Nancy Drew Mutates into Victor Carl

I am back into my murder mystery addiction, something that started when I was 12 and decided to read every Nancy Drew.  Now I have discovered William Lasher's Victor Carl series.  So far, I have finished Bag Man and Marked Man.  Bag Man is better, but maybe the first encounter with any author is always the most memorable.  Lasher evokes Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane.  His throw away paragraphs, scene setters or Victor's internal musings, are forte performances in noir fiction.

I am about to start A Killer's Kiss.  These books call to me ... interfering with my best intentions to chop ice in the driveway and back Christmas cookie dough.  Ah well, the temperature is above freezing and I don't have to drive tomorrow and the garbage cans are out by the curb already, and four batches are in the refrig and another just waiting for its flour so some day after work when I have energy, ha, I will bake them all.

More Carl to follow,

Today is Christmas and my drive to read all Lasher continues.  I finished Fatal Flaw and actually said Wow out loud when the final page was turned.  Both A Killer's Kiss and Fatal Flaw have main characters juxtaposed against Victor:  a former lover who is the murderer in the former, a a current lover who is the victim in the second.

In addition to the power-house writing style, I enjoy how Lasher has echo or parallel themes in all his books:  Other minor characters whose lives mirror his own as in Bag Man and especially in Fatal Flaw where the intrigue is compounded by the prime suspect also being the lover of the victim and the motive of giving it all up or bargaining for love seeps through all characters in the story, some more creepy or opportunistic than the others.

I am moving on to Lasher's first book from 1995, Hostile Witness.

In the meantime, today was reading day since all the gifts were open last night, the tree trimmed days ago, and no fancy cooking planned.  Read cover to cover American Catch - The Fight for Our Local Seafood by Paul Greenberg.  He has three major sections on NYC former oyster beds, there destruction and attempts at regeneration despite Chris Christie and Hurricane Sandy; the decline of shrimping in Louisiana as much attributable to the Army Corps of Engineers channeling the Mississippi as to the oil industry and spills (both oysters and Louisiana topics I wrote about previously); and threats to wild salmon fishing in Bristol Bay Alaska from mining for gold and copper.  Overlaying the State issues is the unsophisticated pallet of Americans, choosing farm bred imported low nutritional value fish over Atlantic and Pacific fishermen.  Rededicates my purchases to Fin, long live Fin.