Where does it hurt? Everywhere you can possibly imagine, if you're a Long Island ex-cop pressed into taking a dead-end case on behalf of a dead client. The sudden death of his son, John Jr., on a basketball court ended Gus Murphy's life as he knew it. Two years later, he's retired from the Suffolk County PD, divorced from his wife, Annie, on the outs with his self-destructive daughter, Kristen, and eking out a living working as a house dick and van driver for an airport motel. So one thing he's not prepared for is a visit from Tommy Delcamino, a petty crook he arrested more than once, who's not satisfied that the cops have done everything they could to catch whoever killed his son, TJ, a car thief who was tortured to death last summer, and offers Gus $3,000, every cent he has, to look into it. Assuming that Tommy D is counting on his own bereavement to garner his sympathy, Gus throws him out, and by the time his old friend Father Bill Kilkenny, a police chaplain who's left the church, has persuaded him to apologize to Tommy, the potential client is about to follow his son to the grave. Now it's impossible to pull Gus, whose depressive streak is matched only by his bulldog determination, off the case. Tracking down three lowlifes connected to TJdrug lord Kareem Shivers, local dealer Lamar England, and mobbed-up carting scion Frankie Tacoshe quickly finds himself in a whirlpool of sex, drugs, murder, and warnings to walk away. The plot never exactly thickens, but a significant proportion of the cast will end up sleeping the big sleep. Fans who find Gus' "portable dark cloud" appealing will be glad to know that Coleman (Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins, 2015, etc.) plans to build a new series around him. Bring on the gloom and doom. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

LET'S MAKE A LIST of the dubious delights that await you in HONKY TONK SAMURAI (Mulholland, $26), the latest outing for Joe R. Lansdale's perpetual bad boys, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. There's excessive violence (eye-gouging and such), to be sure, as well as raunchy language, sexist attitudes, tasteless humor, adolescent clowning around and general vulgarity. Not to mention characters named Weasel and Booger. Hap, who's proud to identify himself as a "very juvenile and pretty crass" rebel from East Texas, and his sidekick, Leonard, who's black, gay and tougher than rawhide, step into it with both feet when Leonard beats up a citizen on his own front lawn after seeing him abusing his dog. Then Lilly Buckner, a foul-mouthed old lady who recorded the dust-up on her tablet, blackmails them into looking for her granddaughter, who has disappeared from the dealership where she worked selling high-end used cars. It doesn't take long for Hap and Leonard to figure out that something hotter than vintage autos is being peddled from this showroom, but the nature of the merchandise and the extent of the criminal enterprise involved in its distribution will have the boys facing the Dixie Mafia. Lansdale's characters can be as down-to-earth as Hap's live-in girlfriend, Brett, who owns the private investigation agency where he and Leonard work. Others, like the transgender Frank, who acts as a front for the real owners of Frank's Unique Used Cars, are more loosely tethered to this green earth. And then there are the bad guys, from the bikers who ride with Apocalypse on Wheels to various locally grown sociopaths ("Some got three teeth and two are in their pocket"). Best of all are the women warriors like Vanilla Ride, who shows up for battle in "black leather pants so tight you could see the outline of a quarter in her pocket" and keeps a stash of sniper rifles in the back seat of her 1982 Buick. She's a pure computer-generated action figure auditioning for her own video game - and a ton of fun. WHEN YOU READ about sadists who have brutalized their housekeepers or au pairs, you try not to think about what life was like for those poor slaveys. But Minette Walters lets her imagination run free in THE CELLAR (Mysterious, $24) and emerges with an intimate and upsetting story about Ebuka and Yetunde Songoli, a rich immigrant couple from an unnamed West African nation who claimed 8-year-old Muna from an orphanage and took her to England. Confined to the cellar on a wretched mattress and allowed upstairs only to cook and clean, Muna is routinely raped by her master and beaten by her mistress (who insists on being called "Princess") until she's 14, when the younger of the Songolis' two sons fails to show up at school and a policewoman arrives at the house to question the family. Walters is no Ruth Rendell, but here she writes with the subtle cruelty and pitiless insights of that author's alter ego, Barbara Vine. There's no mercy in her depiction of the abusive Songolis, yet Muna enjoys a gratifying reversal of fortune when the visits of the police compel the couple to pass her off as their disabled daughter. And Walters has more sinister plans for this clever girl, who is soon able to declare: "I am what you and Princess have made me, Master," proving she has assimilated the lessons in evil she learned at their hands. TOWNS THAT FALL on the glide paths to airport runways are great locations for a book like WHERE IT HURTS (Putnam, $27), the first in a new series by Reed Farrel Coleman about Gus Murphy, a morose part-time house detective who drives a courtesy van between the Paragon Hotel ("paragon of nothing so much as proximity," according to Gus) and Long Island MacArthur Airport in Suffolk County. As an ex-cop, Gus was well acquainted with small-time crooks like Tommy D., who turns up at the hotel and gets nowhere when he begs him to investigate the murder of his son. Gus is too broken up about his own son's death to handle another father's grief, but when Tommy is also gunned down, guilt and "a sense of purpose beyond mourning" jolt him back to life. Although it's overplotted, Coleman's busy book - set far from the Hamptons in "those ugly patches we Long Islanders like to pretend don't exist"- has plenty of robust regional flavor. THE GOTHIC THRILLER is a treacherous genre, but Christobel Kent does a nice job balancing the requisite features of dreamy romance and eerie atmosphere in THE CROOKED HOUSE (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). When she was still in her teens, Esme survived a massacre that took the lives of her mother, twin sisters and older brother and left her father a brain-damaged wreck. You'd think that as a grown woman who now lives in London and calls herself Alison, she'd have the sense to stay far away from the scene of that atrocity. But her lover, an older academic who knows nothing of her past, sweet-talks her into going to a wedding back in Saltleigh, a bleak estuary town where "all roads led to the water" and the "fossilized stumps" of Saxon villages lie buried in the marshes. Although the father of the bride insists that "this is a perfectly normal village," Saltleigh's brooding atmosphere and history of violent tragedy make both the town and its unfortunate inhabitants seem hopelessly cursed.

*Starred Review* Former Long Island cop Gus Murphy retreated to a low-key existence as a hotel detective after his son's abrupt death unraveled his marriage and dissolved his dedication to the badge. When petty criminal Tommy Delcamino tracks Gus down and begs him to investigate his son TJ's violent murder, Gus has no intention of stirring up his own grief by tangling with another father's loss. But when he finds Tommy's body and is nearly shot by the killers, Gus needs his own answers. Warned off the case by cops and a deadly drug dealer, Gus obstinately digs into the investigation by interviewing the handful of witnesses Tommy listed in his amateur murder book. As he dissects the stories of a former outlaw biker, an outcast con man, a Mob-connected fence, and TJ's closest friend, Gus dodges attacks on his life with the help of his secretive, battle-ready coworker, Slava. Gus, who is absolutely one of genre veteran Coleman's best-drawn characters, brings the hard-boiled investigator's requisite battle scars to the table without the self-destructive bent we've been trained to expect. Instead, he meets his tragedy and its consequences with a considered straightforwardness, and his desire for justice reawakens in time with the investigation's quickening tempo, hopefully signaling the start of a series.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2015 Booklist

Edgar-finalist Coleman (Soul Patch) offers a searing look at the dark underside of Long Island in this stellar series kickoff. Ex-cop Gus Murphy, whose 20-year-old son, John Jr., dropped dead playing basketball, works as a night shift van driver and house detective for a hotel whose lobby was "a pretty grand sight if you didn't look too closely, and if your taste ran to despair." His reputation as an honest cop leads thug Tommy Delcamino to ask Gus to help him find the person responsible for the brutal torture and murder of Tommy's son, TJ, after the Suffolk County PD fail to give the case much attention. Gus refuses, out of anger that Tommy is trying to take advantage of Gus's loss of John Jr., but he changes his mind after another murder. Coleman's moving portrayal of a man in deep, deep pain, a tightly constructed plot, and a gift for making Long Island seem like James Ellroy's L.A. add up to a winner. Agent: David Hale Smith, Inkwell Management. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In the two years since his son suddenly died, Gus Murphy, an ex-Suffolk County, NY, police officer, has suffered depression and a collapsed marriage, and is now living in a low-class hotel and driving its van to and from the railroad station. When Tommy Delcamino, an ex-con whom Murphy arrested several times, asks for his help in finding the murderer of his lowlife, druggie son, TJ, because the police are doing nothing, Murphy thinks he's playing the "dead son" card and tells him to shove it. However, he soon realizes the man has nowhere else to turn. When he goes to Delcamino's home and finds him brutally murdered, Murphy has no choice but to solve both murders, theorizing they are connected. That he is warned off by both policemen and drug dealers only strengthens Murphy's resolve. VERDICT The author of the "Moe Prager" series has created another engaging sleuth in the down-but-not-out Gus. His cynicism about God, the income divide on Long Island, and police corruption add dimension to his protagonist. The ancillary characters, both good and bad, are also a fascinating mix. Moe Prager fans will hail this new series, as will lovers of solid mysteries, especially those set on Long Island.-Edward Goldberg, Syosset P.L., NY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.