So does Hayes—and part of Lankford’s talent is the ability to keep us wondering if Mark is being completely honest with us about his investigation into his ex-boss’s death. The other part, which makes his novel especially compelling, is the way movie metaphors shape and color everything. Natural disasters are “star-studded events. An Irwin Allen Production made flesh.” Hayes’s apartment is near the site of the legendary La Reina theater, “one of the most famous movie palaces in the Valley…” A mysterious neighbor looks “like Catherine Deneuve in her glory days.” And my favorite: a fictitious film written by McCoy called “Student Chainsaw Nurses” gets three and a half stars from real critic Leonard Maltin due to its “drive-in purity on a global scale.”
IN THE MOON OF RED PONIES, by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)
Is there any crime writer better than James Lee Burke at evoking the rhythms and geography of American myth? His Civil War novel “White Doves at Morning” is a perfect literary time machine, as is his piercing story of a young miner set in Appalachia in the 1960s, “To the Bright and Shining Sun.” It’s all but impossible to think of the Louisiana bayou country without conjuring up scenes from his Dave Robicheaux books; and his latest series, about former Texas Ranger turned lawyer Billy Bob Holland, shows on every page how the legend of cowboy justice lives on. Even though a district attorney says to Billy Bob, now based in Missoula, “Montana isn’t the O.K. Corral anymore,” he—and we—know that’s not quite true.
In his fourth book in the Holland saga, Burke involves him with the psychological problems of two very different men. Johnny American Horse, a Gulf War veteran and frequent drunk, raises horses, tries to keep oil companies from drilling on sacred Native American land, and has visions like the ones his purported ancestor Crazy Horse was famous for. He’s also caring on an affair with the daughter of a right-wing U.S. Senator. When two hired thugs with guns attack him, Johnny fights back with a hatchet and knife, killing one of them. “Later, he would not recall with any exactitude the struggle that followed,” writes Burke, with the singular power of his lyric prose. “But he knew the blows he visited upon the intruders from an industrial city on the shores of a great lake were more than enough to ensure they would not present themselves to him again, at least not outside the bright edges of his sleep.”
Johnny becomes Billy Bob’s client, as the plot snakes off into a tangled forest of politics and greed. The other damaged character—a true psychopath named Wyatt Dixon, the rodeo clown from “Bitterroot” who buried Holland’s wife alive—is out of prison on a technicality and ready to raise more hell in spite of his professed conversion to religion and decency. Dixon, one of the most believably frightening villains in living memory, is also one of the most interesting—a fact that plays a large part in the unpredictability and satisfying shapeliness of Burke’s latest book.
THE MONGOL REPLY, by Benjamin M. Schutz (Five Star)
The only thing more frightening than Benjamin M. Schutz’s acid-etched portraits of lawyers who specialize in divorce and child custody is how easily they are to believe as they cheat, lie, steal and destroy lives during the course of their daily work. Albert Garfield keeps on the wall of his Washington, D.C.-area office a copy of a letter from a Mongol general named Subutai to Genghis Khan which tells the warrior leader what he is doing to the Persians he’s attacking. “Where we have found them we killed them all, man, woman and child,” Subutai writes. And in an off-the-cuff aside, Garfield then reflects that the Persian leader, when captured, would have molten silver poured into his eyes and other orifices.
What Garfield has in mind for a sad, hapless young former model named Serena Tully is only slightly less dramatic. Hired by Tom Tully, an absolutely vicious (and also quite credible) ex-football star to strip his wife Serena of their children, all her money and credit cards, and whatever shreds of a life she thinks she retains, Garfield does everything in the realm of nasty-but-legal to achieve his client’s wishes. (In fact, the second most frightening thing about Schutz’s book is how much the legal system actually helps this monster out.)
Serena has flaws, but she is a loving mother—baffled into near-madness by what’s happening. Luckily, she has been assigned the services of Dr. Morgan Reece, a children’s advocate with a major sadness in his own heart. There’s also one decent old lawyer who seems to think there’s something wrong here. The fact that Tully has been doing some dirty work for his local mafiosi only serves to add one more brutal ingredient to a strongly-written legal thriller by an Edgar-winning author who has been absent from the writing field for too long.
ABSENT FRIENDS, by S.J. Rozan (Delacorte)
S.J. Rozan isn’t the first writer to use what happened to New York on Sept. 11, 2001 as the background for a crime novel. But the images of pain, loss and fear on every page of “Absent Friends” are so strong that the book will probably be remembered for them, rather than for the intricate and heart-breaking story of her characters—a group of friends who grew up on Staten Island in the 1970s.
“Everyone was like this now,” says a criminal lawyer named Phil Constantine (a latecomer to the friends’ circle and a definite outsider who does their dirty jobs but is treated roughly, especially by the women) suddenly caught up in a TV news item involving a client. “Every siren, every subway delay, every unexpected crowd as you rounded the corner made your heart speed, your palms sweat…” And the sense of the city’s vanished crystaline beauty comes through like an arrow in the heart: “In New York now, beautiful days were suspect, clear blue skies tainted with an invisible acid etch.”
At the center of these absent friends (even the ones who survived paid a terrible price of loss of hope for the future) is Jimmy McCaffery, a heroic fireman who died in the towers. While most of the others remained in their peaceful Staten Island harbor, Jimmy left 20 years ago for Manhattan, where he became a captain at a firehouse near the attack. But why did McCaffery really leave—over a failed love affair, or because of his involvement in some secret payments to the family of a mob-connected man who died in prison?
A once-great newspaper reporter, now mired in booze and self-pity, thinks he has found the answer, but his body falls from a bridge to Staten Island before his story is finished. His young, idealistic lover is determined to find out why. Constantine the lawyer and other friends of McCaffery would rather let it all sink beneath the water and ash.
Rozan, who has justly won every mystery award going for her series about Bill Smith and Lydia Chin, knows how to balance their pasts and their presents without trivializing anything that happened on 9/11. Her performance—a dance in front of the burning towers—takes guts, brains and heart, and all are present in abundance.
REVOLUTION NO. 9, by Neil McMahon (HarperCollins)
As everyone from Thomas Harris, begetter of Hannibal Lector, and Dan Brown (whose only failure in “The Da Vinci Code” was the heavy you could spot crunching through the literary woods a league away) can attest, creating a believable villain is the hardest work in the artistic world. How many recent thrillers have been spoiled—or almost derailed—by a character who won’t come alive on the page, or who immediately goes over the top into the credibility gap?
All of which makes Neil McMahon’s success with one of the main characters in his fourth book about Dr. Carroll Monks—a doctor who just can’t stay out of trouble—so stunning. McMahon pulls off the virtually unthinkable here: he creates a terrorist so authentically motivated that he quickly becomes touchingly real. Freeboot, as the leader of a band of drugged-out, deranged outlaws who live on an isolated tract of land deep in the mountains of Northern California calls himself, is a true lunatic of epic dimensions, a “macho speed freak who dominated his followers, made allusions to Machiavelli, and hinted at the grandiose importance that he would enjoy in the eyes of history.” These things are necessary but not sufficient to explain the immediate fascination we have with Freeboot, nor the unmistakable shiver of sympathy we feel when we hear him speak.
When Freeboot’s 3-year-old son becomes seriously ill, Dr. Monks’s own long-estranged son—a member of the terrorist tribe who has chosen the Beatles song of the title as their anthem—suggests kidnapping the medical man to treat the child. The little boy turns out to be in a dangerous diabetic condition, and Monks’s first chore (aside from staying alive during periodic flashes of violence with his son and other terrorists) is to treat his illness and then find a way to get the child to a hospital.
Since Freeboot and his followers have actually begun their bloody revolution, by massacring some leading citizens and scattering their stolen objects among the homeless, the terrorist—who thinks of himself as a leader born with the quality of “virtu” (which Monks knows has nothing to do with “virtue in its usual sense… rather, it was the power to govern effectively, requiring a combination of cunning and ruthlessness”—appears irrationally afraid that letting his son go to a hospital could derail his revolution. Dr. Monks, his brilliant, troubled son already lost to him, is equally determined to keep the little boy alive.
In McMahon’s assured hands, the duel between the rational, scientific doctor and the fascinating, frightening Freeboot—who fizzes with rampant electricity like a short circuit—is an absolutely riveting read.
WRONGFUL DEATH, by Baine Kerr (Lisa Drew/Scribner)
Can a commercial work of crime fiction carry the weight not only of medical malpractice and legal gymnastics but also the moral quagmire of Bosnian war crimes? Baine Kerr makes believers of us all as he moves his hero—a railroad lawyer named Elliot Stone—home to Boulder, Colorado after two years of working with the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Stone wants to be a federal judge, but he lets himself get talked into being appointed conservator in a case involving a man severely brain-damaged in a train accident by his friend and Bosnian colleague Dr. Hans Leitner—an expert medical witness known as “Dr. God” because of his skill in swaying juries.
When the brain-damaged man is charged with attacking his wife and putting her into an irreversible coma, Stone and his beautiful, sharply-rendered lady friend—a Dutch/Indonesian scientist named Quierin—join with the comatose woman’s determined daughter in a complicated but vastly entertaining court battle against the dangerously sanctimonious Dr. Leitner and a team of legal heavyweights. Kerr’s talents positively gleam here as he has Stone use what he learned in Bosnia to expose a particularly vile act of homegrown evil.
HELL TO PAY, By George P. Pelecanos (Little, Brown)
A critic once called George Pelecanos “the Zola of Washington, D.C.,” because of the way he deliberately peoples his excellent crime novels with the low and the powerless. I’d amend that description to “the Seurat of Washington, D.C.,” because like the great pointillist painter he piles on tiny details of ordinary working lives until they glow with an inner light.
“Soon the colors would change in Rock Creek Park. And then would come those weeks near Thanksgiving, when the weather turned for real and the leaves were still coming down off the trees. Strange had his own name for it: Deep Fall. It was his favorite time of the year in D.C.”
That’s Derek Strange, an African American private detective in his 50s, going about his business in Pelecanos’s second book in his trenchant new series. What links Strange to the sons and grandsons of Greek and Italian immigrants who have inhabited his previous books are the same common interests and ways of making their days more bearable: work, sports, drink, sex and especially the throb of popular music which soundtracks their lives. Strange has been singing along to Teddy Pendergrass’s “Wake Up Everybody” as he drives past Rock Creek Park; he’ll do the same to an old Al Green tape on his way home from coaching a Pee Wee football team a few pages later. And a Commodores instrumental jam will be playing near the book’s end as Strange’s partner, a disgraced ex-cop named Terry Quinn, fights a vicious pimp called Worldwide Wilson to avenge a girl’s death.
“Hell To Pay” is set in the decidedly non-tourist parts of Washington, D.C.—neighborhoods where so many young black children die regularly from drugs and guns that selling T-shirts with their pictures printed on them at their wakes and funerals has become a part of the local economy. First introduced in “Right As Rain,” Strange is a rich and complex character, not always easy to understand but finally hard to resist. His addictions to booze and furtive sex threaten his chance at a promising relationship—not in a melodramatic way but with the natural inevitability of old habits that are hard to break.
Like Pelecanos himself, his characters have job resumes that include unglamorous entries like short order cook, bartender, shoe salesman, record store employee. The cases that Derek Strange works on here are also deceptively low key: he investigates a suspiciously slick young man who wants to marry his friend’s daughter, and searches for the dazed and demented trio of young killers who live on fast food and who ended the life of his nine-year-old star quarterback for the most chillingly banal of reasons. But all around these commonplace details—and largely because of them—shines that unmistakable light of true art.
HARD REVOLUTION, by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown)
Reviewers of George Pelecanos’s terrific crime novels have compared him to Zola and Balzac. I’d like to add, at the risk of appearing pretentious (which has never stopped me before) another major French novelist - Proust. The search through past memories propels and colors all of Pelecanos’s stories; people who work at Greek-owned diners are the glue holding several worlds together; the flashy or reliably sturdy cars that the good guys and the hoodlums drive in this new book are earlier versions of the ones they’ll live and die in down through the years; the popular music they batter and soothe their souls with have lasting echoes; the sports stars they worship are equally eternal and interchangeable.
As in Proust, the characters move on and offstage with the random predictability of a clever cuckoo clock: Nick Stefanos, a major player in several Pelecanos books, stumbles on the scene briefly in his latest; and a baby called Granville Oliver, helped by a young, still idealistic cop named Derek Strange, will grow up to be the fascinating heavy of another novel.