Three Strikes: Three Crime Novellas

New York City links these otherwise disparate crime novellas. Harlan Ellison fans will appreciate the nervous, jangling prose of Klavan’s “I Take Care of Myself in Dreamland,” which takes the reader for a ride through the mean streets of early 1970s New York with Bartok, a physically scarred former soldier, who tells his driver: “I’m going to kill somebody tonight... me or somebody else.” In O’Mara’s lively, amusing “Jammed,” Aggie, whose family has just entered the Witness Protection Program, agrees to drive a semi filled with stolen Canadian maple syrup from Missouri to New York in order to pay off a debt to a couple of tough guys. What could go wrong? Everything, as it turns out. Set in 1941, Salzberg’s “The Maybrick Affair” follows rookie reporter Jake Harper, who grew up poor in Manhattan, as he sets out to write about a reclusive old woman in Connecticut who died “in the company of close to fifty cats.” This seemingly benign human-interest piece flares into something of world-altering proportions. Crime fiction aficionados with a taste for the offbeat will be rewarded. (Sept.)