Harry Dolan’s Very Bad Men is the second book in the David Loogan series,  Dolan’s follow-up to Bad Things Happen about which Stephen King  said….. “Great F****ing Book Man, I was totally hooked”  I am in total agreement with the great Mr. King’s assessment of Bad Things Happen and I feel the same way about  Very Bad Men!!

In Harry Dolan’s Very Bad Men, David Loogan and Elizabeth Waishkey have settled down to a simple life  after the tumultuous events in Bad Things Happen, until one day when David, as editor of Gray Streets magazine receives a manuscript that begins “ I killed Henry Kormoran”.  Not  long after David receives the manuscript, Detective Waishkey is assigned to a new murder case – Henry Kormoran,  and once again it appears that David and Elizabeth are on the trail of a psychotic killer. This time the killer is targeting members of a gang that attempted to rob the Great Lakes Bank seventeen years prior! During the attempted robbery Terry Dawtrey shot Sheriff Harlan Spencer, leaving Spencer paralyzed.  Now, Spencer’s daughter Callie is running for the Senate and the current killings are dredging up old memories about the robbery that may upset Callie’s campaign, especially with investigative  reporter Lucy Navarro on the case for the tabloid The National Current!  The question becomes who and why is somebody targeting these men after such a long time.??? Is it Callie and her campaign, was she involved in the robbery?  Or is it someone else??

Thoughts About Very Bad Men

Harry Dolan once again delivers a top-notch, intricately plotted mystery. While the setting is the present  day, the writing  creates a feel similar to one that one gets when reading Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Does anyone else see Humphrey Bogart playing David Loogan!

The characters are vivid and the twists and turns of the plot keep the reader guessing and, at least for me, quickly turning the pages!!

Grade  A+

Bottomiine:

A series that, while it is still in its infancy, is getting better with each book, and I can’t wait to move on  to the next installment The Last Dead Girl..

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Book 33 for 2014

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A couple of Saturday’s ago, I was browsing through the books at Barnes & Noble and I came across The Last Dead Girl, Book # 3 in the David Loogan series written by Harry Dolan.

On the dust jacket of the book I read that Stephen King called Dolan’s book Bad Things Happen   “a “great f***ing book“! When I came home, I went to my local libraries website and requested the book. I was captivated by the book from the opening sentence, the pages flew by and it quickly became Book 29 of 2014, and I agree with Mr King in is  a great f***king book!

The reader first meets the protagonist of the book, the mysterious David Loogan, while he is purchasing a shovel and some assorted gardening supplies, only David is not going to be doing any gardening,, no he is going to be digging a grave! A grave in which he and  his new employer Tom Kristoll, owner and editor of the mystery magazine Gray Streets, will bury a body. Days later, Tom Kristoll plummets from his sixth floor office window the victim of an apparent suicide. Was it really suicide or was it murder? David thinks it’s murder, as does Elizabeth Waishkey a top detective in the Ann Arbor Police Department, Soon the action in the book begins to follow the typical formula of a Gray Streets mystery “Plans go wrong, Bad Things Happen, People Die”  As more bodies pile up, David is determined to discover who killed his friend, and while Elizabeth wants to believe David is an innocent player in the mystery, ,after a detective from New York shows up and reveals that Loogan was once indicted for MURDER, that becomes a little harder!

This book was a real page turner for me I agree wholeheartedly with what Publishers Weekly says about the book in their starred review of the book

“Dolan gets everything  right in his debut….Pitch-perfect prose and sophisticated characterizations driven by the noirish plot, which offers plenty of unexpected twists. Fans of Peter Abraham and Scott Turow will find a lot to like…. The talent Dolan displays suggests he has a bright future.”

I couldn’t have said it better himself!

Bottomline: A great page-turner, written by an expert at simple prose that conveys way more, in way less! A book that sends you looking for the next book in the series, which I have already requested from my library!!

Grade A – Check It Out!!

The post After a Great Read – Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan – I can’t wait to begin Very Bad Man! appeared first on .