Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Strip Search is one of the mid-period Gabe Wager novels in Rex Burns's long Denver homicide series. Wager, the half-Chicano half-Anglo homicide detective who has been working the Denver beat through the books, is investigating a series of murders along the Colorado Boulevard strip-club corridor that the local authorities want classified as routine.
Burns is one of the most quietly serious regional crime writers of the late 70s and 80s. The Denver geography is rendered with attention. The procedural beats are handled with the kind of restraint the form rewards. The marginal-community texture (the dancers, the bartenders, the parole officers) is handled with respect rather than as backdrop.
Four stars. Recommended to readers of regional American crime fiction. The Wager series deserves wider readership.
Related reads
If you liked Strip Search
The Leaning Land
by Rex Burns
A Rex Burns Gabe Wager novel. Colorado high country, an undermined county courthouse, and the kind of regional crime fiction the form rarely delivers.
Blood Line
by Rex Burns
Blood Line by Rex Burns review. The 10th Gabe Wager Denver homicide novel. A multi-decade family-secrets case and Burns' careful procedural patience.
The Lincoln Lawyer
by Michael Connelly
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly 2005 review. Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles defense attorney who works out of the back of a Lincoln Town Car, takes a case that pulls him into something larger. The novel that launched a series and a film franchise.
Big Little Lies
by Liane Moriarty
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty 2014 review. Three mothers at an Australian elementary school converge on a kindergarten Trivia Night where someone will die. The contemporary domestic-suspense novel that defined the late-2010s book-club shelf.
In the Woods
by Tana French
In the Woods by Tana French 2007 review. Dublin Murder Squad detective Rob Ryan is assigned to a child murder in the same woods where his two best friends disappeared twenty years earlier. The Edgar winner that launched the strongest contemporary literary-crime series.
Tell No One
by Harlan Coben
Tell No One by Harlan Coben 2001 review. A pediatrician receives an email containing a video clip of his murdered wife, eight years after her death. The single best Coben standalone and the one that defined the contemporary domestic-thriller register.
More by this author