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BEAU DEATH:

A PETER DIAMOND INVESTIGATION

By Peter Lovesey

New York: Soho Crime, 2017. $27.95

 

Beau Death is a doozy. It’s multi-award-winner Peter Lovesey’s seventeenth Peter Diamond novel. The series started in 1991 with the stunning The Last Detective (Anthony Award). Readers addicted to Lovesey’s appealing detective and the charming environs of Bath, England, have followed Diamond’s career and personal progress from Diamond Solitaire (1992) through The Vault (1999), Diamond Dust (2002), The Stone Wife (2014), and others, including Another One Goes Tonight (2016).

 

This time, Diamond deals with his coldest and probably most confounding case when a corpse is discovered during the demolition of townhouses in Twerton, a Bath suburb. A wrecking crew finds a body hidden in an attic dressed in authentic eighteenth-century garb. But it’s not just any eighteenth-century outfit. The skeleton is wearing a white tricorn hat and a distinctive black wig, attributed to Richard “Beau” Nash. If it is the legendary Bath dandy and notorious gambler, it will turn history on end. Biographers have put Beau’s body either in the Abbey or in a pauper’s grave, but Diamond’s investigation leads him down several perplexing paths.

 

Diamond’s lover, period-costume expert Paloma Kean, and Beau’s latest biographer, Estella Rockingham, are called in to help unravel the riddle of the bones. And when Diamond calls in a forensic pathologist, the acerbic Dr. Claude Waghorn, for an anthropological autopsy, peculiar details of one of the hands and an undergarment send the entire inquiry in a completely different direction. Added to that, while Diamond is still trying to solve the Beau Nash case, he finds himself caught up in the investigation of another murder that occurs while he is out on a date with Paloma at a fireworks competition in Bath.

In Beau Death, Lovesey deftly handles several different narrative threads. The intricate series of plot lines are seamlessly interwoven at the charged conclusion that takes place at a large, garish party. Lovesey has outdone himself this time.

 

—Robert Allen Papinchak

 

 

THE HIMALAYAN CODEX

By Bill Schutt and J. R. Finch

New York: William Morrow, 2017. $26.99

 

The lost-world subgenre of adventure novels, popularized in the nineteenth century by novelists such as Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard, has seen a resurgence in recent years. Modern authors such as Michael Crichton and James Rollins have taken the genre to new heights, proving that skilled storytellers can still create a plausible fantasy world in which readers can lose themselves.

Bill Schutt and J. R. Finch are among the latest to try their hands at this subgenre. The Himalayan Codex, the sequel to 2016’s Hell’s Gate, once again sees zoologist and adventurer Captain R. J. “Mac” MacCready venturing into the unknown with national security on the line. Set in 1946, the novel begins with the discovery of a lost codex penned by ancient Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. The codex details a previously unknown Roman expedition to Tibet and the implications of what Pliny found there almost two thousand years earlier could have staggering repercussions for the nascent Cold War.

 

The novel’s setting also allows the authors to build up the tension. The Communist Revolution is moving quickly throughout the region and the Himalayas are a political hot spot for competing Chinese factions. With a rapidly closing window as Chinese and Russian forces descend on the area, Mac is sent there with Yanni Thorne, the widow of his late friend Bob Thorne, who died in the previous book. They must uncover the truth behind Pliny’s cryptic assertions that the mysterious Himalayan valley he discovered holds the secret to shaping life itself.

 

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its world building. Schutt, a professor of biology and research associate at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, has published numerous articles and nonfiction books on some of the real quirks of the natural world, and for this fictional Himalayan valley, he has spun his knowledge into creating an authentic-feeling ecosystem. With carnivorous grass mimics and miniature mammoths that have bifurcated trunks, this world feels alien and yet entirely believable. The way everything fits together, including how the valley’s inhabitants were tailor-made for destruction by their Yeti-like overseers, is impressive and memorable.

 

Unfortunately, pacing issues plague most of the book, partly because most of the POV characters are naturalists and the ecosystem is described in a manner more appropriate to a travelogue than a thriller. Further affecting the pacing is the novel’s shifting point of view. For the first hundred or so pages, the narration moves back and forth in time between Mac and company making their wonder-filled journey into the valley in 1946 and Pliny making a very similar journey nineteen centuries earlier. Later on, the book opens up with more POVs (a Chinese scientist on his own expedition, natural scientists back in New York working to decipher more of Pliny’s codex, and a few sections featuring meetings of Stalin’s Politburo), and that actually hurts the pacing even further. Not only do these characters not meet for most of the book, but they have no impact on one another’s quest until the last few chapters, making each thread feel like a stand-alone story about a similar subject rather than a single dynamic narrative. The alien nature of the valley’s inhabitants and their motivations plus the lack of a clear antagonist or clear goals for the protagonists—both of which are thriller staples—hurt narrative drive.

 

The book features a number of clever historical tie-ins, including a fictionalized theory about Alfred Hitchcock’s inspiration for his 1963 film The Birds. Future Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy as a young naval officer, composer Bernard Herrmann, and Joseph Stalin also make appearances. Artist Charles R. Knight, known for his paintings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts which continue to shape how we imagine these creatures looked, is a POV character for the New York sections, while real-life Chinese biologist Wang Tselin is another major player in the story. And of course, Pliny, one of the most important naturalists of the ancient world, is an interesting character, torn between the need to record the wonders and horrors he beholds and his fear of how the maniacal emperor he is forced to serve would use such powers.

 

The authors include an insightful and lengthy note discussing the real-world history and science behind the book’s key elements. It is full of fascinating tidbits that didn’t make it into the narrative. Readers should not skip this section.

 

Despite problems with pacing and narrative structure, The Himalayan Codex is worth a look for fans of history, science, and lost worlds.

 

—Jeremy Burns

 

 

SLEEP NO MORE: SIX MURDEROUS TALES

By P. D. James

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. $21.00

The venerable P. D. James died in 2014. In 2016, an anthology of four of her stories, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories, was released posthumously. This latest anthology, Sleep No More, offers six unsettling tales of mischief, mayhem, and murder first published from 1973 to 2005.

 

In her preface to the earlier volume, James refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s basic tenets of the mystery short story. She adheres to those principles in Sleep No More as well, tempering them with her own trenchant dark humor. It is a collection in which long-ago memories, secrets, and lies dominate each story.

In “The Yo-Yo,” an unnamed seventy-three-year-old retired barrister sorting through some box files comes across a “bright red, glossy” children’s toy which triggers his memory of an incident that occurred at Christmastime in 1936. He recalls leaving his prep school to be chauffeured to his aunt’s small manor house for a holiday visit. Along the way, in the deep darkness of a snowy night, he witnessed a shocking murder. He looks back on his life and realizes that he, as a result, fabricates lies and is obsessed with secrets.

 

The guilt-ridden dreams of the narrator in “The Victim” places this story closest to Poe.  He is a thirty-one-year-old assistant librarian who was the first husband of an eighteen-year-old perfume-counter salesgirl, Elsie Bowman—a woman who became the celebrity Princess Ilsa Mancelli. James gets inside the mind of a murderer driven by jealousy and revenge, who doesn’t know that his ex-wife’s heart harbors its own cunning secrets. The ending poses an ironic question: Who is the real victim—the murdered one or the murderer?

 

The longest and most traditional of the short stories is “The Murder of Santa Claus.”  Like most of the others, it is set at Christmastime. Sixty-year-old third-rate mystery writer Charles Mickledore relates what happened to him in 1939 when he was a sixteen-year-old staying at his uncle Victor’s secluded Cotswold country house during school break. James attempts something challenging by using two first-person narrators. Along with Mickledore, she introduces a seventy-six-year-old retired police officer, John Pottinger, who describes the events from his professional point of view. The murder at the manor was his first case, and he and Mickledore offer variant perspectives on the circumstances of the crime. The story includes period details such as caroling villagers and a childish hunt-the-hare game that involves all the possible suspects staying at the house: the previous owners, a perpetually half-drunk actress, an amateur flyer, and the requisite staff. Multiple clues are dropped before there’s a shooting and a stabbing in this satisfying tale of “an old crime, an old story.”

 

The remaining three tales offer a grim repressed memory: “The Girl Who Loved Graveyards” features a daughter seeking the truth about her father’s final resting place; “A Very Desirable Residence” is a dark and dreary reminiscence of how a certain house ends up on the market as the result of an unhappy marriage and a covetous narrator; and “Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday” culminates in a head-shaking triple twist of an ending after sibling animosity is played against itself in a residential care facility. This final story ends with a chilling punch line.

 

Though James is gone, the engaging, disconcerting stories in Sleep No More (the title is from Macbeth) are her gifts that keep on giving.

 

—Robert Allen Papinchak

 

BLACK SKIES

By Arnaldur Indridason

Translated by Victoria Cribb

London: Harvill Secker, 2012. $15.99

The greatest writer today of international police procedurals is without a doubt Arnaldur Indridason. The Icelandic author recently reached film audiences in Europe and America with his screenplay (co-written with Óskar Jónasson) for Reykjavík-Rotterdam, the biggest budget film to come out of Iceland. The film was remade for US audiences as Contraband featuring Mark Wahlberg. But Indridason is at his core the literary crime novelist who hauntingly chronicles the adventures of his Reykjavík Detectives as they explore human nature at its basest and most disturbing. The latest novel, Black Skies, is no exception with its timely plot and taut narrative.

Ever since the conclusion of Arctic Chill, Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson has been absent, on “walkabout,” contemplating the gruesome discovery of what really happened to his younger brother when they were children. This has brought the series to an interesting fork in the road. In the previous novel, Outrage (2011), the story was told through the eyes of Detective Elinborg, while Black Skies is told through the eyes of her colleague, the surly US-educated Detective Sigurdur Oli. One contrast is that Elinborg is the more sympathetic of the two. Sigurdur Oli is disdainful of Icelandic policing, has less patience and finesse than Elinborg, and is often prepared to “bend the rules” when squeezed for a result. Interestingly, it is these precise faults that make Oli perfect for Black Skies’s plot, which involves corrupt bankers and hidden motives in pre-recession 2005. The title itself is a metaphor for the coming financial crisis that would engulf Iceland and ripple throughout the world.

The novel begins with the serial-killer motif, introducing a drifter named Anders who is crafting a horrific killing device. Sexual perversity is once again the order of the day (as in the preceding novel Outrage, where Elinborg investigated a series of date rapes), but this time Sigurdur Oli is faced with a case of “wife swapping” that leads to the extortion of a banker, a relative of one of Oli’s former schoolmates. Battling his own marital problems, Oli soon sees beyond the wife swapping and extortion to something far more ominous. He sees the dangers of wealth—a carousel spinning faster and faster so that with each turn the riders are less able to stop.

Evident in all Indridason’s work, and especially in Black Skies, is the author’s brutal economy of words. Yet there is room enough for hypnotic imagery. And this novel, a contemplative read on the whole, leaves us inadvertently comparing our own lives to those of the protagonists whose misfortunes we digest. The tragedy of Anders made this reviewer’s eyes moisten, as did the tragedies of the bankers caught up in the machinations of greed. There is no finer writer currently working the literary police procedural than Arnaldur Indridason, and the melancholia that is Black Skies is evidence of that statement. –Ali Karim

 

THE CUTTING SEASON

By Attica Locke

New York: Harper, 2012. $25.99

The Cutting Season is Attica Locke’s much-anticipated second novel. Her first, Black Water Rising, was one of the most acclaimed debuts of 2009 and received nominations for several awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and the Strand Magazine Critics Award. While the scope of Black Water Rising was wider than that of many mainstream crime novels, The Cutting Season—set in Louisiana on an old sugar plantation—runs more along the lines of traditional crime fiction.

Belle Vie has been in the hands of the same family since shortly after the Civil War. Funded by the heritage industry, the house, plantation, and slave huts have been preserved and restored to provide an elegant surrounding for weddings, conferences, and educational visits. In addition to the amenities, visitors are offered a regularly performed play, The Olden Days of Belle Vie, about a plantation where family and slaves work together in peaceful harmony before the upheaval of war. Against this backdrop of warped antebellum nostalgia, the sugar cane is now cut by a new workforce consisting of poor Mexican immigrants—slaves in all but name.

The irony of Belle Vie is not lost on property manager Caren Gray, a descendant of the very slaves who worked the plantation before the war. Her ancestors cut cane in the fields and her great, great grandfather stayed on as a freed slave after the war, working the land until he disappeared in a mystery that has remained unsolved to the present day. But Caren does not have time to dwell on the past—she has a living to earn, an often-uncooperative staff to manage, the homeowners to appease, and her daughter Morgan to raise. Besides, the old slave cabins give her an uneasy feeling she would prefer to ignore.

The book opens with a cottonmouth snake falling from a tree into the lap of the bride’s mother during a wedding, a fitting parallel to the juxtaposition of revisionism and slavery in modern day Belle Vie. On the heels of this bad omen, the body of a female migrant worker is found in a shallow grave along the fence between the plantation and the cane fields. The police investigation into the killing quickly follows the simplest route, pinning the crime on Donovan Isaacs, a young actor who works at the plantation and has spoken out against the revisionist play. As Caren is gradually drawn in, she discovers blood on her daughter’s clothes and realizes Morgan is lying to her about certain events on the night of the murder. Tension escalates when a red pickup truck starts following Caren, the police grow hostile and suspicious, and the Belle Vie staff begins excluding her and keeping secrets that may or may not be connected to the case.

The Cutting Season explores the Old South through the context of new social orders, pitting the pressure to rewrite or redress the past against corporate greed and the need for identity. It is a compelling novel, slow-moving, and beautifully written. It also contains all the elements of a traditional mystery: murder, a growing list of suspects, and an investigation heading inexorably in the wrong direction. If the denouement is less satisfactory than the novel on the whole, this is probably because the author has great expectations of the genre and asks it to carry more weight than most traditional genre writers ask of their work.

Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising is a hard act to follow and The Cutting Season does not disappoint.

—Danuta Reah

 

 

A DARK AND BROKEN HEART

By R.J. Ellory

London: Orion Publishing, 2012. $11.95

R.J. Ellory hit it big with his 2007 zeitgeist work, A Quiet Belief in Angels, and successive works have further highlighted his skill as a literary crime novelist. The author seems to prefer exploring theme, characterization, and human fallibility rather than following the conventions of any genre. It is therefore difficult to pigeonhole him. He has written police procedurals (Saints of New York, 2010), prison melodramas (Candlemoth, 2003), conspiracy thrillers (A Simple Act of Violence, 2008), and gonzo-southern gothic chase thrillers (Bad Signs, 2011). Ellory’s versatility is evident again in his tenth novel, A Dark and Broken Heart. This time, the focus is on how flawed characters gain redemption for past transgressions.

Like most of Ellory’s work, A Dark and Broken Heart is peopled with unlikeable characters, however the author makes sure they are well drawn and multidimensional. This attention to detail is most evident in the main character, Vincent Madigan, a cop with sociopathic tendencies who is in serious debt to New York drug baron Sandia, a.k.a. “The Watermelon Man.” Vincent has one chance to sort out his life by participating in a shakedown of a crew that has stolen $400,000, but things go awry when he is forced to kill his colleagues, and a young girl is shot accidentally in the gun battle. This might be termed collateral damage by others, but not Vincent. He then discovers that the stolen money is also tagged and therefore useless to him. This results in the rogue cop going to ground, with cops and mob, led by Sandia, on the hunt for him.

The reader soon realizes that Vincent Madigan is now a full-blown psychopath—a darkly charming liar, druggie, and user of people in the Machiavellian mold—but with a contrasting streak of humanity. The conflicting sides of human nature are areas that Ellory excels in revealing and here he renders them with tremendous insight and compassion.

So, finally cornered, Vincent Madigan embarks on a curiously reckless and risky journey to resolve his problems. This tale is a microcosmic examination of his life—a search for context and an understanding of why he is the way he is. This all sounds very worthy, but the beauty of the novel is that it can be read as a page-turning thriller about a bad cop with a henhouse of chickens coming home to roost, or as an existential meditation in the vein of a Jean-Patrick Manchette story. A Dark and Broken Heart owes more to the French new-wave than to its setting in the shadows of New York. In this disturbing thriller, Ellory magnificently illustrates the most dangerous side of human nature. Highly recommended!

—Ali Karim

 

DARK ROOM

By Steve Mosby

London: Orion Publishing, 2012. $22.99

British writer Steve Mosby often challenges our view of reality, and his latest thriller, Dark Room, is no exception. Mosby’s work seems to explore the nature of evil itself, so readers with a nervous disposition should be warned that at times it can get ugly. Perhaps British readers are not averse to these forays into the dark side, as Mosby was the 2012 recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award.

Opening along the well-worn path of a police procedural, the novel features detectives Andy Hicks and Laura Fellowes investigating the murder of a woman who seems to have been assaulted by her ex-husband. But when more bodies appear in close succession, the detectives’ original theory of a domestic incident comes into question. All the victims seem to be unrelated. And apart from brutal beatings, no pattern emerges to give any indication of the killer’s modus operandi—though talk of a serial killer is soon in the air. Even Hicks’ faith in a logical solution for every problem is starting to shake.

Written with divergent plot strands that weave together toward an unexpected climax, the book offers little that can be taken at face value, including Hicks’ own relationship with the killers. His already strained existence—investigating the worst excesses of human nature while anticipating the birth of his first child—is far from cliché. But it grows even more bizarre when he begins receiving letters from the killers and begins contemplating secrets from his own past.

Several minor characters striate the narrative of the book before becoming integral at the close. The setting, a vague northern British city in the near future, also seems minor at first. But perhaps the author is drawing a larger parallel to the seeming randomness of life and death, and the idea that the connection between the two is simply hidden from view. Dark Room is a superb thriller for those who eat with their mouths closed and enjoy the existential musings of people who operate on the edges of society.

—Ali Karim

 

DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE:

A Guide to Scandinavian

Crime Fiction

By Barry Forshaw

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. $28.00

In Death in a Cold Climate, veteran British crime fiction critic Barry Forshaw explores the fascinating “Nordic noir” phenomenon. This eruption of Scandinavian crime novels, mostly police procedurals, began in 1965 with Roseanna, the first of the Martin Beck series published by Swedes Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The genre gathered popular momentum in the late nineties with Henning Mankell’s somber Kurt Wallander series and its English-language television version starring Kenneth Branagh. Nordic noir exploded internationally with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2008, US), The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009, US), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010, US).

Forshaw wisely divided Death in a Cold Climate into chapters according to nationality, since he believes the most effective authors from each of the Scandinavian countries demonstrate the respective country’s idiosyncratic approach to social and psychological problems in the crime novel context.

After a useful general introduction, “Crime and the Left,” Forshaw devotes six chapters to Swedish crime fiction before, during, and after the work of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Mankell, and Larsson. His “Criminals and Criminologists” section contains especially intriguing reflections on novels just now appearing in English translation, such as Three Seconds (2011), a searing indictment of government corruption by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström. Forshaw also highlights Norwegian author Jo Nesbø while discussing how Viking legacy continues to impact Norway’s crime literature. He similarly deals with authors—mostly translated, but some not yet available in English—of Danish, Icelandic, and Finnish crime novels in their national, historical, and cultural contexts. The closing chapter discusses film and television adaptations of crime works from all five nations.

Besides Forshaw’s generally illuminating mini-critiques of translated novels most likely to be found in US and UK bookstores, he directly quotes not only Scandinavian authors but also their publishers and translators. The remarks from the translators in particular are helpful in understanding the challenges of making Nordic noir accessible to English-speaking audiences. Overall, Death in a Cold Climate, with its comprehensive bibliography, respect for national literary traditions, and level-headed evaluation of a complex and thought-provoking literary phenomenon is a most worthwhile addition to any reader’s library.

—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

 

 

GONE GIRL

By Gillian Flynn

Review Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

New York: Crown Publishing, 2012. $25.00

Gillian Flynn burst onto the literary scene in 2006 with Sharp Objects, a disturbing novel that won two Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards, which she followed up with Dark Places (2009). Her works feature unreliable narrators as unsettling as any convention-weary reader could wish for. If Patricia Highsmith were writing today, she would have fierce competition from fellow American Flynn, as they share a common strand in their stories—understanding the amorality that lies just a few millimetres beneath the veneer of humanity.

Gone Girl, Flynn’s third novel, is a very tough book to review because it reads like a bad drug experience, or a lucid dream that one wakes from in sodden sheets. Told from the viewpoints of Nick and Amy Dunne, the story follows a marriage that is less One Day (2009) by David Nicholls and more Full Dark, No Stars (2010) by Stephen King. It is in fact a dark romance about two lovers undergoing change.

The backdrop is the economic crisis impinging upon an affluent and educated couple. Forced to relocate from New York to Carthage, Missouri, they downsize to look after Nick’s sick mother, and Nick uses up a slab of Amy’s inheritance to set up a bar with his twin sister Margo (a.k.a. “Go”). There is subtle subtext behind their move as the narrative makes mention of how tough the economy is for people, including Amy’s parents, who once made a reasonable living from writing.

The narrative is difficult to detail, since it’s not the tale but rather the storyteller that makes Gone Girl such a joyous discovery. The plot is simple enough: following Amy’s disappearance on their fifth wedding anniversary, the shadow of suspicion falls upon her husband Nick. And in small town America, this proves troubling because there is no hard evidence, just whispering. Then the small town whispers hit the press and the police begin to hound Nick, waiting for the facade they believe he has built to crumble. Just when we seem to know what has happened to Amy, we are confronted by diverging accounts—Nick’s recollections of his relationship with Amy versus that of his wife’s diary. The climax will make you go back to the start and question everything, even your own reality.

In Flynn’s world, all reality is the artifice we build around ourselves; but when one person’s artifice clashes with another’s, the ugly truth is revealed. This is a thriller that will appeal to readers fascinated by the sinister side of human relationships. If you are looking for the heir to Patricia Highsmith, crack the spine of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Such unsettling entertainment will no doubt feature in all the awards for 2012.

—Ali Karim

 

 

Reviews of Jack Gantos, P.D. James, and more…

Our reviews section features the latest mystery offerings, covering books, anthologies, audio books, and videos.

DEAD END IN NORVELT

By Jack Gantos

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. $15.99

Jack Gantos has received many accolades and awards for his children’s books: Rotten Ralph, Hole in My Life, and the Joey Pigza series. His latest, Dead End in Norvelt, won the Newbery Medal Award for Best Children’s Book of 2011 and the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. This is a novel that is part memoir and part fiction, with a lot of history interpreted by a sensitive youth and his aging, thoughtful mentor.

Eleven-year-old Jack Gantos lives in Norvelt, Pennsylvania, in 1962 with his parents. He inauspiciously begins his summer vacation by getting grounded for the duration. Jack does, however get an occasional reprieve, whenever he helps his elderly arthritic neighbor, Miss Volker, write obituaries. Miss Volker is the medical examiner in town and they are both kept busy since almost every old lady there is dying. Norvelt itself is dying out, and the suspects are limited and may be anyone’s neighbor.

The flavor of Dead End in Norvelt is comparable to a Jean Shepherd story—funny, quirky and naïve—but the twist here, and it is an exceptional one, is Gantos’ respect for the individuals in his book. Miss Volker testifies that “… every living soul is a book of their own history, which sits on the ever-growing shelf in the library of human memories.” And as such, she believes the passing of individuals is momentous and worthy of relating.

The book’s slapstick humor is infectious: Jack digs a “fake atomic bomb shelter” for his dad; at one point they paint-bomb the drive-in from a J-3 surplus plane bought for twenty-five dollars; Miss Volker dips her hands in hot melted wax to relieve her arthritic “claws;” and she cauterizes Jack’s nose capillaries when they drip blood “like dragon flames.”

Middle school-aged boys will especially love the simplicity of life at this time, the fascinating lives the dead women lived, and the actual history the author has included. Gantos packs the book with facts about everything from Francisco Pizarro and Alexander Berkman, to the Great Influenza of 1918 and Cleopatra. “If you don’t know your history you won’t know the difference between the truth and wishful thinking.”

—Patricia Cook

 

 

DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY

By P.D. James

New York: Knopf, 2011. $25.95

Parallel novels—those that exist within or borrow from the framework of a novel by another author—are nothing new. In recent years, two novels have been written attempting to satisfy the “what happened next?” itch inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Susan Hill’s Mrs. De Winter (1993) and Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale (2001). In 1966, Jean Rhys created one of the more extraordinary literary revivals in Wide Sargasso Sea, exploring the life of Antoinette Cosway, first wife to Mr. Rochester, the mad woman in the attic of Charlotte Bronte’s gothic Jane Eyre. And then there is Jane Austen. Her books have inspired several writers to continue narratives that Austen herself ended at a satisfactory concluding point. The itch still persists: Did Sir Walter Elliot of Persuasion become trapped by the next title-hunter to tickle his vanity? Could Fanny Price of Mansfield Park really be happy with the tedious Edmund Bertram? And the perennial question: Did Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice live happily ever after?

P.D. James—a Jane Austin enthusiast and one of the UK’s foremost crime writers—has made her own foray into the world of “what happened next?” with Death Comes to Pemberley, a crime novel that revisits the world of Pride and Prejudice six years after the original book finished. In this intriguing parallel novel, George Wickham, the husband of Elizabeth’s wayward sister Lydia, becomes a suspect in a murder committed on Mr. Darcy’s land.

There are questions to ask of this novel: Does it work as a tribute to a book the author clearly admires, and does it work as a crime novel? The answer to both questions has to be “not entirely.” P.D. James re-creates with considerable success Austen’s style and dry irony, and there are some notable touches of wit, particularly when the deeply unpleasant William Collins, or the object of his obsequious regard, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, put in an offstage appearance.

The problem with literary revivals of well-known books is that the central characters are well established by the original writer. Attempts to develop them by a second writer are rarely satisfactory: Mr. Darcy as a new man with twenty-first century sensibilities, suffering from self-doubt and indecision, is not the Mr. Darcy that Austen created. Elizabeth, vivid and witty in the original, here seems oddly low key. Lydia, a masterpiece of characterization in the original, is one-dimensional in this revival.

Some of the social contexts explored in Death Comes to Pemberley sit uneasily in the Regency setting of the book. The apparent emancipation of Darcy’s sister Georgiana and the developing egalitarian instincts of Darcy do not have their roots in Austen’s original text and fail to be fully convincing. This is P.D. James’s Pemberley, not Jane Austen’s.

Does Death Comes to Pemberley work as a crime novel? P.D. James is a mistress of shadows beneath apparently sunlit surfaces. The dark, the dangerous, and the eerie all compete for space in her books, where killers can be ruthless, egotistical, and cruel. None of this is appropriate for a Jane Austen scenario and the lack of modern policing and modern forensics leaves little for P.D. James to work with. There is no real investigation and the solution to the murder mystery comes in the form of a long confession. It is in the investigative aspects of the story that James’s mastery of Austen’s prose style comes unstuck: talk of prime suspects sits uncomfortably here.

There are moments of vivid narrative: The arrival of Lydia’s coach in the night, as well as the search in the woods for a dying or dead man, are tense and exciting; the narrative moves with satisfying pace. However, this is not the P.D. James of Innocent Blood or of the Dalgleish novels. For her readers, it represents an interesting foray into new territory, but not an entirely satisfactory one.

—Danuta Reah

DEATH OF A KINGFISHER

By M.C. Beaton

New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012. $24.99

A little darker and edgier than its twenty-seven predecessors in M.C. Beaton’s deservedly popular Hamish Macbeth Highland cozy series, Death of a Kingfisher explores Scotland in recession and Hamish in a more touchy than usual state of mind. To deal with the financial slack, quaint little villages such as Braikie have to find ways to encourage tourism. The town appoints a toothsome, strawberry blonde lassie named Mary Leinster—low-cut blouses, twinges of the sight and all—as their council director of tourism. Mary has great plans—renaming Buchan’s Wood as “the Fairy Glen” and building a pricey gift shop. And once Hamish gazes into those heavily lashed blue eyes, he has great plans as well, having been recently meditating on his failures with women.

When a horrendous and rich elderly woman, a newcomer to the town, is slain by one of Beaton’s most ingenious murder devices, Hamish soon has his hands full with a frustrating investigation. He is accompanied by a new constable—a gossipy layabout named Dick Fraser, thrust upon Hamish by inimical influences in the police hierarchy—as well as the usual cast of Lochdubh regulars, including Hamish’s marvelous wildcat Sonsie and lop-eared dog Lugs. Despite the prevailing sunshine and a blue Highland sky, however, Beaton closes this engaging mystery on a chilly note, hinting that winter is coming—and with it, yet another installment of her long-running exploration of human vicissitude.

—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

DEFENDING JACOB

By William Landay

New York: Delacorte Press, 2012. $26.00

The third novel by US lawyer William Landay is a remarkable and emotional journey that puts this work right up at the apex of legal thrillers, rubbing shoulders with the works of authors such as Scott Turow, John Grisham, and Michael Connelly.

When teenager Ben Rifkin is found dead from a brutal stabbing in a wooded area close to his local New England school, all eyes turn to Jacob Barber, the fourteen-year-old classmate who Rifkin had bullied harshly. The problem is that Jacob’s father, Andy Barber, is the assistant district attorney for the county. Andy is soon taken off the case as the investigation gathers momentum. The stresses to the Barber family start to form cracks in their “happy family” façade as Andy tries to protect his son from the rigors of a murder case, something that his wife Laurie has trouble reconciling. Adding to the intrigue, the story is told in first-person narrative, from the viewpoint of Andy Barber—yet how reliable is the assistant DA in retelling the events that this case has dredged up?

The tension ratchets up when we learn that Jacob’s grandfather (Andy’s father) also had the shadow of murder over him and we realize there could be some violent genetic link in the Barber family … or not. Either way, as the trial looms, the Barbers become ostracized from their tightly knit suburb of Boston, making the later stages of the novel fraught with anxiety until the startling dénouement. At times, we feel the hidden depths of the narrator leading us forward, but the anxiety is such that we sense something darker lurking in this suburban community, something far from the white picket-fences, shielding the families from their secrets.

—Ali Karim

A DOUBLE DEATH ON THE BLACK ISLE

By A.D. Scott

New York: Atria, 2011. $15.00

A.D. Scott’s second Highlands mystery, A Double Death on the Black Isle, takes her 1950s heroine Joanne Ross to Scotland’s Black Isle, a picturesque, occasionally forbidding peninsula surrounded by three firths, where Joanne’s school friend, Patricia Ord Mackenzie, lives in an elegant Georgian manor house and supervises her parents’ farming enterprise. Patricia’s sudden decision—sparked by her unplanned pregnancy—to marry a “handsome devil” of a local fisherman shocks Joanne and horrifies her socially prominent mother. It also precipitates actions that shake the fabric of this quiet postwar town to its foundation, namely two mysterious deaths on the same day.

Joanne, who after ten years has left her abusive husband to pursue a job as a reporter for the Highland Gazette, plunges into the deep water of old village rivalries, clashes between farmers and fishermen, and her personal struggles. One of which is her attraction to McAllister, her editor-in-chief and a decent man who’s intensely drawn to her as well.

A.D. Scott has a firm grasp of Highland society and its often intense feuds, her setting is appropriately enigmatic, and her understanding of Joanne’s situation is both sensitive and insightful. In particular, Scott’s portrayal of the permutations of Patricia and Joanne’s friendship—born in the misery of a harsh Scottish boarding school and stretching into a fragile and ultimately exploitative relationship—makes this excursion into secrets a deeply satisfying read.

—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

FALLEN ANGELS

By Connie Dial

Sag Harbor, NY: The Permanent Press, 2012. $29.00

In Connie Dial’s latest crime novel, Fallen Angels, newly promoted Captain Josie Corsino of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Division certainly has her hands full. First, a minor starlet is found dead with a smile on her face; then the body of the girl’s agent turns up. Josie soon learns that the actress was involved with a prominent councilman’s drug-addicted son and that the boy’s father was a close friend and mentor of her superior, Deputy Chief Eric Bright—who is not too fond of Josie and who garners little respect from those he supervises.

As she proceeds, Josie also discovers that her son David, an aspiring musician, is somehow connected to the dead girl and the councilman’s son. To make matters worse, Josie’s estranged husband’s business card turns up among the dead girl’s belongings. Plagued by fears that members of her own family will be implicated in the murders, Josie finds her professional life entangled in a web of personal and political connections.

A former journalist and twenty-seven-year veteran of the LAPD, author Connie Dial has stocked Josie’s division with complex, colorful, and realistic characters. The officers, ranking from adjutants to chiefs, are deftly drawn with unique personalities, as are the underworld pimps, addicts, and hit men with whom the police interact. Josie has two seasoned colleagues who help her crack the case: much-married, hard-drinking Detective Red Behan, a friend and confidant who Josie considers to be the best detective in Hollywood, and Lieutenant Marge Bailey, who commands the largest vice unit in Los Angeles and is Josie’s only female friend on the force.

Dial takes the reader into a world where police business is handled at its highest level. Josie Corsino is a seasoned professional who knows every aspect of her job, including its political ramifications. She works long, hard, unglamorous hours, drinks too much, carries a gun at all times—and uses it when necessary—and is far from being a dutiful wife. In these and other ways, she is a certain kind of modern woman. She may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but she is realistic, and readers will recognize in her aspects of themselves.

—Carol Chadwick

THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS

By Hesh Kestin

London: Mulholland UK, 2012. $16.95

This oddity was first published by independent house Dzanc Books in the US, but since Stephen King wrote that “The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats may just be the best book you never read …” it was picked up by Mulholland in the UK and issued as mass market paperback in March. King’s hyperbolic comment is pretty close to the truth, and for pure reading pleasure, Kestin’s understated and amusing Jewish gangster epic is just that—epic.

Written in first person from the perspective of Russell Newhouse, the author gives us 1963 New York as the backdrop of this tale of gangsters and immigrants and the consequences of their actions and inactions. Newhouse is a twenty-year-old student in Brooklyn, chasing as much tail as he can get. Like the term “tail,” readers should be warned that Kestin’s book is peppered with the language and racial attitudes that were prevalent at the time.

Newhouse’s life takes a hard-left when he becomes involved in the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, an immigrant association that represents and assists the older generation and a throwback to when Jewish immigrants fled war-torn Europe and Nazism, grouping together to help each other out. At the meeting, Newhouse is hired by legendary Yiddish gangster Shushan Cats—a.k.a. Shoeshine Cats. Kestin’s terse writing style is a joy to read, as the lean narrative paints pictures in your mind, for example in this first description of Cats: “The figure who stood there—it seemed for minutes—was one of those small men native to Brooklyn who appeared to have been boiled down from someone twice the size, the kind who when a doctor tries to give him an injection the needle bends.”

Newhouse is soon hired by Cats to assist in the funeral matters following Cats’s mother’s death and the week-long Shiva period. Newhouse takes on these duties, since refusing Cats is not something people generally do if they want to live a happy life. But soon the mysterious Cats vanishes and Newhouse finds himself taking on the mantle of the Jewish gangster’s empire, which leads the narrative into some dark, yet comic, episodes. Shadowing the surreal humor are reminders that the world is far from benign, and men like Cats are necessary when events such as the Holocaust or the assassination of John F. Kennedy occur. Readers will chuckle at this novel’s witty reflections on life, as well as at the dialogue that at times is reminiscent of Raymond Chandler at the height of his powers. A remarkable find and worthy of Stephen King’s praise.

—Ali Karim

SACRILEGE

By S.J. Parris

New York: Doubleday, 2012. $26.95

The Tudor dynasty of late medieval England is popular with novelists across the range. Novels that are at the “literary” end of the market, such as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; popular romance books, such as Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl; and children’s novels, such as Julia Jarman’s The Time Travelling Cat and the Tudor Treasure, have all explored the Tudor era in various ways. It was a period marked by conflict, religious turmoil, and brutal and bloody regimes, and therefore offers great scope for writers of crime fiction, as the success of C.J. Sansom and Rory Clements demonstrates.

S.J. Parris is another crime writer exploring this period. Sacrilege is the third book in her Giordano Bruno series, set in the England of Elizabeth Tudor. Bruno is an Italian refugee from the Continental Inquisition, an apostate monk who has come to England to live in its more enlightened (for the period) climate. He is a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I. The author has thus placed her protagonist at the center of the political and religious intrigues of Elizabethan times.

Parris, in her previous novels, confronts real historical events: the Babington Plot, and the attempts by the Howard family to put the Catholic Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, on the English throne. Sacrilege is based on more personal events for Bruno: Sophia Underhill, a woman who appears in the first Bruno novel, Heresy, returns to his life. Sophia is now a widow in flight from the charge that she murdered her brutal husband.

Bruno travels to Canterbury, the scene of the murder and also the site of the murder of Thomas Becket, a Catholic martyr from the time of the Plantagenet Dynasty, to try to solve the murder and save Sophia from trial, an inevitable guilty verdict, and execution by burning. Disguised as a man, Sophia travels with him, and Bruno has to hide her with sympathizers in Canterbury where she is in danger of being recognized.

So far, so good. However, the book contains some significant weaknesses. The plot is over-complicated, with conspiracy, child murder, and treachery all coming together in a complex strand that is never completely unraveled. It relies on the coincidental juxtaposition of crimes that allows Bruno to reveal a conspiracy at the same time as solving the murder he has come to Canterbury to investigate. Sophia travels with Bruno but, apart from occasional references to the importance of secrecy, vanishes until she is needed again for plot development. This results in the action slowing down and makes the novel sag in places.

Writers of historical fiction have the problem of re-creating the voice of the era while making their characters’ words accessible to modern readers. Putting modern English in their mouths is acceptable—after all, this is what they were speaking: the contemporary language of their period. There are some dissonances here. Parris uses the slightly formal tone many writers adopt to represent earlier forms of English, but this is inconsistent and sometimes coupled uncomfortably with twenty-first century idioms in a way that pulls the reader out of the Tudor world she is trying to re-create. Phrases such as “not your ordinary churchman,” “you lot,” and “you look rough” sit uncomfortably with “filthy Spanish dog” and “whoreson.” This kind of juxtaposition is more reminiscent of the 1980s BBC series Blackadder, or even the 1971 film Carry On, Henry, than of historical fiction.

This intrusion of the twenty-first century continues in the way the characters are presented. The protagonists are much too modern. Sophia, without any background to make this believable, is a feminist before her time. She does not ring true as a character and it is hard for the reader to empathize with Bruno’s passion for her, even as we are asked to accept that he puts his own life and the lives of others at risk for her.

A repeated subplot throughout the series is a lost book ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus (which is not very lost as it has a habit of popping up in unexpected places and then being mislaid again by Bruno). So far, this subplot has not developed beyond this point and Parris should move it on or bring it to an end.

Sacrilege is, at the very least, readable, with dark Tudor set pieces (plague, secret crypts, dark and narrow streets), but Parris, who has clearly done her research, might benefit from placing her characters more in the day-to-day world of Elizabethan England, rather than concentrating on over-complex plots that do not entirely convince.

-Danuta Reah

A WANTED MAN

By Lee Child

New York: Delacorte Press, 2012. $28.00

Having written seventeen books in the Jack Reacher series, most of them big best sellers, Lee Child is the very definition of an old pro: a master of keen suspense, tricky plots, and beautifully choreographed violence. Unlike a lot of writers in his position, though, he never phones it in. His latest Reacher thriller, A Wanted Man, is as deftly plotted and polished as his first or tenth.

The events of A Wanted Man pick up right after the conclusion of The Affair (2011), the previous book in the series. Reacher is hitchhiking across Nebraska, trying to get to Virginia to meet a woman. He catches a ride in a car that turns out to have some very bad dudes in it. Once he figures this out, he needs to do something about it. But solving the problem without putting innocent lives in danger is going to be tricky. Meanwhile, an FBI agent is investigating an especially bloody murder in a town in the middle of nowhere. The victim was a State Department official. Or maybe he was a CIA agent. Or maybe he was nobody at all. Regardless, Julia Sorenson is going to figure it out. What do you suppose are the chances this situation is somehow connected to the one that Reacher is in?

One welcome change from some of the Reacher novels of a few years back is that Jack is no longer acting as much like Superman. Sure, he still figures it all out in the end, and kicks a lot of ass along the way, but he’s no longer quite the lethal savant he was for a while. And it turns out that a more human Reacher is a more interesting one. A Wanted Man is highly recommended to all thriller readers.

—David J. Montgomery

THE ABSENT ONE (UK title, DISGRACE)

By Jussi Adler-Olsen

New York: Dutton, 2012. $26.95

Following the English-language translation of last year’s Mercy—retitled The Keeper of Lost Causes in the US—which featured the English debut of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Danish Department Q novels, we now have the second in the series, The Absent One. These books may be riding on the coattails of the recent explosion in Scandinavian / Nordic crime fiction, but they are far more than imitations. They mix social commentary with a subversion of the conventions and tropes of the genre. At the center of the narrative of The Absent One, we have the Batman and Robin of crime fiction, surly and introspective Detective Carl Morck and his assistant, a Syrian immigrant named Assad. Extending the analogy to include Batgirl, we also have failed policewoman turned secretary, Rose Knudsen, thus expanding the duo into a crime-fighting trio.

Department Q is a section that investigates cold cases, but this time Morck and company are faced with a murder that has already been solved—according to the case file left at the department’s door. Morck’s attention is drawn to the upper echelons of Danish society and the twenty-year-old murder of siblings linked to an elite boarding school. As the trio investigates, they discover that there was a group of students at the school who got their kicks from violence and murder. Today, these madmen sit as bastions of Danish business and society, free from their violent past and coated with the respectability that their positions have provided. They hide their true natures from sight, or so Morck considers. Three of their number—Torsten Florin, Ulrik Jensen, and Ditlev Pram—appear untouchable, since their friend Bjarne Thøgersen admitted to the crimes. Another one, Kristian Wolf, died in a hunting “accident.” The sixth of the group, and the sole female, Kirsten-Marie Lassen, has dropped off the radar. The key to solving this case (if there is a case) lies with a mysterious homeless woman named Kimmie who could link the 1987 murders to the elite group of psychopaths. Kimmie is an interesting character and illustrates the flipside of privilege, showing how easy it is to fall through the cracks.

Adler-Olsen peppers the narrative with deadpan and, at times, gallows humor, using Assad and Rose as foils to the darkness and violence. Without the witty banter between Carl Morck and his Department Q assistants, this would be a troubling read. The novel also raises questions regarding the class systems that appear in every society and the tendency of “elites” to perceive themselves to be above the law. While addressing a theme that has been used before, The Absent One is a masterful read and Adler-Olsen’s take is as disturbing as it is entertaining, offering a wealth of social introspection into the madness of our times and a glimpse of how power and wealth can corrupt.

—Ali Karim

THE CONFESSION

By Charles Todd

New York: William Morrow, 2012. $25.99

Each of the Inspector Ian Rutledge novels by the distinguished mother-son writing pair known as Charles Todd has maintained a delicate balance between compassion for their grievously wounded protagonist and ever more imaginative plot lines that explore the complex roots of human fallibility. The latest installment in the series, The Confession, opens on an eerie encounter between Rutledge and a stranger who claims to have murdered his cousin some years earlier, during World War I. Intrigued but unable to officially investigate the alleged crime because there is no corpse, Rutledge decides to privately investigate. Accompanied as always by the voice of Hamish MacLeod, the close friend he had to execute for mutiny in the trenches, Rutledge drives into the marshy, enigmatic Essex countryside to a hostile village where he immediately senses undercurrents of violence and conspiracy.

Two short weeks after the peculiar visit that launched Rutledge into the murky case he can’t seem to put aside, the body of the man who “confessed” is found in the Thames, a bullet in the back of his head and a gold locket around his neck. Driven by a fierce determination to unravel a crime that page by page becomes more convoluted, Rutledge finds himself physically and emotionally endangered. Several of the surly villagers apparently will do almost anything to conceal their unwholesome past from the outside world, while Rutledge’s antagonistic superior, Old Bowels, is taken down by a heart attack, leaving the inspector to ponder the ramifications of having a new man in charge. Meanwhile, Rutledge fears that if somehow Hamish’s “presence” is discovered, the career at Scotland Yard that until now has helped preserve his sanity will come to a screeching halt.

Exquisitely realized atmosphere, a poignantly drawn protagonist—especially when Rutledge cannot help but think of the woman he loves but believes he can never marry—and a fiendishly complicated plot make The Confession one of Charles Todd’s most enthralling cases to date. This is a series to cherish, one that few of today’s crime writers can hope to rival.

—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

 

 

A DARK REDEMPTION

By Stav Sherez

London: Faber and Faber, 2012. $11.95

In the hands of a lesser writer, the premise of a British police procedural set in London featuring a troubled, maverick detective, who is in perpetual conflict with his superiors could rapidly slip down the cliché gradient. A Dark Redemption, however, does the opposite due to the literary ability of Stav Sherez.

A Dark Redemption is Sherez’s third novel and appears to be the start of a powerful and timely series featuring DI Jack Carrigan and his partner DC Geneva Miller. Carrigan still bears the scars of a visit he and two university friends made to northern Uganda many years previously, while his partner, Miller, has her own demons following her recent demotion from detective sergeant due to “irregularities.” Miller’s superiors assign her to work with Carrigan and, as incentive, have promised her reinstatement to her former rank. The covert part of Miller’s role is to keep watch and report back on Carrigan’s activities to the fifth floor. Miller’s misgivings about the assignment are a microcosm of the novel’s narrative structure: a feeling of unease is striated across the novel as the two detectives explore London’s African immigrant community and discover that there are complex agendas at play.

The case that binds Carrigan and Miller, and provides the backbone of the novel, is that of the rape, torture, and murder of Grace Okello, an overseas student from Uganda. Carrigan initially believes that Grace’s horrific end is tied to her abusive boyfriend, however Miller is less convinced: she sees links to the murdered girl’s academic research into the armed conflicts in her native Uganda. As the case progresses, the odd coupling of the troubled duo starts to take shape. They soon confirm that the roots of Grace’s murder stretch back to Africa and the child soldiers exploited by groups such as Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

As the detectives delve deeper into the case, Sherez adds layers of moving social commentary and insight into the troubled lives of displaced Africans in modern-day London. The journey Carrigan and Miller make down the hidden streets of immigrant London leads to a series of satisfying revelations and twists, leaving the two detectives positioned for what promises to be a remarkable series. At times the novel is truly dark, meshing London’s underbelly with the author’s frenzied imagination. This latest offering from Sherez also deals with the theme of “stranger in a strange land,” which Sherez explored in previous works, The Devil’s Playground (2004) and The Black Monastery (2009). The other aspect that A Dark Redemption shares with these precursors is the glimpse of a darker world co-existing with our own. There are sections in the narrative that make the journey truly terrifying, propelled by an uneasiness as persistent as the beat of an African drum.

Establishing a series upon the threadbare carpet that is the police procedural subgenre is a risky endeavor, but one that Sherez achieves masterfully. A Dark Redemption is a page-turning and thought-provoking story that seems torn from the troubling reality the media chooses to ignore.

—Ali Karim

 

 

THE DARK ROSE

By Erin Kelly

New York: Pamela Dorman Books, 2012. $26.95

Two strangers, each carrying a dark secret, meet and fall in love. And when they finally reveal to each other what they’ve kept hidden, their lives change irrevocably. Lovers with secrets are not unusual in fiction, but Erin Kelly treats this motif in a surprisingly fresh way in her second novel, The Dark Rose.

Witnessing his father’s accidental death as a child has left Paul unable to bear the sight of blood and the bullies at school torment him because of it. A young, illiterate tough named Daniel fights off Paul’s adversaries and Paul repays him by helping him with his schoolwork. By the time they graduate, Paul has reluctantly become involved in Daniel’s life of petty theft. He agrees to help Daniel so he can use his share of the money to attend college and become a teacher. But during a robbery, they are surprised by a watchman. Daniel kills the man, the boys are caught, Daniel is charged with murder, and Paul is named as a material witness who will have to testify against his friend. For his protection and rehabilitation, Paul is sent with other troubled youths to work on a historic garden restoration project. No one at the garden knows what he did to get there and Paul does not enlighten them, fearing that someone will find out where he is and silence him.

Louisa is the well-respected master gardener in charge of the restoration project. We learn through a series of flashbacks that as a teenager working in a London herb store, she was betrayed and humiliated by her boyfriend, a rock musician. During her confrontation with him, he stumbled and fell into the street. When he reached out for her, she pushed him away and he fell into the path of an oncoming car. The driver, drunk, left the scene of the accident and she fled as well, feeling responsible for her boyfriend’s death. Over the years, Louisa has turned her interest in plants, particularly ancient herbal remedies, into a career specializing in restoring ancient gardens. She chose this path because she knew it would take her far away from London and anyone who might associate her with the accident. The passing years, however, have not blunted her guilt, which she harbors as obsessively as she once harbored her love for the musician. She has become a recluse, working well by day and drinking herself into oblivion at night to escape her memories.

When Louisa meets Paul one day on the garden grounds, she is struck by his uncanny resemblance to her past lover. She is troubled by this but drawn to him all the same. She also begins to realize how lonely she has become. In turn, Paul realizes that he enjoys working outdoors and that he likes the people with whom he works, especially Louisa. He is lonely too and needs to be close to someone he can trust. They soon fall in love. For both, the constraints of guilt and worry begin to fade and they start thinking positively about the future. But when they share their secrets and try to help each other, as lovers often do, shocking things begin to happen and the reader is jolted to the very last page.

—Carol Chadwick

 

NOT DEAD YET

By Peter James

New York: Minotaur Books, 2012. $25.99

In Peter James’s eighth Detective Roy Grace police procedural, one would perhaps feel that treading the well-worn path into the dark heart of Brighton, England, would be somewhat stale, yet the converse is true. The Roy Grace thrillers are becoming a comfort read, and there is nothing better than observing the very worst excesses of human behavior from the safety of your armchair, coupled with the fact that the plot of Not Dead Yet contains elements torn from the author’s former life. Before writing novels, Peter James was a film producer who himself rubbed elbows with the Hollywood types he writes about here.

In this novel, Brighton has become the location for a huge Hollywood blockbuster featuring Gaia Lafayette (a combination of Madonna and Lady Gaga), a US-resident diva who grew up in the more humble origins of Council Estate Brighton. Lafayette’s role in the historical thriller should earn her an Oscar for her mantle and move her into the world of film. Detective Grace is under pressure from the fifth floor to ensure that nothing goes wrong in Brighton while the film crew is in town. This is especially critical when they discover that Lafayette has some obsessive fans, including a stalker. Grace and partner Glenn Branson therefore pay close attention when a dead body (torso only) found on a chicken farm is connected to the diva in question.

Despite the density of the plot, featuring James’s trademark multiple viewpoints and reptilian-like plotlines snaking toward an unexpected finale in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, the book reads remarkably fast. This is due to nearly 150 “clipped” chapters. Yet brevity should not be confused with levity; though there is humor and tradecraft, Not Dead Yet is indeed another dark excursion for the reader, portraying the underbelly of this seaside town in a troublesome light—no doubt to the continued chagrin of Brighton’s tourism board.

It may be no coincidence that Not Dead Yet has a film backdrop, since the Roy Grace novels are now inching in that direction themselves. And considering James’s experience with cinema, the films will no doubt match the success of the novels.

If you are eagle-eyed, you may even spot The Strand Magazine’s illustrious managing editor, Mr. Andrew Gulli, lurking in the shadows.

—Ali Karim

 

 

RESTLESS IN THE GRAVE

By Dana Stabenow

New York: Minotaur Books, 2012. $12.99

Arguably Dana Stabenow’s most perceptive addition to her popular Alaska-based Kate Shugak series, Restless in the Grave takes the intrepid national park rat and private investigator far away from her village of Niniltna. This time, Kate joins hunky state trooper Liam Campbell (hero of another Alaska-based series by Stabenow) as he investigates the suspicious plane crash death of Finn Grant, a wealthy businessman from the small town of Newenham. Liam Campbell’s wife, an air taxi pilot, is a prime suspect in the crash.

For her part in the investigation, Kate volunteers to go undercover as a barmaid in Newenham and finds that Finn Grant had been running a web of shady deals, questionable hunting and fishing tours, government buyouts, and an airfreight business with dangerous criminal overtones. In the course of this case, Kate and her half-wolf, half-husky named Mutt encounter a brand new cast of compelling characters, all drawn with Stabenow’s signature eye for dark humor, and sensitivity to native mysticism. Disconcertingly, Kate also meets memorable film star Gabe McGuire, whose big-screen looks and velvet-smooth lines remind her of Jack Morgan, four years dead but forever alive in Kate’s memories.

Stabenow’s passion for Alaska and its people animates all her work, but notably so in Restless in the Grave, where deeper insight into character motivation, family secrets, and shared humanity make for an outstanding addition to an already praiseworthy series.

—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

ROGUE

By Mark Sullivan

New York: Minotaur Books, 2012. $24.99

If we’re to believe the marketing campaign for Mark Sullivan’s Rogue, protagonist Robin Monarch is destined to become the next Jason Bourne. This may not be completely off base, since both characters are heroes in fast-paced international thrillers. But a closer cousin would be John Robie in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film To Catch a Thief (based on the novel by David Dodge); Monarch is a cat burglar and jewel thief who makes like Robin Hood, stealing from rich layabouts to help the poor back home in Argentina.

Although raised by a cunning pair of thieves, Monarch hasn’t always followed in their footsteps. When Rogue opens, he is a covert CIA operative, the best in the business. But that quickly goes south and Monarch reverts to his old ways. His past and present collide, however, when a Russian mobster tries to hire him to steal a top-secret new weapon—the same weapon that his old boss at the CIA sent him after a couple years prior. That’s when the plot really gets moving, and the stakes are as high as they can be.

It’s all but inevitable that when an author writes a thriller like this he or she must choose between pacing and depth of characterization. If the goal is a “thrill-a-minute” page-turner, then it’s going to be difficult to really make the characters come alive as three-dimensional beings. Sullivan obviously chose to go with pacing, and it was likely the right decision. Rogue races along like a freight train with a full head of steam. If some of the more nuanced aspects of the plot get lost along the way, it is a fair trade when the story is this entertaining.

Mark Sullivan is good at this kind of writing, and once you start reading him it’s hard to stop. Rogue contains more than its fair share of wild action, tense situations, and narrative velocity. In Hollywood, they save this kind of story for a summer blockbuster. But in publishing, we get to enjoy a rousing romp year-round. Picking up Rogue is a sure way to brighten your fall.

—David J. Montgomery

 

 

SAFE HOUSE

By Chris Ewan

New York: Minotaur Books, 2012. $25.99

Chris Ewan established himself as a cult writer with his Good Thief Guide series of comic-crime thrillers set in Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Paris, and Berlin. With Safe House, he leaves comedy to explore something altogether darker, and which no doubt will push him beyond cult readership and into the mainstream. This claustrophobic tale is well suited to its backdrop amid the insular community of the Isle of Man, a small island sandwiched between the British and Irish mainland. And unlike Ewan’s more humorous work, Safe House is permeated by a sense of menace and a plot as fast-paced as the island’s renowned annual Tourist Trophy motorcycle race.

After working on a boiler repair in a remote farmhouse, plumber Rob Hale encounters three mysterious people, obviously not locals. Two are men, but it is the third, a woman named Lena, who catches the plumber’s eye. A few days later, Lena joins Hale for a ride on his motorcycle and they are involved in an accident. Like a character in a Philip K. Dick tale, Hale regains consciousness in a state of confusion. When he asks about Lena’s injuries, he is told that there was no pillion passenger at the scene of the accident. Hale realizes that either he’s lost his mind or conspiracy is afoot. Trusting the latter explanation, he begins to search for the mysterious Lena, recognizing on some level that his circumstances are part of a larger puzzle that is missing a piece or two. Along the way, he befriends a tough Londoner PI, Rebecca Lewis, who is on her own search. She has been hired by Hale’s parents to investigate the recent suicide of their daughter Laura, Hale’s sister.

The narrative, from Hale’s point of view, indicates that Ewan has not lost his flare for humor. Though not broad, such as in the Good Thief Guide books, it is dry and measured, attenuating the absurdity of the situation in which Rob Hale finds himself. The plot zips through the chicanes that litter the narrative, and traverses the conspiracy of the missing Lena and the death of Laura. Like the novel’s setup, little can be taken at face value. Though a couple of the plot twists creak, the strength of the writing lets you ignore the sound and focus on the denouement, because like a motor bike rider turning into an obstructed hairpin bend, you just don’t see it coming.

—Ali Karim

TURN OF MIND

By Alice LaPlante

New York: Grove Press, 2012. $15.00

Alice LaPlante’s debut novel, Turn of Mind, is the first work of fiction to win the Welcome Trust Book Prize for medical writing. This may seem a strange niche for a mystery novel, but LaPlante’s book does not slot easily into any genre.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Dr. Jennifer White, a brilliant surgeon sinking into the abyss of Alzheimer’s disease and, as such, the archetype of the unreliable narrator. The reader can trust very little of what Jennifer says in terms of when and where she is, whom she is with, or what she has done. Her perception of reality—and therefore also her narrative—is distorted by the illness. LaPlante leaves it to the reader to navigate Jennifer’s skewed perceptions, just as Jennifer herself tries to do, though she increasingly fails.

The nightmare of Alzheimer’s is depicted with merciless clarity and sometimes with humor. Jennifer White was, and in some ways still is, a highly intelligent woman. She knows when she is being patronized—one of her top ten signs of having Alzheimer’s is, in her words, when “Girl Scouts come over and force you to decorate flower pots with them.” She is also aware of her gradual loss of status, going from “Dr. White” among colleagues at the hospital to “Jen” at the assisted living home. But while Turn of Mind offers a compelling depiction of the slow deterioration of an Alzheimer’s-affected mind, readers must decide for themselves whether it also succeeds as a crime novel.

The crime itself is the murder of Jennifer White’s best and longest-term friend, Amanda, who is found with a fatal head wound and four fingers of her hand surgically removed. The friendship between Jennifer and Amanda was known to be troubled, and as an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in hands, Jennifer has the skill to commit the crime. The police suspect her and posit that her claims of forgetfulness are a blind. The reader knows that Jennifer has no recollection of Amanda’s death—each time she hears of it, it comes as a dreadful shock with fresh bereavement—but this doesn’t mean Jennifer is innocent. At several key points in Jennifer’s life, Amanda breached the trust that should surely exist between close friends. And there is something Jennifer is aware of, even with her damaged mind: a place she doesn’t want to visit. Is this the story of Amanda’s murder?

Turn of Mind is not without its flaws. For example, why does Jennifer remain friends with a woman who tried to steal her daughter and destroy her marriage? The nature of the narrative prohibits this from being convincingly explained. Further, the narrative restrictions created by Jennifer’s illness dictate that the crime is revealed more through exposition than gradual discovery. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing, intelligent mystery. LaPlante joins the ranks of recent authors writing novels that include crimes, rather than traditional mysteries that hinge on them. If you’re looking for serial killer gore, this is not the book for you. The horror does not come from graphic details of the murder, but rather from the slow deterioration of an intelligent, perceptive woman. Turn of Mind is an impressive debut.

—Danuta Reah

 

BEAU DEATH:

A PETER DIAMOND INVESTIGATION

By Peter Lovesey

New York: Soho Crime, 2017. $27.95

 

Beau Death is a doozy. It’s multi-award-winner Peter Lovesey’s seventeenth Peter Diamond novel. The series started in 1991 with the stunning The Last Detective (Anthony Award). Readers addicted to Lovesey’s appealing detective and the charming environs of Bath, England, have followed Diamond’s career and personal progress from Diamond Solitaire (1992) through The Vault (1999), Diamond Dust (2002), The Stone Wife (2014), and others, including Another One Goes Tonight (2016).

 

This time, Diamond deals with his coldest and probably most confounding case when a corpse is discovered during the demolition of townhouses in Twerton, a Bath suburb. A wrecking crew finds a body hidden in an attic dressed in authentic eighteenth-century garb. But it’s not just any eighteenth-century outfit. The skeleton is wearing a white tricorn hat and a distinctive black wig, attributed to Richard “Beau” Nash. If it is the legendary Bath dandy and notorious gambler, it will turn history on end. Biographers have put Beau’s body either in the Abbey or in a pauper’s grave, but Diamond’s investigation leads him down several perplexing paths.

 

Diamond’s lover, period-costume expert Paloma Kean, and Beau’s latest biographer, Estella Rockingham, are called in to help unravel the riddle of the bones. And when Diamond calls in a forensic pathologist, the acerbic Dr. Claude Waghorn, for an anthropological autopsy, peculiar details of one of the hands and an undergarment send the entire inquiry in a completely different direction. Added to that, while Diamond is still trying to solve the Beau Nash case, he finds himself caught up in the investigation of another murder that occurs while he is out on a date with Paloma at a fireworks competition in Bath.

In Beau Death, Lovesey deftly handles several different narrative threads. The intricate series of plot lines are seamlessly interwoven at the charged conclusion that takes place at a large, garish party. Lovesey has outdone himself this time.

 

—Robert Allen Papinchak

 

 

THE HIMALAYAN CODEX

By Bill Schutt and J. R. Finch

New York: William Morrow, 2017. $26.99

 

The lost-world subgenre of adventure novels, popularized in the nineteenth century by novelists such as Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard, has seen a resurgence in recent years. Modern authors such as Michael Crichton and James Rollins have taken the genre to new heights, proving that skilled storytellers can still create a plausible fantasy world in which readers can lose themselves.

Bill Schutt and J. R. Finch are among the latest to try their hands at this subgenre. The Himalayan Codex, the sequel to 2016’s Hell’s Gate, once again sees zoologist and adventurer Captain R. J. “Mac” MacCready venturing into the unknown with national security on the line. Set in 1946, the novel begins with the discovery of a lost codex penned by ancient Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. The codex details a previously unknown Roman expedition to Tibet and the implications of what Pliny found there almost two thousand years earlier could have staggering repercussions for the nascent Cold War.

 

The novel’s setting also allows the authors to build up the tension. The Communist Revolution is moving quickly throughout the region and the Himalayas are a political hot spot for competing Chinese factions. With a rapidly closing window as Chinese and Russian forces descend on the area, Mac is sent there with Yanni Thorne, the widow of his late friend Bob Thorne, who died in the previous book. They must uncover the truth behind Pliny’s cryptic assertions that the mysterious Himalayan valley he discovered holds the secret to shaping life itself.

 

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its world building. Schutt, a professor of biology and research associate at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, has published numerous articles and nonfiction books on some of the real quirks of the natural world, and for this fictional Himalayan valley, he has spun his knowledge into creating an authentic-feeling ecosystem. With carnivorous grass mimics and miniature mammoths that have bifurcated trunks, this world feels alien and yet entirely believable. The way everything fits together, including how the valley’s inhabitants were tailor-made for destruction by their Yeti-like overseers, is impressive and memorable.

 

Unfortunately, pacing issues plague most of the book, partly because most of the POV characters are naturalists and the ecosystem is described in a manner more appropriate to a travelogue than a thriller. Further affecting the pacing is the novel’s shifting point of view. For the first hundred or so pages, the narration moves back and forth in time between Mac and company making their wonder-filled journey into the valley in 1946 and Pliny making a very similar journey nineteen centuries earlier. Later on, the book opens up with more POVs (a Chinese scientist on his own expedition, natural scientists back in New York working to decipher more of Pliny’s codex, and a few sections featuring meetings of Stalin’s Politburo), and that actually hurts the pacing even further. Not only do these characters not meet for most of the book, but they have no impact on one another’s quest until the last few chapters, making each thread feel like a stand-alone story about a similar subject rather than a single dynamic narrative. The alien nature of the valley’s inhabitants and their motivations plus the lack of a clear antagonist or clear goals for the protagonists—both of which are thriller staples—hurt narrative drive.

 

The book features a number of clever historical tie-ins, including a fictionalized theory about Alfred Hitchcock’s inspiration for his 1963 film The Birds. Future Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy as a young naval officer, composer Bernard Herrmann, and Joseph Stalin also make appearances. Artist Charles R. Knight, known for his paintings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts which continue to shape how we imagine these creatures looked, is a POV character for the New York sections, while real-life Chinese biologist Wang Tselin is another major player in the story. And of course, Pliny, one of the most important naturalists of the ancient world, is an interesting character, torn between the need to record the wonders and horrors he beholds and his fear of how the maniacal emperor he is forced to serve would use such powers.

 

The authors include an insightful and lengthy note discussing the real-world history and science behind the book’s key elements. It is full of fascinating tidbits that didn’t make it into the narrative. Readers should not skip this section.

 

Despite problems with pacing and narrative structure, The Himalayan Codex is worth a look for fans of history, science, and lost worlds.

 

—Jeremy Burns

 

 

SLEEP NO MORE: SIX MURDEROUS TALES

By P. D. James

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. $21.00

The venerable P. D. James died in 2014. In 2016, an anthology of four of her stories, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories, was released posthumously. This latest anthology, Sleep No More, offers six unsettling tales of mischief, mayhem, and murder first published from 1973 to 2005.

 

In her preface to the earlier volume, James refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s basic tenets of the mystery short story. She adheres to those principles in Sleep No More as well, tempering them with her own trenchant dark humor. It is a collection in which long-ago memories, secrets, and lies dominate each story.

In “The Yo-Yo,” an unnamed seventy-three-year-old retired barrister sorting through some box files comes across a “bright red, glossy” children’s toy which triggers his memory of an incident that occurred at Christmastime in 1936. He recalls leaving his prep school to be chauffeured to his aunt’s small manor house for a holiday visit. Along the way, in the deep darkness of a snowy night, he witnessed a shocking murder. He looks back on his life and realizes that he, as a result, fabricates lies and is obsessed with secrets.

 

The guilt-ridden dreams of the narrator in “The Victim” places this story closest to Poe.  He is a thirty-one-year-old assistant librarian who was the first husband of an eighteen-year-old perfume-counter salesgirl, Elsie Bowman—a woman who became the celebrity Princess Ilsa Mancelli. James gets inside the mind of a murderer driven by jealousy and revenge, who doesn’t know that his ex-wife’s heart harbors its own cunning secrets. The ending poses an ironic question: Who is the real victim—the murdered one or the murderer?

 

The longest and most traditional of the short stories is “The Murder of Santa Claus.”  Like most of the others, it is set at Christmastime. Sixty-year-old third-rate mystery writer Charles Mickledore relates what happened to him in 1939 when he was a sixteen-year-old staying at his uncle Victor’s secluded Cotswold country house during school break. James attempts something challenging by using two first-person narrators. Along with Mickledore, she introduces a seventy-six-year-old retired police officer, John Pottinger, who describes the events from his professional point of view. The murder at the manor was his first case, and he and Mickledore offer variant perspectives on the circumstances of the crime. The story includes period details such as caroling villagers and a childish hunt-the-hare game that involves all the possible suspects staying at the house: the previous owners, a perpetually half-drunk actress, an amateur flyer, and the requisite staff. Multiple clues are dropped before there’s a shooting and a stabbing in this satisfying tale of “an old crime, an old story.”

 

The remaining three tales offer a grim repressed memory: “The Girl Who Loved Graveyards” features a daughter seeking the truth about her father’s final resting place; “A Very Desirable Residence” is a dark and dreary reminiscence of how a certain house ends up on the market as the result of an unhappy marriage and a covetous narrator; and “Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday” culminates in a head-shaking triple twist of an ending after sibling animosity is played against itself in a residential care facility. This final story ends with a chilling punch line.

 

Though James is gone, the engaging, disconcerting stories in Sleep No More (the title is from Macbeth) are her gifts that keep on giving.

 

—Robert Allen Papinchak

 

 

Our reviews section examines the latest mystery offerings, covering books, anthologies, audio books, and videos.

11/22/1963

By Stephen King

New York: Scribner, 2011. $35.00

Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/1963, takes readers back in time to a turning point in American history. There was huge anticipation and publicity surrounding this magnum opus and the novel does not disappoint.

Jake Epping, a high school teacher in present-day Maine, is asked by local diner owner Al Templeton to complete a task that Al is now too ill to finish. The task is to use a secret “time tunnel” in the diner’s basement to travel back in time and prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Yet the tunnel only leads to a specific day in 1958. In order for Jake to blend into late 1950s and early 1960s culture, he adopts the identity of George T. Amberson and brings a wad of 1950s cash provided by his dying friend. Al also explains the rules of the time tunnel, since he has used it many times for “vacations.” No matter how much time one spends in the past, only two minutes elapse in the present reality, and each journey resets the portal to the same date and time in 1958.

On his first trip to the past, Jake travels to the fictional town of Derry, still reeling from events that were outlined in King’s It. Jake aims to track down a man who savagely murdered his wife and family with a hammer, leaving one son seriously injured. That son would grow up to become Harry Dunning, the janitor with the limp at Jake’s school, a man who before retiring finally gets his high school diploma—in part thanks to Jake’s reaction to the essay he penned detailing that tragic night. Jake hopes he can improve Harry’s future.

The period detail of the 1950s, coupled with Jake’s commitment to be over ninety-nine percent certain that it was Lee Harvey Oswald that killed President Kennedy, make the journey as exciting as it is filled with nervous anxiety. King pins his drama firmly on Oswald being the lone gunman, as opposed to the Grassy Knoll theory, and it’s obvious why he does this. As a literary device, the lone gunman theme keeps the narrative focused.

Despite the time travel element and President Kennedy’s assassination being key drivers for the narrative, it is the other themes King explores that are at the center of this work. The novel explores the relationship between love and loss, as well as the idea that we live in an absurd reality—one that allows a lone nut to kill the most important man in the western world—and drives home the point that people must never take anything for granted as it can be taken away in the random sway of reality.

Stephen King’s 11/22/1963 is a mature work that makes you feel the past is always alive and all our actions and inactions ripple through time to create “the present.” The book is a masterpiece in a career that, thanks to the author’s extraordinary imagination, only gets better and better.

—Ali Karim

THE FORGOTTEN AFFAIRS OF YOUTH

By Alexander McCall Smith

New York: Pantheon, 2011. $24.95

Former Scottish medical law professor and novelist Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle, gracious outlook on the human condition optimistically shines through every page of this slim but significant mystery/meditation on the frailties of human nature.

Philosopher Isabel Dalhousie, comfortably situated professionally, financially, and most of all emotionally with her devoted fiancé Jamie and quirky toddler Charlie, finds herself drawn into fellow philosopher Jane Cooper’s search for her biological parents. Jane’s mother died very young in Scotland, leaving her to be adopted and taken to Australia. Now at age forty, Jane wants to find her father, who she believes was a student in Edinburgh. So begins The Forgotten Affairs of Youth.

As Isabel draws on her own connections and experiences to help Jane, she also faces situations that challenge her personal convictions: When should she and Jamie marry? What should she do, if anything, about her niece Cat’s consistent attraction to the wrong men, not to mention the toxic mushrooms Cat sold to Jamie that he and Isabel ate? How should she deal with her housekeeper Grace’s money problems that Isabel, herself, may have inadvertently caused?

Told with McCall Smith’s trademark wit and wealth of insight into human motives and activities, this small excursion into moral philosophy makes a big contribution to understanding one’s world—and one’s self. As always Alexander McCall Smith has the power to make his readers believe in the best that lies within us all.

——Mitzi M. Brunsdale

FROZEN ASSETS

By Quentin Bates

New York: Soho Press, 2011. $25.00

In Quentin Bates’ debut novel featuring Sergeant Gunnhildur “Gunna” Gísladóttir, the body of a man is found floating near the docks of a coastal Iceland village. Hvalvik is a place where everyone knows everyone and the most Gunna ever has to do is write a speeding ticket or deal with an unruly drunk. When the medical examiner states that the unidentified man drowned, and was probably too intoxicated to be able to walk very far from wherever he started out, Gunna is puzzled by the fact that the man is neither from the town nor known to anyone in it. And when she learns he is from Reykjavik, more than an hour’s drive away, she suspects foul play—despite pressure from her superiors at the capital to think otherwise.

After identifying the dead man by a tattoo on his arm, Gunna tracks his former occupation to a public relations firm run by an extremely unpleasant woman named Sigurjona Huldudottir, who also happens to be married to Bjarni Jon Bjarnason, Iceland’s Minister of Finance. The PR firm represents an aluminum manufacturing company with questionable practices that are potentially dangerous to the environment and further investigation reveals that the dead man was a friend of an environmental activist who died in an unsolved hit-and-run a few weeks earlier. What at first appeared to be a simple drowning in a quiet seacoast village has quickly turned into a complicated scheme involving corrupt politicians and an international contract killer.

Often referred to as the “fat police officer,” Gunna is a middle-aged widow with two teenaged children, indifferent housekeeping practices, and a surreptitious smoking habit. She is aided in her investigation by a large cast of well-drawn characters. As Hvalvik is a tiny village in a small island country, Gunna knows a lot of people there—more than a few are her relatives. In more than one instance, stopping for a quick bite in a café provides her with useful information from one of the patrons. Also particularly helpful is a young reporter from a Reykjavik newspaper charged with writing a story on nearby village police officers. And a blogger with a business sense turns out to be on the same path as Gunna. As the dirt behind the drowning takes on global significance, this kind and friendly cop leads the charge against a sophisticated group of criminals who discover that the Hvalvik police force has been highly underrated. A compelling read.

—Carol S. Chadwick

KISS ME QUICK

By Danny Miller

London: Constable & Robinson, 2011. $11.99

Danny Miller’s excellent debut crime novel, Kiss Me Quick, is set in 1960s England and introduces young Detective Inspector Vince Treadwell. After Treadwell falls foul of a corrupt senior officer in London’s Soho sex industry—sixties Soho was more known for sleaze than for trendy eateries and clubs—he is sent to Brighton on the south coast.

Treadwell is a native of Brighton and all too familiar with the power of gangster Jack Regent, who disappeared after apparently being involved in a knife killing. His new job with the force is to track down Regent in the chaos of organized crime, heroin, and the riots involving gangs of Mods and Rockers that were in fact a feature of south coast seaside resorts in the early 1960s.

Treadwell must walk a fine line between the criminals he is pursuing: Regent himself, Regent’s psychopathic henchman Francis Pearce, his own brother Vaughan—a heroin addict who has in the past worked for Pearce—and Regent’s girlfriend, Bobby, with whom Treadwell becomes romantically involved. Corruption within the police force means that he is unable to trust the people who should be backing him, from his superiors in Brighton all the way back to London.

Miller captures the sleaze and the excitement of sixties Brighton, and the moral ambiguities of a police force that was far less accountable and far less controlled than it is today. One flaw in the narrative is that heroin addiction was comparatively rare in 1964, as doctors were able to prescribe freely up to 1965 and addicts were less dependent on dealers. Heroin trafficking was not the big business it is now, yet the heroin addicts Treadwell encounters are more akin to current users than UK addicts of the period. Also exaggerated in the story, the Mods and Rockers riots, though they occurred, were relatively small scale and blown up by a sensationalist press. Nonetheless, Miller paints a believable and vivid picture of 1960s England. The plot is as crowded as a Brighton beach on a sunny summer Sunday, but the book is a highly enjoyable page-turner. Danny Miller’s second Vince Treadwell book, The Gilded Edge, is due out in May 2012.

—Danuta Reah

NORTHWEST ANGLE

By William Kent Krueger

New York: Atria Books, 2011. $24.99

Welcome back to northern Minnesota and the quickest, most exciting read closest to the Canadian border. The Northwest Angle is a place of majestic vistas, pristine forests, and ocean-like waters in the Lake of the Woods. And William Kent Krueger’s love for this sparsely inhabited region generates all possibilities concerning its independent populace of peace seekers and rogues.

In Northwest Angle, Cork O’Connor and family are vacationing on a houseboat when their lives are threatened by a derecho—a monster storm with hurricane-force winds. The storm sets the mood of violence amid spectacular beauty in this twelfth installment of the spirited series. While the family seeks shelter on one of a myriad of islands, Cork’s oldest daughter Jenny finds the tortured corpse of a young Native American woman and her hidden and healthy infant son, giving rise to another of the novel’s themes: children and family.

With his children entering adulthood and his wife deceased—due to an airplane crash two years prior—Cork is dreading the loneliness of an empty home. Yet his children’s choices are awakening new possibilities: Jenny asserts her motherhood as she defends the newfound child from kidnappers; and Stephen, fifteen, wholeheartedly embraces his father’s Ojibwe heritage, learning of the responsibilities and consequences of becoming a Mide (a healer). As the story progresses, we meet another family, the founders of the Church of the Seven Trumpets, who seek seclusion and security for their worshippers and carry rifles when meeting with outsiders. Heavy lies the burden upon the adults guiding their charges.

The novel’s setting in the Angle Islands engenders a sense of the primitive beauty and natural turmoil that have molded the region’s modest citizenry. In this land of contrasts, all things are possible and best expressed by Amos Powassin, a blind Ojibwe elder: “In all good is the possibility of evil, and in all evil the possibility of good.” Further, the Ojibwe culture emanates from every thread of the story, endowing the thriller with greater meaning. William Kent Krueger allows readers to smell the campfire bacon of deception, but doesn’t let us fully digest the meal until the powerful conclusion.

—Patricia Cook

PERFECT PEOPLE

By Peter James

London: Macmillan UK. $30.00

Peter James is well known as the author of the highly successful Brighton-based police procedurals featuring Detective Roy Grace. However, James’ latest novel, Perfect People, is not a crime novel per se, but a topical international techno-thriller, and a remarkable one to boot.

Filmmaker James started his writing career penning thrillers and horror fiction before he hit his stride as a best-selling crime writer, and he expands his horizons even further with this cautionary tale of genetics and madness. Perfect People opens with Californians Dr. John Klaesson and wife Naomi dealing with the loss of their four-year-old child to a rare genetic condition, and in the midst of planning to have another baby. But both parents carry the faulty gene that caused the fatal condition that resulted in the death of their child and both fear the odds of the rare disease rearing its ugly head again. They turn to the mysterious geneticist Dr. Leo Dettore, who offers a gene-screening process to prevent the unthinkable from happening again. Due to the complexity of laws and ethics that make genetic manipulation a minefield, Dettore performs his technique on a ship in international waters.

Dettore’s method also offers the ability to add “design” to their offspring; and we’re not talking just about sex and hair color here. The debate on the rights and wrongs of “designer babies” provides an interesting dimension to this thriller, and one that attracts the attention of a millennial religious cult. Soon the doctor is killed when his helicopter turns the sky red and, with Naomi pregnant, John realizes that their own lives are at risk. The Klaesson’s flee America and head to Great Britain.

With clipped chapters, the pace ratchets up when the couple discovers that they are expecting twins, a boy and a girl—but once the children arrive, the Klaesson’s problems really begin. With unearthly intelligence, the Klaesson children are “more than human,” and soon the dangers that John and Naomi had been dodging are far closer to home.  Perfect People is a surreal journey of ethics, science, and religion. It is as far away from the dark alleyways of Roy Grace’s Brighton as one could get, but a blindingly hot read set at the edges of our reality and indicative that Peter James can carve a thriller as twisty as the DNA Double-Helix. In a word, remarkable.

—Ali Karim

A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD

By Alan Bradley

New York: Delacorte Press, 2011. $23.00

Canadian author Alan Bradley created this, his first novel series, when he was seventy years old. His decades of teaching and writing—especially his co-authored work Ms. Holmes of Baker Street: The Truth About Sherlock—creatively anticipated these adventures featuring eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce. The first book of the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, was an international success and winner of the 2010 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel. A Red Herring Without the Mustard is the third installment, and although this is not a book for young children, it will be embraced by young adults (age 15+) and adults who love language and humor.

Flavia lives with her two older sisters and father, Colonel Haviland de Luce, in Buckshaw, a British estate manor in the village of Bishop’s Lacey in the early 1950s. But the family may soon lose their home for lack of money. Harriet, mother and wife, disappeared ten years ago while mountain climbing in Tibet, leaving the family more or less emotionally paralyzed. The Colonel refuses to speak about his beloved wife’s death and is barely present in the lives of his daughters. Because of her father’s stiff upper-lip attitude, Flavia cherishes the least smile or brush of affection from him. Flavia’s sisters are interesting characters in their own right: Daphne (Daffy), thirteen, is a bookworm with a Jeopardy-like mind and Ophelia (Feely), seventeen, is a highly regarded pianist. Flavia, an amateur chemist with her own lab in the southeast corner of Buckshaw, is a loner, separated from her older sisters who “torture” her because of some incomprehensible hurt, origins unknown.

Flavia’s actions always have dramatic consequences. In Red Herring, she accidentally burns a gypsy fortune-teller’s tent and her subsequent act of charity results in the gypsy later being bludgeoned. The mystery of the attack on Gypsy Fanella and the outrageous murder of Brookie Harewood—lout and poacher, whose body is displayed upon Poseidon’s trident in the Buckshaw’s gardens—have their origins in a shadowy religion founded by Nicodemus Flitch in the sixteenth century. Threaded within this tightly woven story is the disappearance of a baby, blamed, of course, on the gypsies.

Bradley writes with sophistication, defining the unseen with unique metaphors and similes that allow the reader to see, feel, and hear those ideas: “… the mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.” And flavored with Dickensian spice, the author’s characters—Flavia, the tolerant Inspector Hewitt, de Luce family servant Dogger, and the rest of Bishop’s Lacey—are the kind in which all readers can find a little of themselves.

—Patricia Cook

THE REVISIONISTS

By Thomas Mullen

London: Mulholland Books, 2011. $19.95

The Revisionists is a disturbing mix of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 with a sprinkling of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and perhaps hints of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island or Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly … because nothing in this political espionage thriller can be taken at face value.

We start with an agent from the future named Zed (who uses the alias Leroy Jones), sent back to our time to watch over world events and ensure that all the known disasters occur as history has recorded them. The purpose of Zed and his fellow agents is to protect the “perfect world” of the future from the future’s opposing forces, “the hags.” So Agent Zed finds himself playing cat and mouse with fellow time travelers while trying morally to justify the task with which he has been entrusted—ensuring the death of many innocent people in the upcoming “event,” something that will decimate the population and leave only the small band of future survivors who will craft the perfect world. Added to the mix is Leo, a disgraced ex-CIA agent now working as a private contractor, and the political dissidents that Leo watches over: T. J., the young anarchist; Tasha, a corporate lawyer grieving over her brother who was killed in combat; and Sari, a Korean diplomat’s housekeeper. How their paths cross with Zed is somewhat surreal, as Zed tries to match his mission with what happened to his father-in-law, wife, and young child in his future. There are rumors that Zed/Leroy is not what he seems, as perhaps the future is not as perfect as he has been lead to believe.

In a world where reviewers bemoan books devoid of originality, this is the exception to the rule. The kicker is that the ambiguity of the ending forces the reader to rethink what he was read, since the narrator(s) of the tale appear a tad unreliable—unlike Mullen who delivers a disturbing vision of reality and madness, in a literary style that has you reaching for Valium at the end of each chapter.

—Ali Karim

13 MILLION DOLLAR POP

By David Levien

New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011. $24.95

One reason the PI thrillers by screenwriter David Levien have been gathering such strong acclaim—including a recent Shamus Award nomination for Where the Dead Lay—is the strength of his series character Frank Behr, the troubled former cop now scratching a living as a private eye.

In 13 Million Dollar Pop, Behr has been working for the Caro Group, a private investigation and security company that has been hired to protect Bernard “Bernie Cool” Kolodnik, a successful businessman hoping to start a career in politics. While on duty protecting Kolodnik, Behr ends up in the crossfire of a shootout and quickly realizes that the political motivations of his ward are not shared by some on the darker side of the law. He begins investigating what really happened that night, but receives no help from the local officials, and as it becomes more and more apparent that protecting Bernie Cool was not the plum job that it first appeared, Behr finds himself in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy. Added to this are hit man Waddy Dwyer, escort girls, and euro-trash blocking Behr’s path to the economic security he is chasing. As if that weren’t enough, Behr’s girlfriend is pregnant and he’s dealing with the reality of health care costs, which is why he ended up taking the job in the first place.

This third excursion into the seedier side of Indiana is highly recommended, but bring a Kevlar jacket, because when you crack the spine of this book, you have to watch out for the ricochet of gunfire.

—Ali Karim

WICKED AUTUMN

By G. M. Malliet

New York: Minotaur, 2011. $23.99

Agatha Award-winner G. M. Malliet—the British author of Death of a Cozy Writer and its two St. Just mystery sequels—sets her new series in Nether Monkslip, an idyllic fictional village seething with barely submerged passions, jealousies, and feuds.

At the center of it all is the universally feared and loathed Wanda Batton-Smythe, self-appointed head of Nether Monkslip’s Women’s Institute. Gingerly circling Wanda like reluctant satellites—drawn by the irresistible force of a tacitly shared desire to murder her—are Awena Owen, owner of the village’s new age shop; Elka Garth, operator of the Cavalier Tea Room and Garden; local knitting maven Lily Iverson; and Suzanna Winship, the willowy and vampy sister of the village physician. Among the basic ingredients for this deliciously plotted homicide, Malliet has cleverly inserted a darkly handsome sleuth with secrets of his own—Max Tudor, a former MI5 agent turned Anglican priest, who as vicar of St. Edwold’s Church is the inevitable object of lascivious fantasies on the part of Nether Monkslip’s womenfolk.

After Wanda is found dead during the Harvest Fayre, Max has to tread a precarious tightrope between the “pure, peaceable, and gentle” wisdom from above and the deplorable but so much more fascinating “earthly, unspiritual, and devilish” motives driving a ruthless killer. Wicked Autumn is the opening of what promises to be a thoroughly delightful cozy series.

—Mitzi M. Brunsdale

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