What’s Old Is New Again

There are a couple of newly reissued novels that crime-fiction fans really ought to lay their hands on soon.

The first is Picador’s 40th anniversary edition of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a work that Dennis Lehane, in his new introduction, calls “the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years” and “quite possibly one of the four or five best crime novels ever written.” Part of what distinguishes this gritty tale of Beantown thieves, mobsters, and small-time gunrunners from its literary brethren is its dialogue, “the louts and knuckleheads of Boston’s crime world running off at the mouth,” as another author, William Landay, explained in The Rap Sheet last summer. Higgins, a junior-grade federal prosecutor at the time he penned Eddie Coyle, had listened to many transcripts of trials, hearings, and interrogations, and tried to capture that authenticity in his prose, giving us crooks and assorted other lowlifes who Landay says “mumbled, stumbled, spoke in code, mangled common phrases; sometimes they made no sense at all.”

Also of note: The Leavenworth Case (Penguin Classics). Almost a decade before Sherlock Holmes’ initial appearance, Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935) introduced the first detective star of a book series. In The Leavenworth Case--a once-bestselling 1878 yarn, much lauded by Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White), but now largely forgotten--resolute Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police Force investigates the locked-mansion murder of Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy retired merchant and philanthropist. Was one of his nieces, set to inherit his fortune, behind this nefarious deed? Gryce and a rising young lawyer investigate, in a story that modern whodunit fans should not miss.

READ MORE: “Paperback Writers: Boston, Down and Dirty,” by Richard Rayner (Los Angeles Times); “Down and Out in Boston,” by Troy Patterson (Slate).

Crime Fiction: The Deputy by Victor Gischler

After his takes on the apocalypse (Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, 2008) and medieval alchemy (Vampire a Go-Go, 2009), Victor Gischler returns to crime fiction with his latest novel, The Deputy (Tyrus Books). Toby Sawyer is an ex-musician who returned home to Coyote Crossing, Oklahoma, when his mother died, and ended up staying. The town’s sheriff gave him a job as a part-time deputy, even though he’s hardly a by-the-book type. After local thug Luke Jordan is shot, Toby is left to guard the corpse until the coroner arrives. Bored, Toby walks a couple of blocks to his girlfriend Molly’s place for a quickie, which she happily provides. But by the time Toby gets back to the scene of the crime, the corpse has gone missing. He tells another deputy, who sends him home.

To his wife and son. Toby’s wife, Doris, a waitress, doesn’t take the news of Luke Jordan’s death very well. In fact, she decides that they all need to move to Houston. Now. Toby is not ready to deal with this, and so heads back into town. By daybreak, he will have destroyed not only his car, but a semi-tractor and part of a motel as well. He will also have done battle with immigrant smugglers. His wife will have left him, and he will have killed several men. In other words, losing that corpse is only the start of a very long and life-changing night.

The Deputy is laced with Gischler’s usual humor. Toby Sawyer is the sort of lovable loser this author has put at the center of most of his novels, Gun Monkeys (2001) being the only exception. Coyote Crossing is the brand of small town that often features in Stephen King novels--a great place to be from, but way out on the edge of nowhere. Gischler’s motif, however, is the classic Western, only set in the 21st century. One can imagine horses and stagecoaches here in place of muscle cars and pickups. Gischler even cuts the town’s phone lines, sending everyone plunging back into the 19th century.

Gischler does a fine job of making Toby’s life more and more miserable as the long night of this tale winds down. His protagonist will not only likely lose his job, but possibly also his life, before the sun rises again. He spends most of the night wondering what has happened to the sheriff, even finding blood at that man’s house.

If you’ve read Gischler’s work before, you know somewhat how this story will end. You also know that The Deputy is going to be a helluva ride.

Crime Fiction: The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell

In the world of crime fiction, sometimes it seems as if the only thing anyone’s talking about is Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy.” Those three novels -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (due out in the States next month) -- comprise one of the finest series of crime thrillers ever written. In sparse, precise prose, Larsson paints vivid characters, plots nail-biting action and leaves readers wanting what every writer hopes his readers will want: more.

But as good as Mr. Larsson’s books are, they’re not the only game in Stockholm. Henning Mankell, well-known for his Kurt Wallander series of mysteries, has just published a real blockbuster read, The Man from Beijing (Knopf). Set in more or less the same world as Larsson’s series -- Sweden -- this standalone work is a sprawling tale of desperation, crime, revenge, sibling rivalry and relentless investigation. Its plot begins in present-day Sweden, then jumps back to America in the mid-1800s, then on to today’s China, and finally back to Sweden. No single-location mystery for Mankell; by opening up his plot to many nations and time periods, the author is able to pack his story with every manner of conflict, from human to cultural to historical.

Gripping in every way, The Man from Beijing starts off with the slaughter of 19 people in the small Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen. Naturally, no one saw anything, and the clues are all but nonexistent. There are only a few people left alive in that little town, and they apparently know nothing. The highly detailed police-procedural part of this book happens here, as investigators rip the scene of the crime apart to find anything that might be considered a lead. All anyone can find is a red ribbon.

But then the story shifts location and focus. Enter Birgitta Roslin, an aging, big-city judge who learns she has an interesting connection to the murders. Like us, she’s drawn to it. The investigators do their best to rebuff her, but by that time the case has jumped from the news to her heart. She can’t let it go -- and that’s a good thing, because neither can we.

In the parallel universe of this tale, we then meet three poor Chinese brothers who lived 150 years ago. In their darkest hour, they’re taken -- slave-like -- to America to work on building the young nation’s first transcontinental railroad. They aren’t the only foreigners on the scene. There’s also one particular Swede, who turns out to be a hell of an evil, bigoted taskmaster.

Meanwhile, back in the present, China is preparing to host the 2010 Olympics. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of politicking, a lot of jockeying for power, for money, for control. And at the center of it all, businessmen whose enterprises aren’t totally legit. While they wrestle for China’s present, they also fight to determine the trajectory of its future, looking for ways to both lower China’s population and spread its political force abroad. They look to Mozambique, where a million Chinese citizens can work the land and build a new destiny for both countries.

How does all of this fit together? To call the story line intricate would only begin to scratch the surface. Mankell treads lightly, for the most part, sketching bits of plot and character in such a way that he seems to provide answers but also manages to ask many more questions. Birgitta Roslin is the most complex player of all, willing to put everything on the line for the purest of motives. A judge by day, she has both health and marital problems. They’re not remarkable, but they are what you might expect -- and this makes her someone with whom we can easily identify. In the midst of such massively surprising revelations about her family and this case that’s drawn her in, her mundane problems are almost a welcome relief to her and to us.

Mankell’s style -- as translated by Laurie Thompson -- is just as spare and direct as Stieg Larsson’s. In a way, Mankell’s sentences straddle two worlds: he stands off a bit from much of the action, offering almost chilly, matter-of-fact descriptions, yet manages at the same time to lodge himself deeply in the minds of his characters. It’s as if he’s stripped out layers of emotion to leave us with the stark reality of the evidence and the equally stark motivations that drive his characters. The result is a fascinating blend of styles that keeps the plot tense and the revelations startling. For so many reasons, The Man from Beijing is a brilliant work that’s both challenging and extraordinarily satisfying.

Philip Kerr at The Rap Sheet

Today at The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce offers up an in-depth interview with Scottish crime fictionist, Philip Kerr (If the Dead Rise Not, A Quiet Flame).

Pierce opens with this charming story, but wastes no time in getting down to business:

No matter how many authors I interview in my life, I may never escape the jitters I feel whenever I start talking with somebody whose writing I admire. That anxiety hit me hard last October, during a trans-Atlantic telephone call with critic and Rap Sheet correspondent Ali Karim in London. He’d just informed me that Scottish novelist Philip Kerr, author of the Bernie Gunther crime series, had been named the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Ellis Peters Historical Award, given to him that night during a special reception in the British capital. In response, I casually told Karim that, if he happened to see Kerr amid the crowd of champagne-swilling celebrants, he should pass along my congratulations. “Well,” Karim said excitedly, “why don’t you tell him yourself?” And with that, my correspondent walked over to Philip Kerr -- and handed him his cell phone.

The interview is in-depth and available in full right here.

Crime Fiction: The Devil’s Star by Jo Nesbø

(Editor’s note: With the publication of this review, January Magazine welcomes a new contributor. She’s Gretchen Echols, a Seattle writer, artist and bookstore employee with a longstanding fondness for crime and mystery fiction, especially the works of Ross Macdonald, Reginald Hall and Tana French.)

It is a July hell in Oslo, the Norwegian city gripped in a blistering heat wave. A young woman is found dead with a bizarre mutilation to her body and an odd calling card from the murderer. Meanwhile, Harry Hole, one of the best detectives on the local police force, is in his own private hell -- a month-long alcoholic binge. When he receives a call from his superior, Bjarne Møller, Hole is passed out on his living room floor, clutched in the throes of a recurring nightmare involving his sister and elevators.

Møller is desperate. The detective unit is understaffed because of holiday vacations. He has protected Hole by stalling on sending adverse reports of his erratic behavior to higher authorities, but now Hole is on the verge of dismissal. However, the only detectives left in the sweltering city with the ability and experience necessary to handle the mutilation case are Hole and his nemesis on the crime squad, Tom Waaler. Hole’s last chance to escape the implosion of his career, it seems, is to work this investigation with Waaler.

Jo Nesbø, one of today’s hottest Scandinavian crime-fiction writers, gives us in The Devil’s Star (Harper) a carefully paced thriller built on the classic struggle between a detestable murderer and a detective dedicated to saving lives and discovering truths. Hole, though, puts a personal face on evil. He is convinced that Waaler, a predator and bully, is the person behind the beating death of Hole’s former partner, Ellen Gjelten. He has spent months tracking down an eyewitness to the event, only to then have that witness disappear. Unfortunately, Hole’s boss has dismissed his allegations against Waaler as the result of an obsessive quest entirely without merit. Hole’s obsession has also ruptured his relationship with his girlfriend, Rakel Faulke, and her son, Oleg. Under the same circumstances, you might go on a binge too.

Five days after the discovery of the first body in Oslo, another woman steps around the corner for a short errand -- and doesn’t return. Is she just a missing person, or the second murder victim?

As Hole, Waaler and the rest of the team struggle to understand the meaning of the clues left by the killer, and more corpses appear, the tension heightens. A pattern in the crimes begins to emerge and there is concern that a serial killer may be on the loose. Along the way we are given insights into the source of Harry Hole’s fears of heights and elevators, the bases for many of his nightmares. Nesbø even includes a biblical confrontation -- straight from the New Testament -- between Hole and Waaler, and we begin to wonder if our hero has really gone over to the dark side.

Among the strengths and pleasures of reading Nesbø’s well-crafted mystery (his third, following The Redbreast [2007] and Nemesis [2009]) are the short descriptions revealing the complexities of his secondary characters.

Consider, for instance, Otto Tangen. He’s the owner of Harry Sounds, a mobile professional surveillance company called in on the case by Waaler. The crime team has predicted where the killer will probably strike next, and members hope to intercept him. Tangen has obviously seen Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie, The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman as a bugging expert, dozens of times and would have said about himself, “without batting and eyelid, that emotionally speaking he was closer to his microphones” than to his son, the result of a one-night stand. “At least he had managed to persuade [the mother] to christen the boy Gene,” writes Nesbø. Although Tangen’s friends have never heard of the Hackman movie, this reader enjoyed a smug moment of recognition, having viewed that film only recently.

Tangen has amassed a large collection of microphones, cameras and other tools of his trade. Waaler, well aware of the man’s darker secrets, applies pressure to expedite Tangen’s cooperation.

Another character worth watching: young Beate Lønn from the forensics lab. Early in her career on the force, she had her own run-in with Waaler. Now she is the recipient of his unwanted sexually charged harassment. But late in the novel Lønn has an opportunity to thwart him in a tense scene.

Nesbø shows great talent in keeping his tale moving. He shifts between multiple points of view that include several soliloquies from a character we suspect is the killer. He weaves his story lines seamlessly, ratcheting up the tension as he builds to the long finale.

But -- reader beware. There is definitely a high “ick” factor in the twisted scenes at this story’s end. When I had 50 pages or so to go, I was stopped in my tracks by the nasty, loathsome details of a murder. I was repulsed and I had to quit reading. I was committed to writing this review, however, so I had to get past my disgust. After a break of several weeks, I started over in a careful rereading of the story. This time I recognized the skill and artistry of Nesbø’s writing: the red herrings, the clues with their possible interpretations, the shrewd pacing of the plot and the variations on his principle theme of revenge. Nesbø is an excellent craftsman, so I felt I owed him the courtesy of reading through to the end. As the story spools out to its concluding battle between good and evil, the resulting violence becomes merely gruesome and strangely satisfying.

Harry Hole engages our sympathy in The Devil’s Star, despite his obsessions and fears and his reckless, alcoholic ways, because he is a tenacious protagonist intent on uncovering the truth. Don’t look for any garden parties or bodies left conveniently at the end of library benches in a murder mystery involving Hole. Expect, instead, a gritty, realistic triumph over human wickedness.

Crime Fiction: The Cold Room by J.T. Ellison

J.T. Ellison’s latest Nashville-based novel, The Cold Room (Mira), finds her series homicide detective, Taylor Jackson, chasing an unusual serial killer. He starves his victims to death, violates their bodies and then poses them in elaborate re-creations of famous paintings. What bothers Jackson and her FBI profiler boyfriend, John Baldwin, is the scope of these slayings. It appears he has struck also in London and in Florence, Italy.

Ellison doesn’t hide this murderer from her readers, nor does she obscure the existence of a second serial killer, this one in Italy, called Il Macellaio (“The Butcher”). Our Nashville slayer is a graphic artist named Gavin. Nice guy. Drives a Prius. Admires the hell out of Il Macellaio. Also admires a famous photographer known simply as Tomasso. Gavin imitates the latter in his art work, and the former in his style of killing. So similar is his technique to that of his Italian counterpart, that Gavin’s crimes attract a British profiler to Nashville, one James “Memphis” Highsmythe. Memphis would be welcome on the investigation, if he didn’t have the almost pathological hots for Detective Jackson.

The Cold Room combines The Silence of the Lambs with The Wire. Jackson is a strong, capable investigator who, as we see in several subplots, is having to cope with institutional dysfunction. She’s been demoted from head of the Murder Squad and placed under Lieutenant Elm, a former New Orleans cop obsessed with administrative detail and with a hair-trigger temper. In the meantime, she and her former teammates are dealing with the aftermath of events in Ellison’s last novel, Judas Kiss (2009). She’s been reduced in rank from lieutenant and saddled with a new detective, Renn McKenzie, whom she suspects isn’t worthy of her trust.

Jackson is hard-nosed and a workaholic. Walking into a room, she is immediately in charge, her fellow officers snapping to, not really accepting her lowered status. I like her new partner, too. At first, McKenzie seems to be a stereotypically green upstart, but Ellison fleshes him out as he is exposed to two bizarre murders and a third attempt in less than five days. McKenzie evolves nicely as a result, and will probably make a welcome addition to this series.

The Cold Room character I found grating, however, was Memphis Highsmythe. He could have been an amazingly complex figure, someone dealing with his own grief. Instead, the New Scotland Yard detective came off as a self-centered jerk, unfortunately gifted with investigative talents rivaling those of Jackson and Baldwin. He was supposed to provide a complication for that couple, but in almost every scene, I wondered when Jackson was going to whip out the mace, the taser or the Louisville Slugger. Highsmythe is the kind of guy women find it easy to strike out at in return for their advances.

But if Highsmythe is the low point, then this novel’s mystery, and Taylor Jackson herself, represent its high points. The case of Gavin and his online friend, “Morte,” grows increasingly complex as this tale moves along. Jackson handles the investigation smoothly, sweating more over her relationship with Baldwin than her woes in Homicide. If anything, pursuing her quarry revitalizes the detective.

Author Ellison has done a fine job chasing serial killers. Now, if she’d just learn to throw a drink or two at annoying British detectives...

Death of a Crime Writer

(Editor’s note: In the two weeks since author Robert B. Parker suddenly passed away, there’s been a significant outpouring of appreciation for what he contributed to the detective-fiction genre. Most of that has come from American writers, but not exclusively. The following tribute was penned by Jim Napier, a mystery and crime fiction critic who lives in Quebec, Canada, and contributes to the Sherbrooke Record.)

In the literary landscape of crime fiction, Robert B. Parker stood as tall and proud as a Sequoia, firm and never wavering, impossible to miss and commanding our admiration and respect. But on Monday, January 18, the 77-year-old Parker died of a heart attack while sitting at his computer in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, working on the most recent of his numerous novels. Although it came far too soon for his many readers, it was a predictable and fitting end to an impressive life.

Over the preceding 37 years, Parker had written 74 books, some award-winning, almost all of them bestsellers. The bane of creative-writing instructors, he was famous for writing without an outline or notes, even without a story line when he started a book; instead, he would begin with a simple opening premise and just see where it led him. Yet Parker was a disciplined writer, turning out five pages a day (others have said 10) for 50 weeks per year, giving his readers up to three novels annually. As he put it, “I don’t get better by taking my time. My second draft is not an improvement, so I don’t do one.” Hardly good advice for most aspiring writers, but in Parker’s case it served him well.

After a stint with the U.S. Army in Korea during the 1950s, Parker entered Boston University, where his doctoral thesis -- written in just two weeks -- explored the world of such hard-boiled crime-fiction writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. He might easily have remained an academic, but Parker chose instead to swim in the deep end of the pool: he abandoned teaching to turn out increasingly subtle yet readable novels that both developed the detective-fiction genre and entertained millions of fans for the next four decades.

Well into his writing career, Parker was approached by the administrators of the Raymond Chandler estate, who asked him to complete Poodle Springs, a manuscript left unfinished at the time of Chandler’s death in 1959. He did so (the resulting book was published in 1989), and then followed that up with an entirely new Philip Marlowe novel, Perchance to Dream (1991), a sequel to Chandler’s 1939 first novel, The Big Sleep. Both are tributes to his mentor, affectionately and impeccably written.

Although firmly in the hard-boiled camp, Parker gave the literary world a kinder, more romantic and far more complex hero than had most of the writers who came before him. His 37 tales about a Boston private eye known only as Spenser (which inspired a popular late-1980s TV series) include subplots that revolve around the P.I.’s private life, and show a gentler, nuanced figure (though he could be tough when he had to be) who treats women as women rather than as objects, and knows his way around a kitchen. And as society evolved, Parker transformed along with it: when his two sons acknowledged that they were gay, Parker found a way to explore that fact through his novels, and did so with insight and sensitivity.

While continually adding to the Spenser oeuvre, in the late 1990s Parker began to pen a couple of other series, including half a dozen stories featuring Sunny Randall, a female Boston ex-cop turned gumshoe. Although some people criticized the protagonist as merely Spenser in drag, after awhile the series took on a unique persona, and now stands on its own.

Branching out in other directions, Parker also wrote nine rather darker novels about Jesse Stone, a flawed small-town police chief based in New England, and more than a dozen standalone works.

Let’s be clear: Parker’s books don’t qualify as great literature, whatever that may be. But they are well-written, entertaining yarns that often raise important issues, which is all Parker ever sought or claimed for them. If his plots sometimes seem a bit mundane, it’s because he dealt with events involving believable people caught up in the ebb and flow of real life. And his seemingly light, breezy style often masks some tough questions more frequently found in so-called literary novels. Parker’s skillful use of a first-person viewpoint and sharp, witty dialogue recalls the best of the American hard-boileds, yet his books are unmistakably of our time. In the last Spenser novel published before his death (2009’s The Professional), the hero never uses his gun, and only uses his fists once, to avoid having a conflict escalate into gunfire. True to the hard-boiled mantra, the resolution of the conflict is by cosmic, rather than legal, means: a killer is made to pay for his crimes and justice is served, but in a way that the judicial system could never accommodate. It is a book that profoundly explores manipulation, guilt and accountability in the context of shifting social mores.

Not only did he receive two Edgar Awards for his novels, but in 2002 Parker was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, an honor he shared with such luminaries as Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, John Le Carré, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James and Stephen King. The event acknowledged his place in the pantheon of great crime writers. Yet throughout his career he remained approachable and helpful to emerging authors.

Parker’s influence in the crime-writing fraternity has been enormous. With Spenser he liberated the character of the hard-boiled protagonist from the one-dimensional portrayals of the 1930s and ’40s, and transformed him into a likable, even admirable figure: an ex-boxer with an addiction to cinnamon doughnuts, who was also an accomplished cook, a dog lover, and not least of all, a man who could admire beautiful women while staying true to his partner -- all without weakening his hero’s masculinity. This opened the door for other writers to take similar paths, adding to the richness of the genre. Parker’s impact has been acknowledged by such renowned crime writers as Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben. In a 2007 interview with Atlantic Monthly, Coben said that “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”

Survived by his wife, Joan (to whom he dedicated almost all of his books), and his two sons, David and Daniel, Robert B. Parker left the literary world a legacy that, happily, will continue to shape detective fiction for a very long time.

(Author photo by John Earle. Used with permission.)

Crime Fiction: The Bricklayer by Noah Boyd

Lee Child spawned a new type of protag when he introduced former military cop Jack Reacher. Well, new but old. With roots in Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, Reacher is the contemporary drifter hero, a guy not really tied to law enforcement, but out to do justice nonetheless. Of course, that justice has some strange definitions. Lately, we’ve seen Matt Hilton with his ex-British Army “problem solver,” Joe Hunter, and even Child’s younger brother, Andrew Grant, with his renegade MI6 op, David Trevellyan, emerge as the modern cowboy, the one writing his own rules because the system’s rules just don’t work.

Which brings us to newcomer Noah Boyd’s The Bricklayer (Morrow). In it, a clever killer has set up a plot to frame the FBI for slayings he commits in the name of a bogus terrorist organization, the “Rubaco Pentad.” A reporter who blew the lid off corruption in the Bureau’s Los Angeles office is murdered. Then, when the FBI attempts to pay the Pentad extortion money, the agent sent on that errand is also done in. Another one disappears, apparently part of this growing conspiracy to disgrace the Bureau.

What’s a beleaguered FBI director to do?

In Boyd’s tale, he rehires an agent who had been fired for his inability to respect authority. Steve Vail was canned not for political reasons, but because he preferred to see a cop-killer go to prison rather than take down a superior so obviously guilty of manufacturing evidence. Vail has since found employment as a Chicago bricklayer, a job that requires little supervision or human interaction. However, he is lured back to the Bureau by an attractive former colleague, now the FBI’s deputy assistant director, Kate Bannon.

Vail soon begins to justify his rehiring. But he isn’t satisfied with his success. He hates loose ends. Rather than congratulate himself on solving a case when everything falls into place, he pulls on the investigative strands that remain unconnected. His wariness keeps him from being killed when the Pentad demands a nearly impossible money drop in an abandoned L.A. subway tunnel. Thinking three steps ahead of his foes, Vail realizes they’ve booby-trapped the drop.

In the wake of his survival, Vail looks more closely at who might stand behind this escalating mayhem and apparent revenge. There’s a lot of pesky evidence leading to the involvement of that missing FBI agent. Yes, the agent is now dead, an apparent suicide. Vail, though, doesn’t like that solution.

“Too neat,” he says.

Author Boyd flirts with giving Vail superhuman intellect, but manages to balance his aptitude by simply making him shy of accolades. While the rest of the Bureau’s L.A. field office is celebrating what they think is the end of the Pentad case, Vail is still asking himself the meaning of one unaccounted-for piece of the puzzle.

Thanks to Bannon’s presence here, Vail is not just another lone wolf outsmarting a stupid bureaucracy. Even a rival admits to Vail that the FBI is a bit rigid in its thinking. With Bannon, this is a double-edged sword. Vail’s loose-cannon approach to the case is something she admires, but it also underscores trust issues that infuriate her. At one point, Vail is even fired and wanted by the cops for theft.

And let’s be honest, it’s not like Vail is invincible. Escaping death by the slimmest of margins quite often hurts like a mother, and both Vail and Bannon come out of the experience physically scarred.

There are certainly weaknesses in The Bricklayer. The presence of Assistant U.S. Attorney Tie Delson is somewhat annoying, as she throws herself at Vail, kind of like the office coworker who can’t hide her crush on the new guy. Her ardor for Vail is eventually explained, but it strains the story in places.

Still, the person behind the Pentad is one of the more clever villains I’ve seen in a long time. He’s not really all that brilliant, but he is just smart enough to anticipate what the FBI will do next, and foil its efforts. Eventually, even Vail makes mistakes. Indeed, there’s a place in this tale where he should have been killed.

Boyd’s writing is solidly paced with few, if any, inconsistencies. Probably his greatest strength is in conveying through his writing the action and tension of a Jason Bourne movie or Casino Royale. Taut, rapid-fire and relentless.

READ MORE: “Ex-FBI Agent Paul Lindsay Lays the Bricks for a Successful Writing Career,” by Jim Sullivan (Boston Herald).

Crime Fiction: Gone ’til November by Wallace Stroby

Readers (especially the American variety) have grown accustomed to seeing villains in crime fiction portrayed in starkly negative terms, or else given such repulsive quirks that whatever humanness they manifest must be considered suspect. So Wallace Stroby runs some risk in making his killer for hire, Nathaniel Morgan, the most engaging character in Gone ’til November (Minotaur).

African American, 57 years old, and the veteran enforcer for Mikey-Mike, a New Jersey drug dealer whose wares just aren’t as high-grade or in demand as they once were, Morgan has a girlfriend half his age, a vintage Monte Carlo he loves almost as much, and musical tastes that run to the rhythms of Sam Cooke, Walter Jackson, and the Impressions. He also pops Vicodin at an alarming rate, because he’s suffering from a rare form of cancer that may take him down long before any of his “business rivals” get their shot.

Lacking health insurance or even the prospect of appealing for limited social aid (how would he answer, after all, the application’s request for “current occupation”?), Morgan has made rather desperate plans for his future. He wants to ditch New Jersey, his girlfriend and her son in tow, and find a doctor somewhere far away who can administer the medical treatments he needs. If Mikey-Mike or his hired pistol-pushers try to track him down, Morgan figures “he could deal with that, too, protect what was his. What he’d earned.” All he needs before putting his plan into action is more money to add to the savings he has already hidden away. And that requires him taking on a last assignment for his narcotics-king boss.

Meanwhile, in far-off Florida, a late-30s sheriff’s deputy named Sara Cross has come to the aid of a fellow officer, Billy Flynn, who’s shot and killed a well-dressed young black man, Derek Willis, on the edge of a cypress swamp in the middle of a steamy night. Willis was driving a car with Jersey plates, and according to Flynn, when he pulled Willis over and asked that he open his trunk, the younger man made a break for it. Flynn thought his fleeing suspect had a gun, so plugged him three times in self-defense. Sara finds a zippered bag crammed with firearms and ammunition in the vehicle’s trunk, which might indeed have justified Willis’ actions. And though she has doubts regarding the incident -- why was there a baby seat in Willis’ car? Why didn’t Flynn call for backup before he approached the driver? -- she attests to her fellow officer’s account of the proceedings. It looks like a “clean shoot.”

However, as the immature Flynn -- who used to be Sara’s lover as well as her partner on the sheriff’s squad, but now has a new and jealous girlfriend -- tries to reignite their relationship, our heroine’s suspicions about the Willis shooting mount. Exacerbating them is the appearance of Willis’ “wife,” the mother of their child together, who comes to collect his corpse and “raise hell, most likely.” She tells Sara that Willis “never carried a gun in his life,” which is enough to provoke the conscientious sheriff’s deputy to look a bit further into the provenance of the dead man’s revolver.

Then there’s the mysterious guy who Sara thinks is following her, but whose face she can never quite make out in passing automobiles. She wonders what his role is in all of this -- not knowing that in fact it’s Morgan behind the wheel. His last job for Mikey-Mike, the one that’s going to give him his nest egg for a new life, turns out to be retrieving $350,000 that had been secreted in the car driven by Willis, who was also on Mikey-Mike’s payroll. Why were the weapons discovered, but no reports of all that cash? Morgan wants to know where the money went -- and whether he can steal it for himself, add it to his nest egg. Accomplishing that, though, will put him in dangerous contention with a couple of trigger-happy twins and the considerably more competent Sara Cross.

Stroby, a former editor at Newark, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger newspaper and the author of two previously praised crime novels, The Barbed-Wire Kiss (2003) and The Heartbreak Lounge (2005) -- both starring quondam state trooper Harry Rane -- is meticulous in entwining his narrative threads here, reaping drama, originality and suspense from what seem at first to be Gone ’til November’s familiar themes. But it’s his chief adversarial pair who keep one turning these pages: Morgan, the professional gunman who treats killing like any other occupation, and sees no percentage in surplus deaths; and Sara -- brave and smart, but flawed and too much on her own, struggling as her county’s only female deputy sheriff while she cares for a 6-year-old son whose life is as much at threat from leukemia as Morgan’s is from cancer. The older protagonist is certainly the more engaging -- it was worth every risk to make Morgan a nuanced, sympathetic figure -- but Sara Cross demonstrates potential for growth. That’s good, because her appearance here isn’t her last. As Stroby says, “there will be at least one more book about her, though it won’t be [my] next one. Beyond that, I can’t say, but she’ll definitely be back.”

Swiftly told but suspenseful, filled with moral choices and a bit of welcome ambiguousness at its end, Gone ’til November is
a small story with a hell of a kick.

Val McDermid Wins Diamond Dagger

The British Crime Writers’ Association has announced that Scottish novelist Val McDermid is the recipient of this year’s CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger Award, honoring outstanding achievement in the field of crime writing.

The Rap Sheet has the full story here.

Crime Fiction: Dying Gasp by Leighton Gage

My earliest introduction to the jungle-embraced city of Manaus, Brazil, came in Black Orchid, Nicholas Meyer and Barry Jay Kaplan’s 1977 historical thriller about riches, romance and the devious purloining of rubber-tree seeds at the turn of the last century. Their story made the town sound almost as mythical and magical as it was politically corrupt--a place doing constant battle to protect its manmade wonders from the encroaching rain forest. Manaus sat in the heart of rubber-tree country, and as demand for rubber heightened in the 19th century, the town prospered. “Latex lords grew magnificently wealthy,” according to Greg Grandin, whose terrific 2009 non-fiction book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, reintroduced me to this mysterious metropolis in the wild heart of the Amazon. “With their Beaux Arts palaces, neoclassical municipal buildings, electric trams, wide Parisian boulevards, and French restaurants, the cities of Manaus, located about nine hundred miles up the Amazon River, and Belém, the region’s principal Atlantic port, completed for the title of ‘tropical Paris.’”

Is it any wonder that, after enjoying Black Orchid, I promised myself I would someday visit Manaus?

Then again ... maybe not, now that I’ve read Leighton Gage’s third Brazil-set crime novel, Dying Gasp (Soho Crime). In his hands, Manaus is transformed from the pulchritudinous beauty of my vivid imagination into a decrepit, syphilitic whore. When told that he’ll have to go to Manaus on assignment, a federal officer lists the city’s dubious attractions: “Dengue, malaria, yellow fever, bad food--” No matter what the meal, everything apparently tastes like fish in Manaus. (A running gag here is the visiting cops’ daunting quest for an eatery serving something other than seafood.) The local weather appears to be unbearably hot, the streets filthy, and the people indolent and dishonest, or at least that’s what I gather from Gage’s tale. (If this portrayal is wildly askew from reality, Manaus tourism officials ought to have a serious talk with the author.)

The actual plot of Dying Gasp centers around kidnapping and the production of so-called snuff films. Teenager Marta Malan, the granddaughter of a prominent politician from Recife, has disappeared along with her older girlfriend, Andrea de Castro. Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Federal Police in Brasília has been called in to find her. A tip as to her whereabouts comes from far off Amsterdam, where videos showing the rape and decapitation of a young woman are traced back to Brazil. A voice on one of those videos sounds like that of Claudia Andrade, previously known to the chief inspector for supplying vital organs harvested from living subjects. Silva’s investigation soon leads to Manaus and José Luis Ignácio Braga, aka The Goat, a “whoremaster” specializing in adolescent girls. The Goat picked up Marta in one of his sweeps for involuntary employees, and he has imprisoned her until she agrees to do his bidding. But Marta is nothing if not headstrong, and refuses to cooperate. Since he can’t let her loose, The Goat decides to sell her to a woman who’s supposedly securing willing damsels for horny European clients -- a woman who is, of course, the notorious Andrade.

The white slavery theme isn’t exactly revolutionary in crime fiction, and the details supplied here may be too much for squeamish readers. Gage does, however, bring some new interest to the subject with his fictional participants in that business, especially the irredeemably repulsive Goat and the arrogant, well-hung scumbags who are recruited for snuff video performances. If Claudia Andrade seems too depraved to be believed, she’s at least balanced out by Mario Silva, a dogged but unheroic detective who’s indifferent to power mongers as well as to his politically ambitious (and expediently religious) boss, and who is married to a woman quietly searching for salvation from her personal pain at the bottom of every liquor bottle. The competent but “irreverent and sarcastic” Agente Arnaldo Nunes makes an excellent assistant to Silva, contributing many of this yarn’s lighter elements, and the priest who struggles to win the chief inspector’s help in rescuing other innocents like Marta Malan turns out to be far more interesting -- and stupid -- than one expects.

Although this is Leighton Gage’s third Mario Silva novel, following 2007’s Blood of the Wicked and 2008’s Buried Strangers, it’s the first I have read all the way through. Now I have to go find those earlier works again. Anyone who can combine horror and humor between book covers as deftly as Gage does deserves closer attention.

Original Fiction at The Rap Sheet

While neither January Magazine or The Rap Sheet generally run original fiction, today January’s crime fiction-focused sister publication does just that. As Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce says:

We have a real treat for you today. To coincide with the debut of Loss, Australia-born Scottish author Tony Black’s third novel featuring Edinburgh newspaper reporter-turned-part-time private eye Gus Dury, The Rap Sheet is hosting Black’s never-before-published Dury short story, “Last Orders.” Like his first two novels, 2008’s Paying for It and last year’s Gutted (just released in paperback in the UK), “Last Orders” is a tough little yarn packed with characters not wholly good or altogether predictable, and a spare writing style that serves the plot well.

You can read Tony Black’s “Last Orders” here.

Best Books of 2009: Crime Fiction, Part II

Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker UK)
320 pages
I speak from my status as a longtime follower of Indridason’s Icelandic police-procedural series when I say that Hypothermia is, without a doubt, this series’ best installment yet. Why? Because one of the narrative strands in this tale details the childhood tragedy that still haunts Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson. What Indridason does so well in his detective novels is to offer one main story thread, plus three or four story strands in the background that may or may not collide with the main thread. The principal thread in Hypothermia is the tragic suicide of a young woman named Maria. Erlendur believes that there was more to Maria’s demise than the rope found around her neck. After her husband, Baldvin, explains that Maria was depressed following the recent loss to cancer of her mother, Leonora, and desperate enough to dabble in séances, Erlendur decides to go it alone to uncover the truth. His Reykjavik colleagues, criminology expert Sigurdur Óli and policewoman Elínborg, are skeptical of their boss’ tenacity to dig into what is apparently a family tragedy. But he’s been right many times before. During the course of this investigation, we learn more about the snowstorm death of Bergur Sveinsson, Erlendur’s younger brother, and the effects it had on the melancholic detective and their relatives. As with Indridason’s previous novels (including Voices and The Draining Lake), Hypothermia’s narrative is edged with sadness; it’s also shadowed with the paranormal. Although I miss Indridason’s original translator, the late poet Bernard Scudder, replacement Victoria Cribb does a wonderful job here in bringing Indridason’s story to life in the English language. This tale is as chilly as its title suggests. -- Ali Karim

If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (Quercus UK) 455 pages
When we last heard from Bernie Gunther, in The Quiet Flame (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2008), he was departing Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1950, fleeing in the night after solving the gruesome murder of a young girl and falling in love with an enchanting Jewish woman wary of his former Nazi ties. Now leap backwards in time to 1934. Germany’s indulgent old Weimar Republic has given way to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, and Gunther, disgusted with the new regime (“I’m not a Nazi,” he proclaims early on. “I’m a German. And a German is different from a Nazi. A German is a man who manages to overcome his worst prejudices. A Nazi is a man who turns them into laws.”), has quit the Berlin police department to become a house detective at his city’s famous Hotel Adlon. He’s also just accidentally killed a cop, which can’t be good for business. And business isn’t all that good to begin with. For starters, he’s reluctantly helping a hotel guest named Max Reles, a gangster from Chicago, retrieve a 17th-century Chinese box that was apparently lost to the light fingers of a “joy girl” turned stenographer. In addition, he’s playing escort to a woman journalist from the New York Herald Tribune, Noreen Charalambides, who’s looking for evidence of anti-Semitism to stir up an international boycott of Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Games. Gunther would love to cause trouble for Hitler’s government. However, he must move carefully, both to duck blame for that dead flatfoot and because he’s learned that he’s one-quarter Jewish, and is trying to buy himself an “Aryan transfusion” that will expunge that fact from his record. Doing his job while protecting his own ass won’t be easy, especially when he’s called to investigate a couple of homicides. Only 20 years later, though, will this story reach its conclusion, as Gunther encounters both Reles and Noreen in pre-revolutionary Cuba and seeks the justice he was unable to realize earlier. Kerr is a storyteller from whom other storytellers should steal. He has a sharp ear for clever and caustic dialogue, imbues his chief players with egos and emotions enough to make them seem genuine, is economical in incorporating real people into his fiction, and in Bernie Gunther gives us somebody we can always root for -- even when the man does things that ought to land him behind bars. If the Dead Rise Not is not a perfect book: there are too many coincidences in its underdeveloped latter section, and it reaches a too-speedy conclusion. Then again, I’m judging by the high standards Philip Kerr has set for his series over six installments. By lesser measurements, this is Best Book of the Year material. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur) 384 pages
I was bowled over by John Hart’s 2006 debut novel, The King of Lies, and even more impressed with his Richard & Judy-nominated, Edgar Award-winning 2007 thriller, Down River. But as the old saying goes, good things often come in threes. So I wasn’t surprised, soon after cracking the spine of Hart’s latest book, The Last Child, to find myself entranced. When 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon’s twin sister, Alyssa, disappears from a side street in their rural North Carolina hometown, his whole world and that of his family is ruptured. Then it disintegrates, with his father leaving him and his increasingly self-destructive mother behind. While everyone else assumes Alyssa is dead, Johnny decides he will find out for sure. Armed only with his wits and the assistance of two friends -- police detective Clyde Hunt, who’s working the Alyssa Merrimon case, and a giant named Levi -- Johnny goes looking beneath the veneer and into the historical and emotional cracks of his town. A second girl’s vanishing heightens the tension. What Johnny finds as he probes these mysteries will make your skin crawl, I guarantee it. Filled with Southern angst and genuine-feeling family strife, and reminiscent in tone of Harper Lee’s fiction, The Last Child points Hart in the direction of Grisham-level fame. This book already won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. -- Ali Karim

The Lovers by John Connolly (Atria) 352 pages
This eighth novel in Irish writer John Connolly’s Charlie Parker private-eye series pulls together many of the strands he’s been weaving through his preceding installments. Each word, sentence, paragraph and page in The Lovers seems to have been considered, polished and refined to form a picture-perfect narrative, one that is as chilling as it is poignant. The tale starts out with Parker looking into the mysterious suicide of his father, following the latter’s shooting of two young lovers for no apparent reason. Charlie Parker’s investigation will place his own life in context and reveal why shadowy figures from his earlier adventures (The Collector, The Traveling Man, etc.) were interested in him. Making his job more difficult, journalist Mickey Wallace is writing a lurid true-crime book about Charlie Parker’s life, and a Jewish cleric knows more than he’s willing to reveal until dead bodies start to pile up. Parker has to rely on his psychopathic sidekicks, Louis and Angel, to watch his back as the secrets of The Lovers are revealed. This tale is peppered with heart-wrenching vignettes concerning the dark side of our existence. At times, I put the book down and felt my eyes moisten, due to the compassion exhibited in this yarn. On other occasions, I tossed the book aside, due to my growing sense of unease and fear about what lay ahead. Reading The Lovers felt like opening the door to a charnel house, filled with the screams of the dead. But its narrative is enriched by Connolly’s research, evident in some curious observations, historical references and insights into the darker edges of religion. When I reached the novel’s end, all the events in the previous Parker books fell into context like the numbers on a lottery wheel. A most satisfying experience, indeed. -- Ali Karim

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Penguin
Press) 275 pages
It’s always raining on the dream-cityscape that’s the setting for Jedediah Berry’s unusual debut novel, The Manual of Detection, a surrealistic and symbolist book whose mean streets have as much in common with René Magritte and Salvador Dali as with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Protagonist Charles Unwin (sic) labors at a mammoth investigative bureau called “The Agency” -- like the Pinkerton outfit as imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, maybe -- where his unexpected promotion from clerk to detective (“For better or worse, somebody has noticed you”) provokes a carnival of odd events. There are strange doings at the edge of town, and odd shifts in the time-space continuum, as Unwin searches for his illustrious missing predecessor at the Agency, the palindromic Travis Sivart. The plot (as it were) is in constant shift and rain-blurred focus, like a poem written by an automaton or a dream generated by software, in this realm where “every looking-glass is a two-way mirror.” If you’re seeking a standard-issue thriller, drop The Manual of Detection like a hot rock. But if you want an inventive, amusing, Fellini-esque dream-within-a-dream, try this somnambulistic fable. You may never get out awake. -- Tom Nolan

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Ballantine) 336 pages
“Trauma scene and waste cleaning is a growth industry,” remarks Po Sin, the owner and operator of Clean Team. His observation comes early in Charlie Huston’s terrific neo-noir black comedy, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. It’s such a weird statement that you have to laugh; but it’s true, people die in horrible ways every single day, and someone has to clean it up -- for good money. Someone like Web Goodhue. The protagonist in these pages, he’s an asshole: he admits it, his friends know it, and his family knows it. Fine. The biggest lie about fiction writing is that your protagonist has to be likable. Why? Was Tony Soprano really a nice guy? How about serial killer Dexter Morgan from the Showtime TV series Dexter? They’re charming and charismatic, but not actually good people. They are, however, easy to relate to as humans. Web, too, is human. Fatal flaws and all. He suffered a tragedy that no one should have gone through, and paid dearly for it. Now, he loafs around his best friend’s apartment/tattoo parlor and does as little as he can. But his buddy finally gets sick of it and pushes him toward the first job available, which is cleaning up gory crime scenes. The people he works with are just ordinary folk, trying to make a buck. It isn’t long, though, before Web is summoned to clean up a mess for a woman he just met. And before you can say “trauma,” he’s involved with a bizarre smuggling operation and trying to free a kidnap victim from some very bad people. Gore lovers will find plenty of that here, but there’s also a nice and intricate crime-fiction plot for the rest of us. In the end, what makes The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death great is its searing humanity. Frankly, with such a great premise and character, I won’t be surprised if a network like Showtime or HBO picks up Web Goodhue as a series star. -- Cameron Hughes

9 Dragons by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) 374 pages
It’s tempting to compare today’s Southern California detective novelists to their predecessors, especially to Raymond Chandler. But while it’s said that former journalist Michael Connelly, best-known as the author of several novels featuring LAPD detective Harry Bosch, was inspired to write novels in part by the work of Chandler, he has surely long since put his own distinctive stamp on Los Angeles-based crime fiction. No one would mistake 9 Dragons, Connelly’s latest Bosch book, with a Chandler effort. For one thing, much of its action takes place in Hong Kong, where the police detective’s teenage daughter lives, and where he races to save her from what seems to be imminent danger. The author’s characteristic touches are in strong evidence: current cases’ connections with past Bosch mysteries and with other Connelly series; and the sense of doom that seems to dog the detective like a hovering cloud. As fast as Harry Bosch rushes towards the light at the end of his personal tunnel, so quickly he drags his dark shadow behind -- always seeming to succeed and fail in equal measure. Some of the painful personal shocks he endures in 9 Dragons make Chandler’s mean streets look, in retrospect, almost benign. -- Tom Nolan

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux) 208 pages
Denis Johnson is the King Midas of contemporary American literature. It seems there is nothing he touches that doesn’t gleam with the burnish of gold. Carveresque short stories? Check (Jesus’ Son). Central American political thriller? Double-check (The Stars at Noon). Vietnam War magnum opus? Check, check and check (Tree of Smoke). This year, Johnson delivered a novel which could have rolled off the typewriters of Chandler, Cain or Hammett. Set in contemporary Northern California, Nobody Move stars a guy named Jimmy Luntz as a sort of Humphrey Bogart drifter who gets on the wrong side of a man named Juarez, who has sent his trusted henchman, Ernest Gambol, after Jimmy to collect a hefty debt. Meanwhile, Jimmy is ensnared by Anita Desilvera, a femme fatale who’s been framed for extortion by her louse of a husband. In the novel’s first two dozen pages, Johnson sets the stage for a tense dance of pursuit, evasion, sex, revenge and hair-trigger violence. At once a pastiche and an homage to classic noir-lit, Nobody Move is a novel that snaps its sentences like a stick on a snare drum and barrels through 200 pages with the accelerator pressed to the floor. Compared to the hefty Tree of Smoke, Nobody Move is a stiletto. But it cuts just as deep. -- David Abrams

The Professional by Robert B. Parker (Putnam) 304 pages
Robert B. Parker makes it look easy. Too easy, in a time when the pain and agony of writing has become just another marketing point, and any author who dares to be prolific runs the risk of being dismissed as somehow inferior, of being a mere entertainer, of being a hack. As though the time spent writing a book is a better indication of its literary merit than the book itself. Well, the hell with that. In 2009, while other, often more highly regarded novelists were allegedly sweating over every comma and clause (pausing only to whine publicly about the agony of writing), Parker published four books: Night and Day, another in his popular Jesse Stone series; Brimstone, the third is his acclaimed western series, featuring town tamers Hitch and Cole; and Chasing the Bear, a Young Adult novel featuring a teenage version of Spenser, Parker’s bread-and-butter private-eye hero. Chasing the Bear was a solid and effective work, dealing -- as do almost all of Parker’s books -- with matters of honor and morality, courage and compromise, and love and autonomy. And all rendered in Parker’s lean, tight prose, with little in the way of fat, and with dialogue -- Parker’s one real literary indulgence -- that’s right up there in the George V. Higgins/Elmore Leonard category. The Professional offers more of the same. The 37th installment of his long-running Spenser series, it follows the Boston gumshoe as he investigates a handsome stud who’s simultaneously bedding and putting the squeeze on four married, middle-aged women. Pro that he is, Spenser tracks down the cad fairly quickly. But then the real fun begins. Were this the work of a hack, stopping the blackmail would be the end of things; but Parker, as always, has a few buttons to push. The scoundrel turns out to be surprisingly affable, piquing Spenser’s curiosity. And the question of why, not who, becomes the point -- at least until, in a deft change of focus, we see what Parker’s really after this time: a mediation on masculinity and friendship, and its limits. Granted, anyone familiar with Steinbeck may see what’s coming, and the plot shifts and the “likable” blackmailer may throw some readers. But somehow Parker pulls it off, offering a smart, literate mystery that provokes and challenges, while never failing to entertain. And it didn’t take him 100,000 words and three years of hand-wringing to accomplish. That’s because Parker, like Spenser, is a professional. -- Kevin Burton Smith

The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) 448 pages
After being given his pink slip at the Los Angeles Times in a downsizing move, cop-shop reporter Jack McEvoy is not about to start feeling sorry for himself. Instead, he chooses to go out with a bang. And as we see in The Scarecrow, he has just the attention-grabbing article in mind. Sixteen-year-old Alonzo Winslow stands accused of killing 23-year-old stripper Denise Babbit and stuffing her body into the trunk of her car. Los Angeles police detectives claim that Winslow confessed to the killing, and the authorities are set to charge him as an adult. Although McEvoy initially envisioned his article as a large exposé on how a young man is turned into a killer, his subsequent investigation leaves him convinced that Winslow didn’t actually do Babbit in. But very quickly, he runs into problems. First off, Angela Cook, his younger replacement on the cop beat, convinces the assistant city editor to let her co-write the article and grab a piece of McEvoy’s byline and thunder. Secondly, Babbit’s real killer -- “The Scarecrow” -- becomes aware of McEvoy and Cook’s interest in the homicide. The Scarecrow makes it his priority to stop them before they dig too deep and discover his sordid history. After things go south with deadly consequences, McEvoy calls in the one person he can trust to help: his ex-lover, current FBI agent Rachel Walling. Walling is a recurring character in many of Connelly’s Harry Bosch books, and a fan favorite. It isn’t long before she and McEvoy pick up their romance where it stalled years ago, a romance that nearly ended her law-enforcement career. Walling is a prototypical Connelly character: she has been to the dark side and back. The sublime joy of Connelly’s newest novel is watching McEvoy and Walling track down their quarry. The reader feels an increasing dread, knowing that The Scarecrow has them outwitted at almost every turn. This is a taught thriller that makes clear why Connelly’s name so often appears on bestseller lists. -- Anthony Rainone

The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central) 416 pages
The bigger the first book, the harder the second. The next fence, as any jockey will tell you, is always the toughest. It’s hard to get away from adages, except to say that British writer Tom Rob Smith clears the second obstacle better than the first with another blockbuster set in the mid-20th-century Soviet Union. This time around, Joseph Stalin is dead, and Nikita Khrushchev decides it is time for a change. His “Secret Speech” is meant to herald a new era and condemn the recent past, but it brings immense chaos. Author Smith revels in it. Child 44 -- based on the true story of Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered a huge number of Russian children over many years -- was the super hit of last year’s crime list. It brought Smith the sort of success that every new writer hopes for on his or her debut. The fact is, though, that I didn’t like Child 44 very much, and was surprised so many people did. I found Smith’s fictional “solution” far-fetched and unsatisfactory. It stuck too close to the true story for much of the time, and then wandered off into adolescent fantasy at all the crucial points. I mean to say, does one man murder an army of children for no better reason than to trace the brother he hasn’t seen for ages? The strong points of Child 44 were respected secret policeman Leo Demidov, his wife, Raisa, and Smith’s tense prose. All of those elements are back in The Secret Speech, tighter and tougher than before. The story is a rollicking rollercoaster ride of a teenage adventure filled with rooftop escapes, Siberian death camps, Hungarian revolutions and hand-to-hand fighting on the high seas. It is all very Robert Louis Stevenson-esque, with hunks of Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon thrown in. Who needs a film script? Hollywood should already be hopping. -- Michael Gregorio

Shadow and Light by Jonathan Rabb (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 384 pages
Family and film share the spotlight in this intricately wrought sequel to Jonathan Rabb’s first historical crime thriller, Rosa (one of January’s favorite books of 2005). Again, we’re in Berlin, this time in 1927 at the height of the Weimer Republic, watching beleaguered Kriminal-Oberkommisar Nikolai Hoffner go through the paces of probing a murder. The dead man -- a supposed suicide -- is Gerhard Thyssen, a producer at the famous Universum Film AG (Ufa) studios outside the city. One expects to learn that Thyssen didn’t off himself. What’s less predictable is where Hoffner’s investigation will lead: to the disappearance of a movie starlet, the discovery of a secret room at a sex club where pornographic flicks are shown, and a criminal plot centered on technology allowing sound to be recorded synchronously with what had been silent pictures. It seems Thyssen was responsible for Ufa’s top-secret work in the “talkies” realm, and now that he’s gone, so is the device he’d sought to perfect. Everyone wants to find the thing, including Ufa’s most prominent director, the real-life Fritz Lang (Metropolis), because they can imagine how it might revolutionize entertainment (and, of course, make possible Nazi propaganda newsreels during the coming decade). Pursuing inquiries that lead him deep into Berlin’s seamier corners and expose a plot to rearm post-war Germany, Hoffner seeks assistance from one of a powerful local criminal, as well as from the captivating Helen Coyle, who may or may not be a talent agent with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the States. At the same time, the chief inspector must contend with his two estranged sons, one of whom has gone to work for Ufa, while the other, angrier boy has fallen under the sway of Joseph Goebbels and the right-wing German Workers’ Party. Rabb does an excellent job in Shadow and Light of painting Weimer-era Berlin in all of its multifarious and corrupt hues, and does much to elaborate on the character of his protagonist, who is beset on all sides by his failures and the painful reminders of them. One can only imagine what challenges and disappointments might yet befall Nikolai Hoffner, as the author prepares what he insists is the final part of a trilogy. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst (Random House) 288 pages
Alan Furst gets better, book by book. Each one reveals some new, intriguing aspect of his immense talents. When his first historical spy novel, Night Soldiers, appeared in 1988, it hardly seemed possible that his work could get any better. But Dark Star (1991), with its effortless painting of the complexity of middle-European politics, would be difficult to beat, while the ironic poignancy of The Polish Officer (1995) put him into the top bracket of contemporary spy novelists. Yet here we go again. Best books of 2009. (Yes, I know that The Spies of Warsaw came out in hardcover last year, but its publication this year in paperback makes it fair game for this listing.) Although Furst’s chosen genre is ever more clearly defined, there is nothing reductively “spy” about his storytelling. It all comes down to the solidity of the characters he creates, his consistent eye for detail and the natural vivacity of his plotting, which is the true essence of his narrative style. The Spies of Warsaw is as similar to -- and as unlike -- his other books as anything could be, though it is distinctively “Furstian.” Which is to say that it has a recognizable bouquet, like the finest of wines. Spies is the detached, understated memoir of Colonel Jean-François Mercier, a French aristocrat working in Warsaw, Poland, as a military attaché in 1937, making the embassy rounds of social events, picking up tidbits from colleagues, lovers and men who happen to work in Nazi arms factories, watching the “storm-clouds gather over Europe,” and yearning for his country estate and his favorite hunting dogs. The novel is a consummate achievement, a page-turner of astounding literary quality. In the end it all boils down to one driving impulse: Mercier wants to rescue Anna Szarbek from Warsaw and carry her off to Paris. And that is what he does. He gets the girl, despite the gathering storm clouds, knowing that it won’t be long before the Nazi’s tanks come rolling down the Champs Élysées. Was ever a plot more simple, or more satisfying? -- Michael Gregorio

Stardust by Joseph Kanon (Atria) 512 pages
Publisher-turned-novelist Joseph Kanon’s latest book -- his fifth -- is as good as any of those that have come before, including the Edgar Award-winning Los Alamos (1997). It’s about a young man, Ben Collier, the son of a famous German director, who has returned to the United States from service in Europe with the Signal Corps. Ben travels to California in 1946 after his sister-in-law, Liesl, informs him that his B-movie director brother, Danny, has suffered a serious tumble from a hotel window. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? Ben arrives just in time to witness his brother briefly emerge from a coma, but soon afterward Danny dies. While Liesl believes the suicide theory, Ben suspects that someone pushed Danny to his early death, and he turns amateur detective in order to identify the culprit. Liesl and Ben soon begin a scorching affair, which is of course too good to last. Toss in the atmospherics of Los Angeles’ German émigré community and revelations about Danny’s role in an anti-Communist crusade launched by a congressman against the American film industry, and you’ve got all the makings of a box-office, er, bookstore hit. -- Dick Adler

Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone) 370 pages
Author Gruley is the Chicago bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, but don’t expect any business secrets to be revealed in his smashing debut thriller, Starvation Lake. Gruley has either played or been obsessed with the lower depths of amateur hockey, and he’s as familiar with the backwaters of Michigan as he is with his computer keyboard. He also knows how to drag you kicking and screaming into a story so gripping that you’ll probably devour it in one gulp -- like the heavenly sounding egg pie served at Audrey’s Diner (“Cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs bubbled up through a golden cocoon of Italian bread ... Steam billowed from the sausage, bacon, potatoes, green peppers, mushrooms and onions baked inside ...”). In this yarn, Gus Carpenter is the associate editor of the local newspaper, a man who’s been forced home to Starvation Lake (where his shrewd mother still lives) after a promising investigative reporter’s job at a Detroit broadsheet imploded. One freezing night, the remains of a snowmobile are discovered in the titular lake -- the same machine in which Carpenter’s former hockey coach died some years back after crashing through the ice on another, nearby body of water. Evidence of the coach’s murder is discovered, and the mystery of how the snowmobile got into Starvation Lake adds another baffling element. Carpenter’s efforts to solve these mysteries promise to shake up more than a few people. This one’s a definite keeper -- especially when served with egg pie from Audrey’s. -- Dick Adler

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Delacorte) 373 pages
Flavia de Luce, the feisty 11-year-old English girl at the heart of Canadian author Alan Bradley’s debut crime novel, may be the most engaging such precocious protagonist since Dick Lochte’s Serendipity Dahlquist or even Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew. This hectic but charming tale set in 1950 is told in Flavia’s commanding voice, and few openhearted readers will likely resist her particular combination of candor and hauteur. The youngest daughter of an aloof, tolerant, stamp-collecting widower with limited means and a colorful past, Flavia -- a resourceful loner with a bent for chemistry -- suffers (and exacerbates) the sibling frictions of living with two sisters in a dilapidated Georgian manse in the countryside. When a furtive visitor drops dead in the backyard cucumber patch, the apparent victim of a poisoned custard pie, Flavia’s singular traits and talents come into bloom. The result is an adventure that rockets (by bicycle) from village shops to college cloisters to police headquarters and back, with Flavia doing her de Lucean best to exonerate her father and save her own pre-adolescent skin. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (and its planned sequels) should delight clever 11-year-olds of all ages. -- Tom Nolan

The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe (McClelland & Stewart) 415 pages
I have yet to read a review of The Taken that doesn’t mention, even as an aside, the mystery of the author’s identity. In truth, though, the guessing is less strident this time out than it was for Inger Ash Wolfe’s “debut” outing, The Calling, when that book was published early in 2008. Part of the reason for this has to be that both books are beyond good: they’re fantastic. And there comes a moment very early on when you realize, the who matters less than the what in this instance: The Taken is just a terrific book, no matter whose name you slap on the cover. In our second visit with rural Ontario police Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef, we find her recovering from back surgery and wallowing in pure and palatable misery, partly from pain and partly from the humiliation of having to live with and be cared for by her ex-husband and his new wife. The discovery of a body in a local lake refocuses Hazel’s attention. Not only was it not the drowning accident it first seemed, but it appears to have occurred in just the same way as a death described in their community newspaper: in a work of fiction. The deeper Hazel digs the less she feels she knows ... and the more there is to unravel. The characterizations here are brilliant and crystal clear. Like The Calling, The Taken is a novel of living, breathing beings -- though sometimes, perhaps slightly too real. DI Micallef is brilliant and perfect in her imperfections. She is grumpy, uncomfortable and impatient in her pain, and these things inevitably creep into her work. And that work is demanding and surprising. The suspense here is perfectly wrought, but not overworked. The Taken stands with the very best of contemporary crime fiction. Period. -- Linda L. Richards

Woman With Birthmark by Håkan Nesser (Pantheon) 336 pages
Are some sins unforgivable, some people unredeemable? Such are the questions attached to the brutal deeds of apparent vengeance in Woman With Birthmark, Håkan Nesser’s latest account (to reach American shores) of the cases of police Inspector Van Veeteren (as translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson). Someone is murdering certain male citizens in a grotesque way that implies an element of payback. What former wrongs are thus recalled? And where will the killer strike next? Van Veeteren imagines his quarry to be “a bit cheeky, a little bit roguish even, but at the same time, serious. And very, very determined.” And the thoughtful detective sees the murderer’s acts as emblematic of social trends destined to play out in his native land: “The veneer of civilization, or whatever you preferred to call it, could begin to crack at any moment, crumble away and expose the darkness underneath. Some people might have imagined that Europe would be a protected haven after 1945, but Van Veeteren had never been one of them.” In such a morose place and time, Håkan Nesser’s 60-something police investigator -- a solitary chess aficionado and Bach-listener -- proves a most apt, able and sympathetic character. -- Tom Nolan