Deadly Beloved -- Max Allan Collins

Regular readers of this blog know that I love comic books and I love private eye yarns, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I’m a long-time fan of MS. TREE, the female private eye created by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty who has been appearing off and on in comics for more than a quarter of a century now.

DEADLY BELOVED, the latest release from Hard Case Crime, is the first Ms. Tree novel by Collins, and as he explains in an afterword to the book, it’s sort of an update and reboot of the series, a new origin story based on elements from the comic book stories that introduced the character. The basics are the same: tough private detective Mike Tree is murdered on his wedding night, leaving his new bride, also named Michael, to bring his killer to justice and then take over the agency that he started. That’s back-story in the novel, but it also ties in prominently with the case on which Ms. Tree is currently working, a case that involves multiple murders and the Chicago crime family whose patriarch Mike Tree put in jail several years earlier.

Collins does a masterful job of moving the story back and forth in time and weaving the various storylines together. Mike Tree and his bride were inspired by Mike Hammer and Velda, and naturally there’s a Spillane-like vibe that runs all through this story, even though the voice is distinctly Collins. DEADLY BELOVED is one of those rare books where I couldn’t seem to turn the pages fast enough, with plenty of action and colorful characters and a tough attitude on the part of Ms. Tree that’s very appealing. You’ll probably see the ending coming, but that doesn’t matter because it fits so well. This is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, and I hope that Collins writes more Ms. Tree novels, as the afterword indicates that he might. For now, DEADLY BELOVED is highly recommended by me.