great War echoing from the other side of the world, is indeed (as its press release claims) "brimming with warmth and humor." The Indian-born police officer is way out of his comfort zone, still struggling to grasp the culture in which he's been pinned. Chasing down possible Germans on a nearby island should seem familiar, but instead Akal lands in more confusion as he meets native villagers whose tribal customs may prevent pursuit of the criminals he's after. For the sake of his friend Taviti, ready to translate the local customs, Akal takes on a mentor's role in policing, and learns a great deal about the "true stories" that men tell each other. I couldn't put this one down. (And you don't need to have read the first in the series, A Disappearance in Fiji, but you'll probably want to catch up with it after Akal has you applauding his efforts.)

I didn't realize at first that Scott Carson was the pseudonym of Michael Koryta --  if I'd known, I might not have tried the new title under the Carson authorship, DEPARTURE 37, for fear it would be "too terrifying" for my taste. That would have been my loss! It's rare that an author can provide underpinnings to time travel as part of a crime novel or thriller and have it all make sense. This book, set in coastal northern Maine, takes 16-year-old Charlie through a naval experiment that tears open her life, starting with the moment when her deceased mother's voice speaks to her from the cockpit of a wrecked plane, saying what hundreds of pilots across the country are also hearing in the voices of people they love: Don't fly today. I refuse to offer any spoilers ... that should be enough to let you know whether this is your kind of good read. To my delight, it was one of my best treats of the season, and goes onto my "let's read this again" shelf, for sure, with its attachment to "the most famous moment in the history of artificial intelligence."

More reviews soon, as I'm now writing them for two other publications, just figuring out my footing. Or pagination.