Before Mike could turn, something hard and heavy slammed into his head. He was a three-million-candlepower spotlight flaring white, then fading to dark. He was an empty gun floating to the bottom of a cold black lake. Then he was nothing at all.
---Sean Doolittle, Lake Country (Bantam Books, 2012)
Doolittle is one of the best current crime writers: his books are elegantly plotted and crisply written. Even if Doolittle's books were not original paperbacks I would still see him as the heir to John D. MacDonald and other crime writers who pioneered the paperback (John D. MacDonald published twenty-one Travis McGee novels -- which I reread every few years -- but also more than thirty other crime novels).
Doolittle's books are set in very specific locales with very specific denizens. In Lake Country it's Hennepin County Minnesota and a news reporter, a bartender, a kidnapped college student, two army buddies suffering PTSD and two collectors for bookies. Doolittle shows a certain amount of compassion for every character he portrays, most of them caught in webs of their own making and everyone trying to escape. Doolittle is quite good, as MacDonald was, on the details, from what people's homes are like to what they prefer to drink. Everyone is driven by their background and by fate, some escaping it while others yield to it.
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