Ron CorbettRecensioni

"CAPE RAGE" is a pulse-pounding thriller set in the rugged Pacific Northwest. With a gripping plot, compelling characters, and masterful storytelling, Ron Cobett delivers a must-read for fans of the genre. From the treacherous Danby family to the relentless pursuit of psychopath Henry Carter, this novel is a rollercoaster ride of suspense and intrigue that will keep you hooked until the very end.

Cape Rage is Ron Corbett's just released, second book that features Danny Barrett.

Barrett is an undercover FBI agent that's been called on to infiltrate a crime family. They make their home on a treacherous island with only one way off...

Danny is a great lead character. I expected he would prove to be canny and whip smart - and he was. As readers we are privy to his inner dialogue. I can't even imagine the inner tension of pretending to being someone else. Especially when the head of the crime family is trigger happy. The chapters where I thought he was going to be outed as a cop had me sitting on the edge of my chair. The crime family is a ruthless bunch. I'll let you meet them for yourself. There's another man on his way back to Cape Rage - along with a girl with no name.

Now, there's danger and lot of suspense in this tale. But...there are also some great descriptions of the land and the setting. The relationship between the man and the girl was unusual and I read over their bits more than once.

The plot is inventive and ended with some unexpected twists that I didn't see coming. I have to admit to feeling a bit of rage myself with one of those twists. But it fits.

This is my first read of Corbett's - and it won't be the last.

violence, unputdownable, crime-fiction, thriller, suspense, family-dynamics, family-drama, family-history, revenge, island-life, robbery, testosterone-fest, undercover, FBI, relationships, relatives*****

FBI undercover agent Danny Barrett gets himself embedded with a criminal family on an island after getting shot in the back and left for dead. The Job is to solve a bank safe deposit box robbery probably done by this family. The story is presented from both perspectives and rushes along completely holding my interest. Watch out for the twists!
I requested and received an EARC from Berkley Publishing Group via NetGalley. Thank you!

Wenn nach rund 50 Seiten dieses Krimi-Debüts des kanadischen Journalisten Ron Corbett der ermittelnde Detective Yakabuski eine Handvoll Gäste und Angestellte in einem einsamen, nord-kanadischen Angler-Lodge aufgrund des Mordes an einer Familie in einer unweit gelegenen Wald-Hütte zum Verhör einvernimmt, denkt man als Leser zunächst : ok, ein whodunit.
Doch schon nach wenigen Seiten weitet sich dieser Noir zu einem großen Panorama des Schauplatzes und seiner Bewohner: vom Land-Diebstahl zu Frontier-Zeiten & der darauf folgenden Hochphase industrieller Holz- & Papierverarbeitung bis zur deindustrialisierten Ödnis heutiger Zeiten; vom vordergründig gelingenden Zusammenleben zwischen Ureinwohnern und den Nachkommen der Landnehmer in den qualmenden Fabriken bis zu den Verteilungskämpfen in Krisenzeiten längs ethnischer Gräben & ihrer Gangs.
Daß auch die mexikanische Mafia und ein beschädigter Bosnien- & Afghanistan-Veteran eine stimmige Rolle spielen, ist keine Kleinigkeit, dienen solche 'Exotismen' in weniger gelungenen Hervorbringungen des Genres doch oft nur zur Farbgebung einer blassen Handlung.
"Preisgegeben" ist eine echte Entdeckung: ein raffiniert konstruierter Spannungs-Roman, der auf Effekte verzichtet & dessen Personal glaubwürdig die Themen der Zeit verkörpert.

THE SWEET GOODBYE was an entertaining beginning to a new series. Danny Barrett has been an undercover agent for twelve years and successful. But his new case, which takes him to a dying town in Maine and the deep, uncharted Maine woods, is going to test him in many ways.

Lee Forestry Products has too much money on its books - what accountants call "funds without provenance" - which makes the FBI think something illegal is going on. The first undercover agent they sent to investigate was found murdered.

Now, it's Danny time to try to find out what is going on. He was a Detroit cop but grew up in the forestry business in Upper Michigan. His cover as a tree marker gives him a chance to investigate.

As Danny gets to know the players - the two Lee brothers who own the business, Beau Lafontaine who has a reputation in the Maine woods, and Pearl Lafontaine who's a diner waitress, cousin of Beau, and Travis Lee's long-time lover - he gets tangled up in a twisted situation.

The story is part mystery, part twisted romance, and all-around compelling read. The story is told from multiple viewpoints and sometimes in flashbacks. I enjoyed the story very much and look forward to more in the series.

Mission Road by Ron Corbett is the third book in the Detective Frank Yakabuski series. The story starts off with the disapperance of a college student who came looking for the mission 1.2 billion dollars worth of uncut, untraceable diamonds. This is where the mystery begins. Two weeks after the disapperance of the first diamond hunter, a map is published online detailing the approximate location of the diamonds, Mission Road. This map brings hoards of people to Mission Road in search of the diamonds, but it also brings a murderer. This is where the fun begins for Yak.

Even though I haven't read the two previous books in the series, I was pulled into the story quickly and had me thouroghly intrigued from the start. It took the view of several characters, some of which were major players in the story and others who were incidental but necessary to build the scene and plot. There was a heavy emphasis on the rival gangs found in the area and these two mysterious men, one of which was hired to take care of a previous issue and the other one who was thought to be a local legend. There is a power play between the two which results in a lot of people dead, some of whom were simply wrong place, wrong time, which just added to the mystery of who the men were. This book was quite violent but not gory. How they found out where the diamonds travelled was really interesting and took a lot of imagination on the author's part. It made it more interesting that they didn't find them right from the beginning but actually had to work for it. The ending was satifying and I'm hoping there will be another story in the series. I also loved how it was set in a small town on the Northern Divide.

Some people may have issues with how the diamonds were stolen, but many don't realize that small town airports wouldn't necessarily have much security because they aren't in heavily populated areas and some companies try to do things on the down low.

I recommend this novel to those who enjoyed Ron Crobett's other novels and those who like mysteries involving heists and how it happened.

Warning, there is a lot of deaths in the novel, but as i mentioned above, they are not very gory, more person gets shot in the head and is no longer recognizable or just shot.

Thank you ECW PRESS from the ARC .

Mission Road by Ron Corbett is the third installment of the Detective Frank Yakabuski series. At the end of the previous novel Cape Diamond, 1.2 billion dollars in diamonds are stolen and the mystery takes off from there. Frank Yakabuski is the law on the Northern Divide which is a continental divide in central North America. He will need to solve the theft of all those diamonds which, rumor has it, have been hidden on Mission Road, an old logging road. All kinds of characters come to town as modern diamond prospectors, dreaming of riches. Also present are vicious criminals who join the fray. All of this provides the reader with an extensive list of characters, sometimes adding confusion. The body count is unrealistic and, if you are bothered by excessive violence, this may not be for you. There is plenty of activity and the reader will not be bored: this is an action-packed mystery. Thank you to ECW Press and NetGalley for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A really fun, charming, warms-your-heart read. It's about an old fishing guide in the Algonquin Provincial Park in north-central Ontario named Frank Kuiack, Frank has been a guide since before he became a teenager (and he was born in 1935!). He witnessed the glory years of the Park's fishing lodges, and still continues guiding today.
The story is told through the author's eyes, as he goes fishing with Frank on one of his last, extended trips. Lots of great stories about fishing in "the old days", as well as some good bonding moments today.
The biography of Frank will make you laugh, as well as make you tear up. A formerly hard-drinking, hard-living man, Frank has no problem telling the author of his many mistakes over his life. And of his turning his life around with the help of friends and AA. The love he had for his wife, over his later years, is very touching.
All in all, this is a feel good book. I read it, on my Kindle, while on a canoe/fishing trip in the Boundary Waters last week. It really touched my heart.
I would recommend it to any fisherman, outdoorsman, or nature-lover.

I was checking out the 2018 Edgar Awards winners and nominees and came across this title. What really caught my attention is the name of the protagonist, Detective Frank Yakabuski , since Yakabuski is my surname. It is not a common name, especially with this anglicized spelling, except in the Madawaska Valley northwest of Ottawa.

Detective Frank Yakabuski is sent to investigate the triple murder of a secretive family living on the Northern Divide where they built a ramshackle cabin near the almost-deserted community of Ragged Lake. Yakabuski sequesters the locals at the local lodge while he conducts his investigation. He quickly comes to suspect that a motorcycle gang with which he is familiar has moved into the area and may have been responsible for the murders.

Readers should be forewarned that that this is a violent story. The book begins with the gruesome murder of three people, including a child, and by the end, the body count is well into double digits. Both the innocent and the guilty are killed.

The pace is uneven. Early in the investigation, Yakabuski finds the journal of Lucy Whiteduck, the murdered woman. From the journal, we learn about Lucy’s childhood, her time in the big city of Springfield, and her return to the Northern Divide. The journal is necessary for important background information which impacts the present but its inclusion slows down the pace. Then there is a protracted face-off scene where things happen at a frenetic speed.

Apparently, this is the first in a series of books featuring Det. Yakabuski. Considerable background information, therefore, is given about the man. He is an army veteran who served with distinction in several of the world’s trouble spots. As a police officer, he has earned the respect of colleagues. He is definitely a leader who can think logically even in very tense situations. It also becomes obvious that he is willing to bend the rules if he thinks doing so will cause the least harm.

Some of the secondary characters emerge as interesting people since some effort was made to portray them in some depth. The villains, however, are stereotypes; they tend to be totally evil with no redeeming qualities. Yakabuski thinks of the inhabitants of Ragged Lake as “living cheek-to-jowl with true evil” and one character even says, “’There is someone in Ragged Lake who is nothing but evil.’” And then a villain tells Yakabuski there awaits a new sort of evil, “some new sort of whacked-out freak. Something truly fuckin’evil” which Yakabuski has “never seen before.” Is this the prelude to another blood-soaked investigation?

It is the geography of this book which is frustrating. In an author’s note at the beginning, Corbett mentions that since this is a work of fiction, all places are imagined and “there are no literal depictions of any city or town on the Divide.” Springfield, “a northern city of nearly a million people” is supposedly the creation of the author’s imagination, yet he refers to Britannia Heights, Sandy Hill (which has the main campus of the University of Springfield), and Buckham’s Bay, all neighbourhoods of Ottawa. Lucy even applies for a job in “a kids’ store in the Springfield shopping mall called Tiggy Winkles.” I’ve visited Mrs. Tiggy Winkles in the Rideau Centre in Ottawa! I attended the University of Ottawa in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood of Ottawa; on the eastern edge of that neighbourhood likes Strathcona Park. Why does Corbett make it Strathconna? Why bother disguising Ottawa as Springfield? Why mention real village names like Cobden and then make up fake ones like Grimsly? And why change John Rudolphus Booth, lumber tycoon and railroad baron of the Ottawa Valley, to James Rundle Bath?

The Northern Divide is indeed “about four hundred miles” from Ottawa. (I know this because for five years I lived in northern Ontario, not far from the Quebec border; about 25 kms away was a watershed sign which indicates that all waters north of this point flow into the Arctic and all waters south of this point flow into the Atlantic.) Yet Corbett chose to name his Northern Divide town after an actual lake in the southern part of Algonquin Park?

Det. Yakabuski is from High River, “the oldest Polish settlement in Canada . . . in the Upper Springfield Valley.” Why not have him come from Wilno, located in the Upper Ottawa Valley, which is the actual first and oldest Polish settlement in Canada? The surname Yakabuski is very common in the village of Barry’s Bay (10 kms from Wilno), the village where I was born. I’d be willing to bet that is where the author saw the name on his travels between his hometown of Ottawa and Algonquin Park. In Barry’s Bay, he might even have met a Frank Yakabuski!

Perhaps I have an unusual perspective on this book because of my name and where I’ve lived, but I found Corbett’s imagination to be strangely unimaginative. Corbett is almost insulting to the reader; it is as if Corbett expects his readers to be stupid. Two characters in the novel have a conversation about an Englishman who claimed to be an Apache chief. The reader is not to have heard of Archibald Belaney who called himself Grey Owl?

I was hoping to really like this book, but I’m afraid I found it only mediocre. I am not surprised that it did not win an Edgar Award.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).

The strongest character in Ragged Lake is the bleak, remote, and frozen woods of the Northern Divide. The land has helped to shape the people living there into self-sufficient individuals who are used to doing for themselves and keeping what they know to themselves. The man sent to investigate the murders, Frank Yakabuski, is a big man who knows how to handle himself. After taking one look, very few people want to mess with him. As a lead investigator, I found him to be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes he wouldn't take risks because they were dangerous and unlikely to succeed, yet at others, he took equally dangerous risks that also had very little chance of success. I have to admit that I found it difficult to warm up to him or any of the other characters.

The pace of the book is a bit uneven, mainly due to some digressions that--although crucial to the plot-- could've been more smoothly introduced. The strongest parts of the book are the setting, which I mentioned earlier, and the mystery itself, which kept me guessing at motives throughout. However, the body count in Ragged Lake was much too high for my liking. If I'd known one major detail (which is left out of the synopsis), I probably would not have chosen to read the book.½

The focus and strength of this book is largely the setting. Corbett shows us the mostly abandoned, snow-covered, unforgiving land. He does such a great job of placing us in this setting that I found myself chilled, despite sitting here in Florida where the temperature was hovering near 90.

Pacing is slow up to the last quarter, when everything starts to come together (or unravel). The focus on setting and the history of the land often overshadows the murders and investigation. We also spend a lot of time with Yakabuski reflecting back to his childhood and to his time in the military. Some of the details in these lengthy passages eventually play into the present events, but it's a long, circuitous route getting there.

Then we have the murdered woman's journal interjected throughout. Dozens of pages of this journal are plunked into several different sections of the book. We learn her entire life history through this journal. Granted, her story on its own is interesting and would have been compelling had she been the focus in real time. But, shared this way, it only served as a disconnect from the current timeline. Too much of the story takes place in other characters' past, and I lost the intensity and immediacy of the actual investigation.

When we finally get to the action nearing the end, I found it difficult to like or relate to Yakabuski. He seems to have no problem placing innocent people at risk so that he can register a win by capturing the bad guys.

At the end, we have a little thread left dangling, which I assume will continue on in the next book. Despite that, this book does have a solid ending on its own.

*I received an advance copy from the publisher, via Amazon Vine, in exchange for my honest review.*