Police At The Station And They Don't Look Friendly, McKinty - B+

                 This series just gets better with each reading, although I suspect the next one will be the finale. Duffy and Beth are living in his house with their infant daughter. He is very suspicious about the murder of a drug dealer with a bolt from a crossbow. He and his team begin to dig and hackles are raised all over Ireland. An IRA team kidnaps him, and only his combat skills allow him to live. He suspects that there's some connection between the IRA man he is after, and a highly placed mole in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. When his house is attacked, he knows that his suspicions are correct. He lays a trap, catches the two men behind it all, and negotiates a quasi-retirement from the RUC that will, in about a year, allow him, Beth, and Emma to escape to Scotland. As good as they get.

A Grave in the Woods, Walker - B+

           This is another fabulous book in the Bruno, Chief of Police series. It is also a vivid reminder that before the author semi-retired to the south of France, he was a noted historian, as this novel has the most history of any of the others. A grave is opened in an abandoned church graveyard. Two German women, with their Wehrmacht id's, are found naked, and it is obvious that they were raped by the Resistance and murdered. An Italian naval officer who was shot was buried with them. The grave has been expertly sealed in cement. The findings bring the press, German and Italian diplomats, and French forensic officers to St. Denis. Bruno and the Mayor organize a superb ceremony to honor the war's dead and then protect St. Denis from a flood.

Ghosts Of Belfast, Neville - B+

                  The 'ghosts' are the twelve people Gerry Fegan murdered when he was an IRA hitman. Most of the dozen, whose faces haunt and follow him through Belfast, are Ulster paras, a few cops, and unfortunately, a few innocent civilians. The only way Gerry can expunge the visions of them is to kill again, and his first victim is an old friend now in the IRA hierarchy. Before he is buried, Fegan takes out another IRA troublemaker. As he had been with both men the night they died, he becomes a target for the party. They come after him, he is ready and bangs up the assassin. Before he leaves town, he sends the IRA's priest to his eternal reward for violating the sanctity of the confessional, among other sins. However, when the IRA kidnap another outcast, a woman and her daughter who Gerry is protecting, he turns himself in. When a different captive slows down the IRA's torturers, Gerry seizes the opportunity and escapes with Maria and Ellen. He bribes his way onto a Chinese trawler in Belfast harbor and leaves behind Ireland and its ghosts forever.

               This novel from 2009 is famous as Northern Ireland's best crime story, and one that graphically illustrates the dysfunctional horror that was the Troubles and its aftermath.

Everyone Knows But You, Ricks - B

           A young FBI agent in San Diego loses his family in a car accident and, in his demoralized state, asks to be sent as far away as possible. In Bangor, Maine, he is called out when a body shows up on the shore of federal land. Upon examination, the lobsterman's head has been bashed in. Thus, he begins his investigation into an amazingly closed island community where the lobstermen all fish areas of the ocean that have been in their families for generations. Needless to say, outsiders are not welcome. On Liberty Island, "we take care of our own." Eventually, a confession is coaxed out a leading citizen who did in one of the worst men in town who served what he got. Intriguing debut novel by a noted military historian.

The Incorruptibles: A True Story Of Kingpins, Crime Busters, And The Birth Of The American Underworld, Slater - B, Inc.

                      This story begins in Manhattan in the 1890's. It is about those "who had left the largest ghetto in the world - the Pale of Settlement - and lived in what would soon become the most crowded ghetto in history, the East Side of New York." Their children learned English and became street wise practitioners  of many skills, one of the most desired of which was mathematics, especially useful  in the gambling trades. In this world, young, ambitious Arnold Rothstein began his career as a gambler and hustler who dreamed of cracking the big time. "The East Side became an incubator of delinquency" and another young man, Abe Schoenfeld, a future reformer, "watched a Jewish underworld coalesce in real time." Rothstein so impressed Big Tim Sullivan of Tammany Hall that he granted a gambling concession to Arnold in mid-town's west side Tenderloin district. Schoenfeld attracted the attention of the wealthy and famous Jewish philanthropist, Jacob Schiff.            At the almost half-way point, nothing seems to be developing. I'm certain it will, but too slow for me.