3.5 stars

This crossover novel, which features two of Lee Goldberg's Los Angeles detective teams, works fine as a standalone. In the book, Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) arson investigators Walter Sharpe and Andrew Walker. work with Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) homicide detectives Eve Ronin and Duncan 'Donuts' Pavone.

The story has three threads that merge towards the book's climax. I'm going to be a little vague, to avoid spoilers.

As the book opens, a master thief known to the police - who's taken steps to hide his identity - is relaxing in the spa of a luxury hotel. The perp thinks he's unrecognizable, but a cop tracks him down and makes a deal: 'I won't turn you in if you get the new owner of a pharmaceutical company to lower the price of Xylaphram. The drug used to cost $10,000 per year, and the greedy new owner raised the price to $150,000 per year....and my son needs the medicine.'

The perp agrees, and organizes an audacious plan that involves stealing a 40-million-dollar Infinitum watch from the world's most impregnable museum, the 'Gallery of Curiosities' on Surudoikiba Island in Japan. That's all I'll say about this sub-plot, except to note that it's VERY entertaining.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, fires have been breaking out. A series of blazes have been set in carports under apartment buildings, and the LAFD assigns the case to Walter Sharpe - who's an arson expert, and Andrew Walker - a former U.S. Marshall who's an ace manhunter. Sharpe and Walker discover the carport fires were started with Duraflame logs, which are designed to burn steadily for at least three hours. This allowed the arsonist to move from site to site before the flames got big enough to attract attention. Sharpe and Walker collect clues and expect to get credit for a 'solve'. However a bigger crisis arises, and the carport arson case is transferred to LAFD investigators Pete Caffrey and Al Scruggs - who think they're hilarious when they call Walter Sharpe 'Shar-Pei' for his droopy features and dogged pursuit of perpetrators.

Meanwhile, a HUGE FIRE has immolated an overpass of the Santa Monica Freeway, which cuts across the center of Los Angeles. The road is one of the city's busiest and most important arteries, moving over 300,000 vehicles a day. The fire that shuts down the Santa Monica Freeway cripples the city, and the Emmy Awards are only two weeks away!! Thus the mayor of Los Angeles and governor of California are determined to repair the overpass at lightning speed.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Richard Lansing assigns the freeway case to Sharpe and Walker, giving them unlimited resources to investigate. Sharpe and Walker learn the land below the overpass, where the inferno started, is leased by Southland Premiere Properties. Southland, in turn, subleases parcels to many small businesses, including a car salvage operation, a painting company, and storage lots for resellers of old tires and pallets. All these businesses have flammable materials. To add to the danger, there's a homeless encampment alongside the businesses. The homeless enclave is "a firetrap full of half-assed electrical hookups, propane gas grills, and addicts freebasing smack." Worse yet, it seems Caltrans inspectors "saw what was going on down there and let it go."

It turns out the overpass fire was arson, and Sharpe and Walker examine the crime scene and interview witnesses/persons of interest. Along the way Sharpe and Walker find the body of a murdered Caltrans inspector.. and they team up with LAPD detectives Eve Ronin and Duncan Pavone to investigate the various related crimes.

As the story approaches its denouement, all three threads - the carport arsons, the freeway arson, and the watch thief - merge in a rather creative fashion.

I like Lee Goldberg's writing and I enjoyed the story. However, the book requires a HUGE suspension of disbelief. The 'champions' (so to speak) in this story are incredibly clever and super lucky, and EVERY situation falls their way - things that would never happen in real life.

So, though I recommend the book, I advise readers to just sit back and enjoy a tale that would be a pipe dream in the actual world.

Thanks to Netgalley, Lee Goldberg, and Thomas & Mercer for a copy of the book.

I thought the last entry in the Walker and Sharpe series was on fire (pun intended). The book felt like it stood not in the shadow of Crais and Connelly, but in their equal. So I was eager to get to this third entry in the series, and I felt feeling a bit burned. All the things that made book 2 so great were here, but it just didn't feel the same. I chalk it up to a big side plot from the first book involving a con artist and his heists. While that storyline was good, it just didn't fit in with the rest of the novel. I kept wanting to go back to our main characters. The heist plotline felt like something straight out of Goldberg's previous series co-authored with Janet Evanovich. I liked those, but when I'm in the mood to read a heist novel, I'll read one of those -- not the fire investigations series. This book wasn't bad at all, but I still felt like it wasn't as good as the other books. I'll keep reading it, and definitely want to start the Eve Ronin series (which I keep putting off for some reason). Next time, though, I'll keep my expectations a little tempered.

I enjoyed the separate parts of the story but didn’t like that the book was split into 2 different storylines which really don’t conjoin. It was annoying to have to switch mindsets from one to the either. #HiddeninSmoke #NetGalley

Another thrilling installment in the world of arson investigation! Walker and Sharpe are back investigating LA fires. You also have the subplot with Danny Cole, a bad guy you really like, who is helping to seek revenge/justice. Eve and Duncan also help out.

Non-stop action and a satisfying ending.

Thank you to NetGalley, Thomas & Mercer, and Lee Goldberg for the eARC.

Hidden in Smoke begins with Los Angeles arson investigator Andrew Walker calling in a favor. After letting con artist extraordinaire Danny Cole escape following his mission to rob millionaires and pursue vengeance, Walker is asking Danny to complete his act of revenge. Megamillionaire Roland Slezak built his fortune by unethically raising his companies’ pharmaceutical prices for pure profit, and destroying Slezak’s life would lower the cost of an anti-seizure medication desperately needed by Walker’s two-year-old son.

Walker already has a lot on his plate, as a night erupts with a series of car fires set near apartment buildings in West Hollywood. Walker’s partner Walter Sharpe always – loudly – laments the fire departments who wash away evidence while putting out fires, but in this case it doesn’t take long for the arson investigators to track down the likely culprit. They have to pass on the actual capturing of the criminal when they are assigned to investigate a fire underneath the I-10 Santa Monica Freeway that shut down traffic for hours. In a town that lives and dies by its freeways, the freeway closure has the mayor, governor, and head of the Department of Transportation demanding that it be resolved and the freeway rebuilt as soon as possible. This puts Walker and Sharpe in conflict with the small industrial businesses and homeless encampment underneath the freeway, both who blame the other for starting the fires. The trail of clues eventually leads them to a dead body, which has them once again meeting Lost Hills homicide detectives Eve Ronin and Duncan Pavone. The four investigators are as effective in their investigations as they are frustrating to their supervisors, caring more about results than public relations or politics.

This 3rd in the Walker & Sharpe series (but 7th in the Eve Ronin, who has her own books) is an exhilarating blend of an Ocean’s Twelve caper and the movie Backdraft, with plots coinciding into a satisfying end. Danny Cole – with a new face and a new name – enlists his own crew of honeytrap/muscle Tamiko Harada and Sam Mertz, and together they conduct an elaborate scheme to steal a priceless watch out of a museum on a Japanese billionaire’s private island. This clever and exhilarating romp is as engaging as Walker and Sharpe’s more grounded and practical investigation, but both are as witty and hilarious as one expects in the books written by Lee Goldberg. California natives will feel at home with the descriptions of freeways and familiar landmarks, with the latter including action-packed surveillances in a shopping mall and drive-thru. The dialogue is always witty and the plots so entertaining that readers will be eagerly anticipating the next adventures of these characters who are as much fun together as they are in their own separate books. The more the merrier though, and here’s to hoping that they all team up again to deal out justice to criminals and an incompetent bureaucracy.

Lee Goldberg has written another exciting novel that is almost perfect to play out on the big screen. His writing reads like screenplays and the action is non stop. In the third installment of the Sharpe & Walker partner series, the duo needs even more help from some of Goldberg's other characters (Det. Eve Ronin) in order to solve an arson case in Los Angeles in this cross-over novel. Because this is the third book in the Sharpe & Walker series, readers may have trouble understanding all of the backstory at first, but Goldberg does a good job of catching everyone up in the first few chapters.

Arson investigators, Walter Sharpe and Andrew Walker, have the skillset and intelligence of Gerritson's Rizzoli & Isles and the humor of the Lethal Weapon guys, Riggs & Murtaugh, making for an enjoyable read. It is a great novel for fans of police procedurals, both in print and media forms.

Thank you to NetGalley and Thomas and Mercer publishing for the chance to read this novel.

While the plot may be a bit complicated, this is another good novel from Goldberg. I like the dialogue and banter. There are two lines running through the book. One involves a thief from Malibu Burning and the other arson investigations. The plot line of investigating arson fires is a welcome change from the more typical murder mysteries. The plot had some good twists and turns. This novel was perhaps a bit less engaging than the previous one I read but it was still enjoyable. I did feel the characters were well developed. It was interesting characters were brought in from another series. Goldberg's scene descriptions are great. This novel makes one think twice about driving on highway overpasses.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent review.

Hidden in Smoke by Lee Goldberg
Sharpe & Walker #3

Arson, theft, murder, and more are cases that overlap and need to be solved ~ Sharpe & Walker are on the job and what a job it proved to be ~ Great addition to the series!

What I liked:
* The first chapter that set the hook and indicated the direction of the story
* Andrew Walker: two years as an arson investigation, ex-US Marshall, loving husband and father, “hunter” of men, prefers action to downtime
* Walter Sharpe: senior arson investigator, intelligent, puzzle solver, experienced, looks for clues and facts to verify when investigating fires, willing to share knowledge, doesn’t jump to conclusions
* That Eve Ronin & Duncan Pavone were part of the story
* Brian Lockwood: a new face who was introduced in book one – wonder if he might get a series of his own – intrigued by him
* The birds eye view of how the pivotal heist was carried off and what part it played in the story – loved seeing the team again and watching them in action
* The supporting characters and the part they played – wonder if Deputy Carter will show up again
* The police procedural aspects of how the arsons were solved
* The plot, pacing, setting, and writing ~ great characters
* Returning to Southern California where I grew up – it all seemed so familiar
* That fires in California are a big issue, great losses occur, can become political issues and all of this is covered a bit at a time in this series

What I didn’t like:
* Who and what I was meant not to like
* Thinking about the greed of the bad guys and what they were willing to do to make their fortunes
* Having to wait for the next book to be finished

Did I like this book? Yes
Would I read more by this author? Definitely

Thank you to NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for the ARC – This is my honest review.

5 Stars

Lee Goldberg has done it again. This book is perfect for fans of Bosch - it’s a police procedural done absolutely right. I felt a pull to Walker and Sharpe from book one, even though I really didn’t expect to. The addition of Eve Ronin and Duncan is icing on the cake. Must read.

I discovered this book and the characters Sharpe and Walker through Lee Goldberg’s highly enjoyable Eve Ronin series set in Southern California. This book has two plots - an arson investigation and a subplot that is a heist style story. This particular series of arsons involve the destruction of cars and murals and Sharpe and Walker, with help and interference from a range of colleagues, eventually work out the connections. The heist plot was great fun - a revenge plot against a big pharma money-grabbing type. As a reader outside the US I find the free-market approach to selling medication quite shocking and perhaps this is why I found the subplot so compelling, caring about the outcome.

Sharpe and Walker are back! And they're joined by Eve Ronin and Duncan Pavone. Oh, and master thief Danny Cole as well. What more could you ask for?

This was a thrillride of a book full of fires and heists and incredibly quick people, both in their thinking and on their feet. I would absolutely recommend this one. And shhhh, don't tell but I actually like the team of Sharpe and Walker more than Eve and Duncan.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Walker & Sharpe have done it again. This story has two separate plots woven together into a cohesive story. I didn’t necessarily care for the second plot, but it doesn’t take away from anything. I villain was unexpected & so good. I cannot wait for the next one.

I was captivated by this one and was so excited to see there’s a new book coming out soon.
Hidden in Smoke is a story full of interesting characters, a fast-paced action and a very character driven plot.
I wasn't prepared for the tense, cinematic finale which kept me on the edge of my seat.

What an excellent crime thriller! This book takes you on a rollercoaster from arson and the investigation to high stakes robbery. It’s fast-paced and suspensfeul and full of twists that keep you guessing. Hidden in Smokey’s the 3rd book in the Sharpe & Walker series. I read it as a standalone book.

I enjoyed the characters and how they developed. This is my first book by Lee Goldberg and will be going back and reading some of his previous novels.

Thank you to NetGalley & Thomas & Mercer for letting me read this ARC.

I love anything Lee Goldberg writes. His tales are so far fetched, full of action and suspense with great quirky characters and Hidden In Smoke is no exception. I love that he writes different series in the same fictional world so the supporting casts of characters seem like old friends to me. I love the smart, funny dialogue and the shocking twists I didn’t see coming. I’m never disappointed by his writing!

<i>Hidden in Smoke</i> is the third installment in the Sharpe and Walker series, centered on two arson investigators with very different personalities who sometimes clash but ultimately make a great team. In this book, Sharpe and Walker are investigating a series of car fires, along with a major highway blaze that has caused significant damage and may be the work of a serial arsonist. Meanwhile, we also follow Danny Cole, a professional conman and thief who first appeared in book one and returns here in what turned out to be my favorite storyline.

This was probably my least favorite of the series so far, and the fact that the heist subplot was more engaging than the main investigation left me a bit disappointed. Still, it was an entertaining and enjoyable read overall, just not as satisfying as the previous entries in my opinion.

A decent read, just nothing that really blows my socks off. The premise was interesting and the arson investigation itself was well done but overall it was a bit on the boring side. Perhaps I've just had my fill of Sharpe & Walker, although I do really enjoy the humor that Goldberg injects into his storytelling. My thanks to Thomas and Mercer for providing a review copy of this book via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

It’s been a while since I read a Lee Goldberg book, and his newest book, Hidden in Smoke, reminded me of why I love his writing. Goldberg masterfully builds complicated story arcs with dual narration in this novel, and the reader enjoys a heist in an underground museum in Japan as well as multiple arson investigations.

Hidden in Smoke is the third book in the Walker & Sharpe series, and these arson detectives have great chemistry and investigative skills. They investigate multiple arsons and murder in this book, gathering clues from a diverse group of community members and chasing a few criminals by car and helicopter. Their story unfolds at the same time as a group of thieves plan and execute an elaborate heist to steal a watch worth $40 million.

Goldberg creates multiple story lines that intersect at certain points and keep the reader fully engrossed. I love how he creates a large cast of characters, with many returning from prior books and other series. The story has suspense and lots of action, but the writing and dialogue is very humorous as well. The author creates complex, sharp-witted characters whose expertise and life experiences make them excellent investigators. I also like the description of Walker’s home life, which adds dimension to his character and the story.

Hidden in Smoke is a great story with multiple crimes/cases to solve juxtaposed with the planning and execution of a complicated heist. The reader is on a wild ride through these situations. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and I need to get caught up with the first two books in this series. Goldberg is a talented, experienced author who writes compelling police procedurals, and Hidden in Smoke is no exception. I can’t wait to read more of Lee Goldberg’s books.

Thank you to Lee Goldberg, Thomas & Mercer Publishing, and NetGalley for an advance reader’s copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Hidden in Smoke by Lee Goldberg is a direct sequel to his equally enjoyable Malibu Burning, featuring characters from the Eve Ronin series, including the title character herself.

In Hidden in Smoke, Danny Cole and several of his fellow heist masters return to their last mark, seeking a more satisfying conclusion to their original mission. Fire investigators Walker and Sharpe, particularly Walker, play a pivotal role — it’s Walker who persuades Cole to come out of retirement and hiding by offering him an altruistic reason to get back into the game.

As with much of Lee Goldberg’s work, I loved this book. With many characters crossing over from the two series, the novel at times reads like a great Ed McBain 87th Precinct mystery. Potential readers should be aware, however, that Goldberg states in the introduction that he must reveal the conclusion of Malibu Burning to properly tell this story.

Otherwise, much like Malibu Burning, Hidden in Smoke has plenty to offer — a wonderful heist novel filled with action, fire science, and solid police procedural elements. Lee Goldberg expertly balances all these ingredients to deliver another thoroughly engaging reading experience.

Hidden in Smoke by Lee Goldberg is both a fire/police procedural and the story of the takedown of a very bad man by a criminal, who was not such a bad man. The two are related through one of the fire investigators, who is one of the few people who know Danny Cole is alive. Andrew Walker is an ex-marshal and the father of a little boy with epilepsy. There is a drug that treats it but it is owned by the very man Danny Cole will go after. All the while, Walker and his wife are figuring out out to pay each month, and Walker and his partner, Sharpe, are working on a series of arsons set over a period of two nights. It doesn’t take too long to figure out who is setting the fires but they have to hand it off when someone sets a big fire under a freeway stack, throwing Los Angles into one big traffic jam. They actually narrow that one down fairly quickly, but there are several bad elements involved, not just the arsonist. Sharpe is the fire evidence guy, Walker tracks them down. And they are good.

A terrific novel, both suspenseful and full of interesting knowledge. As interesting as the Sharpe/Walker investigation is, watching Danny Cole bring about the fall of Slezak was so masterful that I don’t think the pieces of it could be traced. It worked though, bringing hope to thousands of epileptic patients. Well thought out and interesting, the whole thing moved quickly. One had to be paying attention every moment. The pacing was perfect and the plot tremendous. What a terrific read.

I was invited to read Hidden in Smoke by Thomas & Mercer. All thoughts and opinions are mine. #Netgalley #ThomasAndMercer #LeeGoldbert #HiddenInSmoke