Sin City Treachery: An AJ Docker and Banshee Thriller is a light read — but engaging and entertaining.

“Doc” Docker is a medical professional. But the star of the show is his retired police dog, Banshee.

His sidekick Rick is another hilarious character.

Las Vegas, the entertainment capital of the world, hosts an F1 race, the largest sporting event in the city’s history and a prime target for terrorism.

With over a half million people descending on the strip for the event, a bomb detonates in a parking garage days before the race.

In the emergency room, Doc fights to save the lives of a pregnant doctor and her premature baby injured in the blast, spurring him to risk his own life to find justice for the victims.

He is joined by his girlfriend, Lana, a smart, ambitious reporter, his friend and colleague, Rick, and his trained ex police dog Banshee.

Their investigation takes them from a seedy bar to iconic landmarks around Las Vegas and crescendo on the night of the race when chaos reigns in the city.

Sin City Treachery

Excellent.

The Informant surprisingly finds Elizabeth Waring, now now high up in the Organized Crime Division of the Justice Department, visited by the professional killer (alias Michael Schaeffer) she’d been hunting for years.

 A Mafia hit team finally catches up with Schaeffer who had been in hiding. He knows they won’t stop coming and decides to take the fight to their door. 

He offers Waring information on the mafia, in order to get them off his back. So begins a new assault on organized crime and an uneasy alliance between opposite sides of the law. 

The Butcher’s Boy	(1982)	Description / Buy at Amazon
Sleeping Dogs	(1992)	Description / Buy at Amazon
The Informant	(2011)	Description / Buy at Amazon
Eddie’s Boy	(2020)	Description / Buy at Amazon

Good premise. But ultimately too complicated & confusing.

The 30th book in the excellent series is not one of the best. Some are calling it the worst.

Exit Strategy (2025) finds Reacher sitting in a Baltimore coffee shop. Spotting a conman taking advantage of two elderly customers, he quickly teaches a lesson. Returning the money.

THIS is the kind of story I want in these novels.

… Unfortunately it got worse.

On the way out of the coffee shop, a young man drops a note into Reacher’s pocket. That leads to a lengthy & often confusing, slow, and eventual confrontation with an  interesting villain. But the plot is too complex.

I assume the new books are mostly written by Andrew. And they are not as good.

An AJ Docker and Banshee Thriller.

Faulty Bloodline (2024) is 2nd in the series of books where former police dog, Banshee, is our favourite character.

Author Gary Gerlacher was a pediatric emergency physician. The emergency room situations in these books are based on real life

AJ Docker (Doc) and his guard dog, Banshee, move to a small town in the mountains for a slower-paced lifestyle.

Doc settles into the idyllic setting with a rewarding job and enriching colleagues, as well as with a romantic interest who leads him to contemplate marriage.

His new life seems perfect until he begins to uncover the town’s dirty secrets. A serial killer hunts in the woods, and dirty money flows throughout the town.

Read the AJ Docker and Banshee Thrillers in any order, or follow the series from the beginning:

1. Last Patient of the Night
2. Faulty Bloodline
3. Sin City Treachery
4. Deadly Equation
5. Terminal Exchanges – coming
6. The Phantom Files – coming March 2026

The second V. I. Warshawski book I’ve read bySara Paretsky.

Again, weird. Original.

First-person narrative from V.I.’s perspective, giving readers direct access to her thoughts and observations. Right or wrong.

I was interested enough to Google and come up with:

A Conversation With Sara Paretsky on the Writing Process (Killer Writers)

like a dog wrestling with a sprinkler, and the sprinkler is always winning

 I was lucky to be friends with P.D. James, who told me she outlined in so much detail that she would write the chapter she wanted to work on a given day. I wish I could do that. I would write so much faster and have so many more books out. I’d be like the Stephen King of private eye novels. …

I have an idea for a crime and characters who can set the story in motion. Then, the story ends up going down a dead-end alley, so I have to back up. Sometimes, the characters change roles. They become more or less prominent or even change whether they’re good or bad …

That makes sense now.

Overboard (2022) has no conventional plot that I could discern.

V.I. is — as usual — protecting Chicago’s weak and vulnerable without getting paid.

There are astonishingly well organized bad guys chasing V.I. — as usual — for reasons unclear.

I do like how they push issues of social and political justice. Paretsky makes clear that she hates Trump.

The Chicago setting is excellent. I love that city.

It’s unapologetically set during the pandemic lockdown.

I might keep reading these books. They are strangely compelling, even without a clear storyline.