DEBUT Michael Skellig, a former army special forces sergeant, owns a small limo service, run with the help of an undocumented immigrant and two army vets with issues. Together they form a loyal close-knit family. The saga starts with an offer from Bismarck Avila, a bad-boy rock star skateboarder, to buy Skellig's company after he intervenes in a shoot-out at a nightclub where Avila is the target. When Skellig declines the offer, Avila blackmails Skellig into being his exclusive driver. Enter a crooked cop and another threat on Avila's life, with Skellig as his best chance at survival. VERDICT Bones creator Hanson has written an outstanding debut thriller. Readers of Scott Turow and Harlan Coben will appreciate the intricate plot and rich character development. Although there is a fair amount of violence, loyalty and "doing the right thing" are the main themes of this novel.-Susan Carr, Edwardsville P.L., IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Los Angeles limousine driver Michael Skellig, the hero of Hanson's nimbly plotted first novel, has spent the past 28 hours ferrying around Bismarck Avila, a celebrity skateboard mogul. A former Special Forces sergeant, Michael is waiting outside a Santa Monica hotel for his client when he believes he hears the voice of the Chechen torturer he killed a decade before in Yemen warning him of danger. He runs inside the hotel just in time to save Avila-but not one of his bodyguards-from two gunmen. Michael wakes up hours later in the hospital only to discover that the police suspect him of the murder. Avila will vouch for Michael with the LAPD-if Michael agrees to become his full-time personal chauffeur. But the job is more than just driving Avila: Michael needs to find-and stop-the person who's targeting the skateboarder. Hanson, creator of the TV series Bones, melds well-placed bits of humor with a serious look at the emotional trials of returning veterans. The energetic plot demands a sequel. Agents: Eve Attermann and Claudia Ballard, William Morris Endeavor. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

HO, HO, HO! Let Jolly Santa hand out his boring, politically correct presents to all the good boys and girls. Here comes Bad Santa with a sack of the year's best crime and mystery thrillers, full of psychos and siekos for the naughty kids. First to crawl out of the bag is Jo Nesbo's monstrous villain in the thirst (Knopf, $26.95), a serial killer who stalks his victims on Tinder, rips out their throats with dentures made of metal spikes and drinks their blood. The good citizens of "melancholic, reserved, efficient" Oslo are paralyzed with fear and loathing, but the murderer's bizarre M.O. alerts Harry Hole, Nesbo's gloomy Norwegian detective, that this repulsive killer is having fun with Harry, tempting him to come out and play. The crooked New York cops in Don Winslow's excellent police procedural, THE FORCE (Morrow/ HarperCollins, $27.99), have minds in the gutter and share a vocabulary as ripe as rotten fruit. But just because they're no-good crooks doesn't mean these roughnecks can't police their turf. They pull off the biggest heroin bust in memory, put down an all-out gang war and handle quotidian misdeeds like regular gentlemen. Their methods are extremely thoughtful and inventive; they just aren't entirely lawful. Of all the places where you really do not want to meet a couple of nut cases with rifles, a zoo full of "wild things in boxes" ranks high. Gin Phillips taps that primal fear in FIERCE KINGDOM (Viking, $25), a heart-thumping thriller about a mother who finds herself and her 4-year-old son running for their lives among cages of unhappy wildlife after two crack marksmen start hunting down zoo visitors like animals. Phillips's resourceful heroine gives new meaning to the term "tiger mom." Meet the great guys who work at Oasis Limo Services in the DRIVER (Dutton, $26). The plot of Hart Hanson's first novel is ragged, but his furiously funny storytelling voice is full of moral indignation on behalf of unstable war vets like Ripple, the dispatcher who lost both legs in Afghanistan and now draws violent cartoons all the livelong day, and Tinkertoy, a mechanical genius with a scary case of post-traumatic stress paranoia. Even Skellig, the levelheaded owner of the cab service, hears the voices of men he's killed in battle ("troubletroubletroublebadtrouble") while he's driving. With racial barriers slowly dropping in the 1950s, token black cops are badly needed on the Atlanta police force. But as Thomas Mullen lets it be known in LIGHTNING MEN (37lnk/Atria, $26), Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are also valuable assets in neighborhoods where white residents are literally up in arms over the black families buying homes on their blocks. As the son of a Baptist minister, Boggs is a member of the black aristocracy, a beneficiary of "preacher money and a preacher house, even a preacher car." Black vs. White doesn't begin to cover the complexity of these diverse relationships. Ever since Harry Bosch was forced into retirement from the Los Angeles Police Department, Michael Connelly's tough-as-oldboots hero has been taking on cold cases for the San Fernando force, working from a makeshift office in the old drunk tank of the county jail. ("Sometimes I think I can still smell the puke.") In two kinds of TRUTH (Little, Brown, $29), Bosch goes undercover as an elderly oxycodone abuser to take down a gang of international racketeers who are moving prescription drugs in and out of the country by enslaving aged addicts desperate to feed their habits. That's pretty ugly - and a new one on us. Jack Reacher ("Bigfoot," to those awed by his 6-foot-5-inch, 250-pound bulk) is right where we want him in Lee Child's new novel, THE MIDNIGHT LINE (Delacorte, $28.99): on an endless ribbon of highway, hitching rides and serving as "human amphetamine" for tired truckers. A chance visit to "the sad side of a small town" leads Reacher on a quest to track down a criminal enterprise preying on wounded veterans, a scam that saddens our hero and makes him very, very angry. To the East Texas natives in Attica Locke's bluebird, bluebird (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), Highway 59 is both a lifeline and an escape route. Everyone headed in or out of town makes a pit stop at Geneva Sweet's Sweets, including Darren Mathews, a righteous Texas Ranger working his way through every hamlet from Laredo to Texarkana, looking for the murderer of the black man and the white woman whose bodies were fished out of the muddy waters of the Attoyac Bayou. The plot has legs, and Locke's blues-infused idiom lends a strain of melancholy to her lyrical style. The great port of London churns with activity in Anne Perry's rich, if blood-splattered, Victorian mystery, an echo of MURDER (Ballantine, $28), which finds Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police hunting down the assassins of Hungarian immigrants who fled oppression only to be greeted with bitter hostility in their new home. "It's fear of ideas," Monk's wife, Hester, says. "Everyone you don't understand because their language is different, their food, but above all their religion." EARTHLY REMAINS (Atlantic Monthly, $25), Donna Leon's latest Venetian mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, is one of her best - and one of her saddest - dealing with the relentless polluting of the great lagoon. "We've poisoned it all," mourns Davide Casati, an aged boatman who treats Brunetti to languorous tours of the floating islands on the graceful, gondola-like rowing boat he built with his own hands. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Hired as a bodyguard for African-American reality TV star Bismarck Avila, a rapper and skateboard mogul, "astoundingly vanilla" LA limo driver Michael Skellig draws on his background as an Army Special Forces officer in Afghanistan to save his client from killers.Skellig graduates from being Avila's driver to being his bodyguard after he saves the young celebritybut not one of his 300-pound protectorsfrom gunmen at a nightclub. Hard-edged LAPD detective Delilah Groopman, with whom Skellig has had a serious flirtation, wrongly suspects he killed the muscleman himself, so he must outrun not only the bad guys who are out to do in Avila, but also the sexy police officer. That becomes exceptionally complicated after Skellig kills a dirty LA cop who is torturing members of his limo company's team of wounded veterans. Hanson, creator of the long-running TV series Bones, takes to crime fiction in high style. Like Carl Hiaasen, he shows great pleasure in combining nasty violence with an arch comic sensibility ("When one is obliged to dispose of a murdered body, one faces a Gordian knot wrapped around Pandora's box, which contains Occam's razor," says Skellig, a nonstop stream of pithy comments). Skellig's crew of Afghanistan veterans is an entertaining bunch. It includes Tinkertoy, a female mechanic with a quirky case of PTSD, and Ripple, a barely-19-year-old with issues of his own. The ghostly warnings Skellig hears, in the voice of a terrorist he shot in Yemen, add to the fun. Bones showrunner Hanson's fresh-voiced first novel is a lark, which is saying something considering the violence to which its characters are subjected. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Remember The Rockford Files? The A-Team? Hart Hanson, creator of the TV show Bones, delivers all the punch of a classic television 70s crime show in this remarkable debut. Michael Skellig, an ex-Special Forces sergeant, is the proprietor of Oasis Limo Services, and his team consists of two badly wounded veterans and his former Afghan interpreter. Skellig drives the mean streets of Los Angeles, a twenty-first-century Philip Marlowe. He can be as tough or as tender as he needs to be. He ruminates on everything from Hippocrates' humors to the possibility of a Cadillac being haunted. He is wounded in his own way and haunted by the voices of those he has killed. After he saves a celebrity skateboard mogul from two gunmen, he ends up working as the man's regular chauffeur while in competition with a rogue cop and some nasty dudes to find a bunch of barrels that are worth killing for. The dialogue is crisp and street-tough, and the action redefines relentless. The novel also serves as a moving tribute to the sacrifices of our veterans; their stories are so harrowing that they can be painful to read. This will appeal to fans of classic hard-boiled detective novels, but the superhip contemporary tone will also attract millennials. Expect lots of buzz for what is sure to be one of the season's hottest first novels.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2017 Booklist