The Second Life of Nick MasonBy Steve HamiltonPutnam, 2016Seven Days DeadBy John FarrowMinotaur, 2016Steve Hamilton’s debut novel A Cold Day in Paradise(1998) introduced former Detroit cop Alex McKnight, who traded his badge for a cabin in the woods and a new career as a private eye. It won an Edgar for Best First Novel and launched a highly successful series. Hamilton went on to win another Edgar for Best Novel with his stand-alone The Lock Artist(2010). He is only the third author to win Edgars for both categories (the first was Ross Thomas and the third this year’s Edgar winner for Best Novel, Lori Roy). Hamilton has either won or been nominated for every major crime fiction award in America and the UK.The Second Life of Nick Mason is a high-voltage series launch that brilliantly adds to his body of work. Nick Mason grew up in a tough Chicago neighborhood where crime is almost the only thing that pays. Mason got his start stealing cars, and moved on to robbing drug dealers with two of his buddies, Eddie and Finn:

It took less time than stealing a car, it paid twice the money, and nobody involved in this transaction had any interest in calling the policeAfter six years of stealing cars and two of taking down drug dealers, Mason moved on to high-end robbery, safe-cracking. He got really good at it and got back with a girl he had met when they were both in their teens. Her name was Gina Sullivan:Gina had one rule for Nick. The only rule she needed. The straight life with me or the life you’re living without me.Nick chose life with Gina Sullivan. Because nobody on planet Earth could ever push his buttons like this woman could.

They get married and have a daughter and he concentrates on being “a normal working stiff.” Until he gets suckered into the classic last heist, the big score that can’t go wrong—except that it does. One dead DEA agent and one dead friend later, Mason winds up in Terre Haute in a maximum security prison, doing 25 to life and refusing to name the fed’s real killer. Mason’s stoicism and an ironclad set of personal rules, his code of honor, help him cope with prison life. The most basic rule: When in doubt, keep your mouth shut. In his own uncompromising way, he moves around the three worlds inside, White, Black, Latino, without trouble. His comportment earns him the up close and personal attention of Darius Cole.Cole, who is serving a double-life term, is the head honcho within the walls. He has an “office” in the Secure Housing Unit, a separate wing for the high-profile offenders. Everyone calls him “Mr. Cole,” even the guards. Once a Chicago crime boss, he still controls an international network of criminal activity. Mr. Cole born in the Englewood section of Chicago, learned the fine art of money laundering at thirteen:

By the time he was twenty, Cole had a minority share in a dozen restaurants. In barbershops. In car washes…. He’d mix in drug money with the cash proceeds and deposit it all as legitimate income.He paid federal agents to keep him out of the files. FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, even Interpol. Cole stayed invisible.He bought more businesses all over the country…. By the time he was thirty, Cole had grown smarter and even more powerful. He expanded overseas…using accounts in other people’s names. …People who knew the penalty for betraying him…. When the time was right, he moved back into the drug business, but he did it the smart way, on the wholesale end…. He hired the best accountants. He hired the best attorneys. And he paid off the dirtiest cops. He grew his business into an empire.Most cops know how to follow criminals. Only a select few are good at following money. Cole stayed ahead of them for years until they finally brought him down on a federal RICO case. He’d been here in Terre Haute ever since.

Five years into Nick Mason’s sentence, Cole offers to purchase his freedom. He’ll be Cole’s “special warrior” on the outside. All Mason has to do is answer a special cell phone whenever it rings and obey the instructions he receives. Blindsided by the hope that he can rebuild a life with his wife and daughter (a notion that Cole merely hints at) Mason takes the deal. It can best be described as “Faustian.”Upon his release, a black Escalade chauffeured by a Hispanic man with sunglasses picks him up. They ride in silence. The driver doesn’t offer so much as a sideways glance on the long ride to Chicago. Mason is ever mindful of his basic rule: When in doubt, keep your mouth shut. The tattoos on the driver’s arms identify him as a member of the Mexican gang that dominates the West side of Chicago. Mason is stressed out. Rule number nine: Never work with gang members. When they pull up in front of a Lincoln Park town house, the driver breaks his silence:

“My name is Quintero.” He made the name sound like it came from the bottom of a tequila bottle. Keen-TAY-ro. “You need something you call me…. Don’t get creative. Don’t try to fix anything yourself. You call me. Clear so far?”Mason turned and looked out the window.“Why are we here?”“This is where you live now.”“Guys like me don’t live in Lincoln Park,” Mason said.“I’m going to give you a cell phone. You’re going to answer this phone when I call you …There is no unavailable. There is only you answering this phone. Then doing exactly what I tell you to do…. Keep your phone on.”

He gives him the phone, the keys to the house, ten thousand in cash, a sum he can expect the first day of each month, and some food for thought:

“One more thing,” Quintero said, “This isn’t freedom. This is mobility. Don’t get those two things confused.”

The town house is the last word in luxury. It’s got a full gym, billiard room, a three foot humidor, world class wine cellar, and outside the sliding glass door of the sleek, modern kitchen, a swimming pool lit up with underwater lights. The pièce de résistance is the Mustang in the garage. It’s a 1968 390 GT Fastback, a jet-black version of the car Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt:

He’d never stolen a car like this because you don’t steal a masterpiece and take it to the chop shop. You don’t steal a car like this and drive it yourself no matter how much you want to. That’s how amateurs get caught.

It’s all his to drive. The house also contains an attractive, enigmatic female housemate who divulges only that she and Cole go back a long way. Seems he’s got two minders.When the first call finally comes, Mason goes to meet Quintero with a gut feeling that his life will never be the same. Cole’s instructions come with a motel key and boil down to helping a man “check out.” And he means out of life, not the room.

This is it, Mason said to himself. I made this deal. I didn’t give him any exceptions. I didn’t say there are certain things I will not do. I just said yes.…Mason stood there looking at the key…. “One thing I’ve never done,” Mason finally said.“I know you’re here for a reason,” Quintero said. “Cole doesn’t make mistakes. So you better get yourself ready, cuate.”Mason put the key in his pocket and walked away.“First one’s a bitch,” Quintero said to his back. “Then it gets easy.”

Now he’s a paid assassin in a gilded cage. Each new assignment is viler than the last. He’s caught up in a vise of evil. The cops, especially the one who put him away, are on his tail. Worse, things go seriously awry with Gina, who’s become his ex-wife, and their nine-year-old daughter. Mason rebels and takes matters into his own hands – the hell with the consequences.The Second Life of Nick Mason moves with the speed of lightning to a resolution you won’t see coming. The breakneck pacing plus the pitch perfect pared down prose make this fine thriller work on all levels. Hamilton gives us in Mason an anti-hero awash in moral ambiguity that we root for because of his flaws. In the end we absolve him of his sins so that when we meet him again—and there is every indication that we surely will—it is with high hopes and pure anticipation.Finally, this novel arrived with a slew of encomiums from a roster of authors that reads like a veritable who’s who of the top writers in the field. Deservedly so. It’s that good.It’s a long way from the underbelly of Chicago to Grand Manan, an island off the coast of Maine. This is where John Farrow’s Seven Days Dead takes place. John Farrow is the pen name of Canadian novelist Trevor Ferguson. Under that name he created the series starring the chief detective in the Montreal police, Emile Cinq-Mars, which began with City of Ice in 1999. Four highly acclaimed novels later, he began a trilogy within this series that focused on storm ravaged locations and featured a retired Cinq-Mars. The first was The Storm Murders(2015).Seven Days Dead, the second in the series, opens as a woman races by boat in an epic storm to get to her dying father. He is Alfred Royce Orrock, expiring in his mansion on Grand Manan, where he owns most of the industry:

Time will not wait for anyone, she knows, and certainly not for her.Nor will the tide.Nor will her dying father.Bastard...Yet the race to arrive before his death is on.

Meanwhile the Reverend Simon Lescavage, accustomed to being summoned by Orrock, has endured the storm to get to him. The pastor is well acquainted with the old man’s idiosyncrasies and failings perhaps even the depths of his depravity. Thus there is no love lost between them, though the pastor is a frequent albeit reluctant visitor. Tonight he suspects it might be to hear Orrock’s final confession.Maddy manages to get to her father’s house only to find him already dead. In the gale’s wake another body surfaces: it is the Reverend Lescavage, his corpse eviscerated and tied to a tree overlooking the sea. Coincidentally, Emile Cinq-Mars and his wife Sandra are spending their first ever summer holiday on the island. They arrived the night before by ferry, having persevered through weather that in their view was fit for Noah’s Ark.Emile dislikes retirement intensely, as evidenced in The Storm Murders. He’s also not overly fond of vacations. So when it turns out that Alfred Orrock didn’t die of natural causes, he is not averse to being roped into the investigation by Maddy, who the local Mounties consider their prime suspect. It isn’t long before he has cause to wonder if the Reverend’s grisly death is connected to the old man’s. And who are the odd lot of men and women who were out in the maelstrom and had congregated on Seven Days Work, the sheer cliff overlooking the sea? Why were they there? And what of Aaron Oscar Roadcap who found the pastor’s body not far from that sheer cliff. What was he doing out on such a night?As is his wont, Cinq-Mars enjoys sparring with the taciturn fisherman and the dulse (seaweed) harvesters who inhabit the island. An old school detective, he’s been called the Hercule Poirot of Canada, as he relies on his intelligence and intuition in place of technology. Very little escapes his practiced eye. Masterfully, he ever so subtly inveigles the darkest of secrets out of hiding to solve the case.Seven Days Dead is an entertaining, literate, character-rich thriller. Cinq-Mars is as delightful as that other beguiling Canadian cop, Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache. Happily, we have the third installment of the trilogy to look forward to.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.