Titan's Hard Case Crime brand strikes again with the fifth Ms.Tree collection gathering together stories from the series by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty. The first story in this collection titled Heroine Withdrawal picks up right after the violent events of the final page of the last volume.
As the three issue saga titled "Mureta Means Death" gets underway, Ms.Tree has killed the pedophile and serial murderer who had kidnapped her son. The police are again put out that she's taken the law into her own hands. An old ally named Dan Green returns to the fold, having recovered as best he can from injuries suffered from a bombing by the Muerta crime family. Sporting a glass eye and a hook, Green seeks his own vengeance on the patriarch of the Muerta clan and for a time is locked up for his murder. Later secrets are revealed and needless to say this installment ends with an unexpected death.
After the events of the last bloody finale, we get a two-issue story titled "Right to Die" in which Ms.Tree is drawn into the always ferocious abortion debate. She is ordered by the court to leave her detective work to her employees and give up her gun. An old ally of her husband shows up and wants to blow up a clinic. When the clinic is blown up, there is still a mystery to be solved. No matter how you feel about this topic this is a pretty good mystery story.
Because she was swept up in the violence of the abortion clinic, she violated the court's order and is sent to jail. The two-issue story titled "Prisoner Cell Block Hell" has our heroine forced to deal with all sorts of threats coming at her from both inside and outside the jail. As usual she finds a bit if corruption which kicks off the usual mayhem.
Her lawyer arranges for her to not got to trial but she must submit to psychiatric observation and so she is admitted to a clinic for extended treatment. The story titled "Heroine Withdrawal" lends its name to the collection itself and proves pivotal. While under treatment she discovers that perhaps she must change. At the same time a political murder comes to her attention, and she puts her staff on that project.
The collection closes with the three-issue story titled "The Other Cheek" in which a reformed and medicated Ms.Tree seeks to change her approach to life despite the dangers that lurk around every corner. Collins chooses to tell this story from several points of view, giving insights into the other characters in this saga. Not least of which is her son, who ends up staying with his grandmother again with tragic consequences. As is obvious from the last cover, she gets over her pacifism.
The volume closes with a Mike Mist prose story about a suicide that wasn't.
The death count in these stories is stunning. Perhaps it's because I'm reading them all together and not monthly, but I frankly don't think it's possible to get a true count of bodies in these stories. It feels different given the relative realism that Collins tries to bring to the series, unlike a book like say the Punisher which is more hyperbolic. Another issue is the price of this collection, which has gone up considerably since the beginning of the series. There's one more volume I think, so I'll stick it out for now.
Rip Off
No comments:
Post a Comment