Review: "Photograph" by Brian Freeman

 

Photograph by Brian Freeman Blackstone, 2025     In Brian Freeman’s excellent psychological thriller, Photograph—which is due in bookstores Oct. 7th—a Daytona, Florida, private eye, Shannon Wells, is hired for a peculiar job. A worried, middle-aged accountant named Faith Selby, asks Shannon to “[j]ust find out who I am…. That’s all I need to know.” Shannon takes the request at face value and while she finds evidence Faith Selby started life as someone else, she is unable to identify who exactly that someone else was. And it appears this conclusion is exactly what Faith was hoping for. Almost a year later Shannon finds another Selby—Faith’s daughter, Kate—sitting across from her “office” table at a seaside tiki bar inquiring why Shannon had been hired by Kate’s mother. Shannon balks at the request until Kate reveals Faith has been murdered. Kate believes the murder is related to a photograph Faith took of a young girl standing next to a vending machine, her back to the camera, in the parking lot of a roadside motel. The photograph was taken 26-years earlier and it appeared, without Faith’s consent, in a recent coffee table book called Millenium Memories. Shannon agrees to help Kate find Faith’s killer and, using the photograph as her only real clue, she follows a trail of violence and menace to smalltown Michigan where she learns the photograph may be related to an unsolved murder from 1999. Photograph is an atmospheric and wickedly plotted thriller with a touch of the supernatural—Shannon is haunted by nightmares of a woman being murdered in what may be a flashback to her own murder in a past life. The action is lively: there are gunfights, tightly ratcheted tension, and surprise after twisty surprise. While the concept is big and (some might say) over-the-top, Freeman’s clever plotting, his attention to detail, and his likable heroine smooth Photograph into a nail-biting, exciting, and caffeinated literary treat. It should appeal to readers of psychological thrillers, suspense, and mainstream thrillers in equal doses.

Check out Photograph on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Review: "An Honorable Assassin" by Steve Hamilton

 

An Honorable Assassin by Steve Hamilton Blackstone, 2024   Steve Hamilton is best known for his series featuring former Detroit cop turned reluctant Upper Peninsula private eye, Alex McKnight. McKnight appeared in eleven novels between 1999 and 2018. The first, A Cold Day in Paradise—which I heartily recommend—netted Hamilton an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The McKnight books are meaty, well-plotted, character-driven extravaganzas, but they never attracted many readers outside the P.I. genre. Which is a shame because they are as good as anything the mystery genre has to offer. In 2016, Hamilton changed course and released a crime thriller, The Second Life of Nick Mason, to great fanfare. It made multiple best-of-year lists, including from NPR and Kirkus Reviews and, perhaps most telling, it landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Second Life of Nick Mason combined a rich Chicago setting with solid characterization and an intricate (and surprising) plot. It, frankly, surpassed most thrillers of its kind on every level. Hamilton followed it up with the second Nick Mason book, Exit Strategy, in 2017, then in 2018 released an oddball Alex McKnight book—odd because, unlike the other McKnight books, it alternates between first and third person and is told from multiple character perspectives—titled Dead Man Running. Since then, other than a co-authored novel with Janet Evanovich, Steve Hamilton has been silent. At least until now, because his third Nick Mason title, An Honorable Assassin, is scheduled for release tomorrow (Aug. 27). The Second Life of Nick Mason opened with Mason being released from a 25-years-to-life sentence, for a truck heist gone wrong, after serving only five years. Part of the deal is Mason must work as an assassin for a Chicago gangster named Darius Cole; the guy who arranged for Mason’s release. Those first two books are about Mason’s struggle to break free from Cole and now in An Honorable Assassin, after he has finally escaped Cole, he finds himself bound to a mysterious and sinister international cartel. An Honorable Assassin begins only hours after Exit Strategy ends. Mason is sent to the world’s second largest city, Jakarta, Indonesia, without any instructions except that he’ll be met at the airport. When he arrives in Jakarta, even before he has left the airport, Mason’s first assignment is dished out—assassinate a wealthy terrorist sponsor named Hasham Baya as he arrives on a skyscraper’s helipad. Everything goes wrong: Baya escapes, the building is overrun by Indonesia’s paramilitary unit, Detachement-88, and Mason is arrested. The mission planning seems non-existent to Mason and, even worse, before he can get out of police custody a French Interpol agent, Martin Sauvage, takes an interest in him. Unlike Hamilton’s first two Nick Mason novels, which are a marvelous marriage of the crime and the thriller genres, An Honorable Assassin is a straight-line rocket propelled thriller. It is closer to Lee Child and David Baldacci than what we are used to seeing from Hamilton, but the electric style and frenetic pacing keep the pages turning and the reader from wandering into the improbabilities of the plot. A step below the first two books in the series, An Honorable Assassin is still a bunch of fun and very much worth reading.

Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the paperback at Amazon.