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Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mysteries)

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I read a couple of books over the weekend and had a good time with both, but the real find, for me, was Jon Talton's _Concrete Desert_, the debut of his character David Mapstone.

Mapstone holds a PhD in history and is in-between academic jobs, working part-time as a deputy for the sheriff's department in Phoenix. His job is to pull old, unsolved cases from the files and see if he can't put together some new leads. At the same time, he's approached by an old girlfriend, to pull some strings and see if he can find a lead on her missing sister. When his search for the sister begins to entangle itself with a 40-year-old unsolved murder, which might have been the work of a serial killer called "the Creeper," Mapstone begins to receive threats on his life.

Talton does a great job with setting here, bringing Phoenix and the 100+ degree summer heat to convincing life. Also, the historical research that his detective must do adds a fascinating touch to the novel and allows for quite a bit of comparison between the old city and the new one, which is growing at the rate of an acre of desert being taken over by development every hour. This historical digging into old cases is a neat idea for a fictional detective/mystery series and should lead to many more interesting future novels.

Talton also does a good job of creating some background characters, such as Mapstone's boss/mentor, Chief Deputy Mike Peralta, and a love interest, Lindsay Adams, who works in the records department. Both are characters we want to know more about and will, I hope, feature in future David Mapstone mysteries. A very promising debut!

Because he was politically incorrect, Professor David Mapstone failed to attain tenure at San Diego State or obtain a job at his alma mater Arizona State. He return to his hometown of Phoenix to accept a job at the sheriff's office working cold but open cases. He also teaches an American History course at the local college.

Maricopa County Chief Deputy Mike Perralta, David's former partner when he worked as a cop, assigns the professor with the 1959 Rebecca Stokes murder. At the same time, David's first girlfriend Julie Riding, who dumped him twenty years, ago asks for his help in finding her missing sister Phaedra. On the Stokes case, David links the murder with four similar killings. When the police find the corpse of Phaedra, David sees the same pattern as he found in the Stokes inquiry. David wonders if the killer is a three-decade old copycat, the original "Creeper" back on line, or an attempt to hide the homicide within a serial investigation?

CONCRETE DESERT is an exciting, very entertaining police procedural with a slight twist in that the main character is not a law enforcement official. The story line is fun as the complex David feels genuine and the law enforcement side of the cast provides further depth to his character. Though Julie and the suspects seem two-dimensional, they do not take away from a wonderful investigative tale.

Harriet Klausner

It's hard to believe Jon Talton is a first-time novelist after sailing through this can't-put-it-down mystery. He handles characterizations of a jobless history professor and a law enforcement professional beautifully, then stirs in his setting in Phoenix and Arizona with equal loving care. The unusual plot, people and place are blended into a winner that, perhaps, can develop into a book series. One easily recognizes that somewhere back in his past Talton had expert tutoring in use of the English language. It shows here in Concrete Desert.

Talton's first book is a mystery set in Phoenix, AZ but it is of universal interest in the questions it raises in an underlying theme about the place we are rasied, leave and them return to, only to find it changed. It is an intriguing read, both as a mystery and for the larger questions artfully woven into it.

Great mystery book. Really enjoyed the setting in Phoenix as I am familiar with the area. However, it would be a great read for anyone who enjoys a good mystery.

Not bad for a first novel.

Granted, this book will be a shock for innocent Easterners who think of Phoenix (and other Southwestern cities) as clean modern places free of the drugs and street crime that plague old cities of the Rust Belt and East Coast.

Fact: most "East Coast" drugs are imported, much through cities such as Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque and El Paso. Fact: along with the smuggling of illegal aliens, drug's are a bloody and heartless business. Fact: Crime in Phoenix is almost double the rate for New York city, and property crime is more than double. Fact: culturally, Phoenix is still a cow town, but now it is also a high crime town.

Talton bases his story on these facts, presenting a hard-boiled story of crime and corruption in Phoenix. It is a story that is almost ignored by the daily press, which provides Talton with his day job; Talton is one of the first writers to fictionalize the reality of "the good life" in the sunshine of the Southwest. If you want a up-to-date factual account of the drug business along the US-Mexico border, look up Tucson author Charles Bowden.

Supposedly a fourth generation Arizonan, he's sometimes sloppy on easy to check facts, such as asserting Arizona had about 50,000 people when it became a state in 1912. The fact is closer to 200,000 by 1910. He offers a common theme that explosive growth has destroyed the old time atmosphere, apparently unaware that Arizona almost doubled in population in the decade preceding statehood. Yet, this whining about the passing of the "good ol' days" is a prevalent theme, the excuse used by long time residents to justify doing little or nothing about current problems.

It's an ideal setting for Talton's fictional investigator, failed history professor David Mapstone who's returned to Phoenix and been hired on a free-lance basis by an old friend in the Sheriff's Office. His job? Investigate old unsolved crimes, and see if he can come up with something new. It provides him with a job as a sworn sheriff's deputy and a license to do pretty much as he wants, including hot-dogging as a lone-wolf investigator of recent murders.

The principle villains, of course, are an Iranian immigrant and a corrupt politician. It's a nice bit of politically correct typecasting. The politician is vanquished, of course, but the Iranian villain lives on to generate villainy for future novels. If this sounds strange, keep in mind that of the last four elected governors of Arizona one was impeached and removed from office, another resigned after being indicted for criminal fraud and eventually pardoned by President Bill Clinton, whom he had never failed to denounce while in office.

Although the book is fiction, nothing Talton writes about is implausible in Phoenix or Arizona. That's what makes it so interesting; he's a wide-eyed innocent in pursuit of a good story, largely unaware of the cynicism of crime, politics and opportunism in Arizona. After all, too much of a good thing -- or bad thing, as the case may be -- tends to make fiction unreal. Talton manages a nice enough balance to create a fast-paced story.

All in all, it's a good introduction to the real Phoenix.

The Chamber of Commerce isn't going to like his books; but then, the Chamber and its blindness to problems is one reason the crime rate is so high. Perhaps if Talton can make a series out of these books, he'll generate enough heat and controversy that the police and sheriff's office will make an effort to clean up some of the persistent crime.

But then, in Phoenix old timers always found it easier to ignore or cover-up rather than confront problems. Talton, or his alter ego Mapstone, is an exception to that old habit. It provides the foundation for what should be a good series of books, and an intriguing unraveling of the social problems of the area.

This book is a good start on what could become a fascinating series. His second book, "Camelback Falls," is even better. Let's hope he continues improving, and that he finds a growing audience interesting in learning about the real Phoenix behind the stucco and red-tile roofed facade of precocious respectability.

Talton manages to make the city of Phoenix a central character in his novels. "It was July. High summer in Phoenix, when a temperature of 105 degrees is a relief...It's the time of year when the asphalt gets so hot, it can leave second-degree burns on your skin; when $ 350-a-night resorts hold half-price sales and everybody who can afford it heads to the ocean."

The main character is David Mapstone, a consultant to the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. But Mapstone isn't quite what you expect in a Deputy Sheriff. Because of his PhD in history, his job is to research cold cases. He's tall, interesting, talented, and modest. The author manages to inject subtle humor, often with Mapstone's self-deprecating comments.

Mapstone is contacted by Julie, a former girlfriend. Julie's younger sister is missing. The girl's body is soon found in the desert (popular for dumping bodies even today), and there are unusual similarities to a cold case. The hunt for a solution keeps the reader turning pages to see what will happen next, or who will be discussed.

Some of Arizona's notorious criminals are mentioned: Mapstone meets Julie at the Phoenician, a lovely hotel that still operates today. Mapstone comments on the opulent lobby, and Julie replies, "You know, Charlie Keating built this place...then the feds took it over in the S and L crash."

I enjoyed the book on so many levels, and couldn't put it down. Talton is a fourth-generation Arizonan and really knows how to keep the reader interested. As soon as I finished this book, I bought and read the other four Mapstone mysteries: Camelback Falls, Dry Heat, Cactus Heart, Arizona Dreams.

Where on earth do the people at Publishers' Weekly dig up their reviewers? The PW comments on this book couldn't be more divergent from the truth.

I suspect, to be honest, Talton is getting this treatment because he's not a "loyal Bushie". More and more, PW is disparaging novels that and novelists who fail to toe the GOP line. It's such a pity that the magazine's standards have sunk to such pitiful depths. Time was you expected PW reviews, while hardly in the Dr. Johnson mode, to be objective, bright, informed snapshots of the books in question. Some of them still are. And some of them are drek like this one.

David Mapstone is back in Phoenix during the heat of the summer and not exactly all by choice. Not only did he recently lose his teaching job at San Diego State thanks to the tenure committee's decision, he has to do something about his grandparent's house, which he recently inherited. For now, he is living in the house and dealing with the memories it represents and looking for a new teaching position. He is also working for Mike Peralta, his old friend and partner, at the Sheriff's Department where he is consulting on old cases to supplement his bank account and to have something to do. If that wasn't enough to keep him occupied, his old girlfriend, Julie Riding, walks back into his life by showing up at his grandparent's house late one night.

Mapstone still loves her, or at least her memory and what they had, and she needs a favor. Her sister, Phaedra Riding, is missing and has been for two weeks. Since Phaedra is 28, she is an adult and with no sign of foul play at all, the police aren't being much help beyond taking a report. Julie wants Mapstone to ask around at the Sheriff's Office while he is doing his consulting thing.

He does and before long, he sees a pattern in the case of Phaedra Riding that links it back to a series of murders that occurred forty years ago. Is Phaedra alive or is she a victim of a serial killer who has resurfaced? Or is Mapstone seeing things that aren't really there and unnecessarily bringing havoc, personal and professional, on himself as well as so many other lives?

Released in 2001, this novel was the first of a series and features David Mapstone, a conflicted character who isn't happy in his own skin. Almost noirish in style and feel, it does not have the deep dark mentality typically found in books classified as noir. Still, Mapstone, through the slowly developed back-story, clearly has enough guilt and repressed pain to serve for several novels. Added to that is a cast of secondary characters, both friends and foes, all of whom seem to have their own deep issues.

Those issues, which result in engaging secondary storylines one could reasonably expect to be carried forward into the subsequent novels of this series, also serve to make this book complex and multi layered. Relationships and the damage they can cause and heal is an important secondary theme of this novel as the human connection becomes more and more important to Mapstone throughout the course of the 212-page novel. The human connection is what drives the main storyline as Mapstone works through the past and present relationship with Julie while working an increasingly murky case. Those twists in the main storyline are woven together with events in the secondary storyline seamlessly and ultimately lead the reader to a violent confrontation that has devastating effects. Complexity in the mystery as well as in the characters along with vivid descriptions of setting, a strong sense of pace as this book does not drag at all, makes this novel one very good read.

Book Facts:

Concrete Desert
By Jon Talton
Thomas Dunne Books
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN# 0-312-26953-6
2001
Hardback


Kevin R. Tipple © 2005

David Mapstone is a history professor, acting as a deputy sheriff. Or is he a Deputy sheriff acting as a history professor? His old college sweetheart asks him to find her sister. He is working for the Sheriff's department to find the solution to a 40 year old crime. In the dark heat of the night, the two searches merge into a search for David's self. How is personal history measured?
This mystery novel is about questions... unasked, unanswerable and unwritten.

Or it could be just a good story with a great character and good sense of place. Keep writing, John!!