By Harry Pinkus
Moving Targets
Detective Thriller
Watch as Miles Darien returns with a new thriller in 2026. In this third installment of the series, he is challenged by several complicated cases including tracking down a valuable collection of stolen artifacts; searching for a long-lost heir to a family fortune; and unraveling a cold case murder of an Indigenous man in Wisconsin’s Northwoods.
Along the way, Miles is forced to deal with a devastating personal loss and the grief that follows.
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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers’ Favorite
In Harry Pinkus’s Moving Targets, private investigator Miles Darien takes on the suspicious death of Charles Powler, a Bad River Chippewa farmer found at the bottom of a ravine in northern Wisconsin. The case had gone cold before Powler’s family lost their farm to a mining company seeking land in the region. When a journalism student travels north to investigate the death and is later found badly beaten, Miles realizes someone is protecting what happened. His search leads into a local network built around racial hatred, where a police officer may have helped keep the original killing hidden. As Miles closes in on the truth, the investigation puts those closest to him in danger, forcing him to discover how far the men involved will go to keep the past buried.
In Moving Targets, Harry Pinkus delivers an excellent crime thriller shaped by Miles Darien’s forensic eye. Miles is a convincing character who comes across as realistic, particularly because his professional certainty coexists with doubts about his life with FBI agent Ken Caldwell. The settings are great, from a returned church cross that becomes a useful clue to dawn beside the Bad River bridge in Mellen, where empty streets give the investigation a northern Wisconsin chill. When violence reaches Miles personally, Pinkus uses a Santa Fe retreat to show how loss changes a detective accustomed to working through uncertainty. Pinkus keeps the later search through adoption records brisk by making the documentary detail part of discovery. With twists that amplify each revelation and a polished writing style, readers who enjoy believable crime fiction should put this book at the top of their list.
Literary Titan’s 5-Star Review
Moving Targets is a detective thriller about Miles Darien, a Lakeville, Wisconsin private investigator whose cases keep pulling him toward bigger questions about loyalty, justice, grief, and what it means to build a life with other people. It opens like a classic PI story, with stolen church artifacts and Miles’s quiet vow, “I will find them,” but it grows into something more personal and more emotionally loaded.
The book works best when it lets Miles investigate through conversation, observation, and old-fashioned persistence. The Holy Trinity case is a smart early mystery, full of fingerprints, misdirection, and small details that matter. Then the cold case involving Charles Powler shifts the story into darker territory, bringing in land, mining interests, racism, corruption, and violence. The author gives the investigations a steady, procedural rhythm without making them feel cold.
What gives the novel its heart is Miles’s circle: Ken, Ryan, Anne, Carl, George, Cora, Bobbie, Olivia, and Molly. Their banter makes the book feel lived-in, like you’re dropping into an ongoing community rather than just following a lone detective from clue to clue.
Moving Targets becomes a book about survival as much as solving crimes. Miles keeps working, but the work doesn’t magically fix him. The later sections, including the New York wedding, the Robin subplot, therapy, the move into Carl’s office, and the brief Santa Fe trip, show him trying to find a shape for his life after loss. The final discovery gives the ending a gentle lift without pretending grief is neatly resolved.
Moving Targets is a warm, character-driven detective thriller with several mysteries braided through one man’s changing life. It’s strongest when the cases and relationships feed each other, because Miles’s talent as an investigator comes from the same place as his friendships: he notices things, he cares, and he follows through. The book is part mystery, part community portrait, and part grief story, and that mix gives it more emotional weight than a standard case-of-the-week thriller.
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