You may never choose to visit the Fens—especially in the summer, which sounds particularly toxic—but it will come alive from the very first page because of Kelly’s extraordinary art and imagination.
GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, by David Wolstencroft (Dutton)
Imagine you’re a talented young TV writer, about to start his first spy thriller. Haunted by the glorious ghosts of the past—everyone from Eric Ambler to Charles McCarry, with special bows to LeCarre and Deighton—you try to come up with something fresh, some trick or treatment which might just catch readers’ attention. But all too often, such ambitions result in overkill by trying to artificially inflate the stakesDavid Wolstencroft, who created (as they say in TV land) and wrote the intriguing A&E series “MI-5,” has gone the other way—by narrowing his focus down to two unlikely spy colleagues and then keeping that focus sharp and very funny. “Good News, Bad News” could almost have been written by Samuel Beckett, so knife-like are its dark images and absurd scenes of futile bafflement.
Charlie, a budding failure in his late 20s, and George, a bluff, stout individual some 15 years older, are the entire staff of one of those instant photo printing studios buried in a subway station beneath the streets of London. (Those streets are painted as particularly noxious, making the photo shop almost an oasis of comfort.) One day, Charlie and George realize by accident that they are both also British government spies—each one ready to quit out of boredom and unmet expectations. Apparently, no one in their organization has noticed the posting mistake—but once they do, each man is ordered to kill the other.
From this brilliant start, Wolstencroft goes on to fashion an exciting, often hilarious story of a growing friendship (up to a point; one of the men will probably wind up eliminating the other) and the frustrations of being a seedy cypher in a world that was supposed to be glamorous. It’s a dazzling performance, full of surprises, and the only doubt it leaves is what will this most promising author ever do for an encore.
FALLING OFF AIR, by Catherine Sampson (Mysterious Press)
Catherine Sampson does so many things so well in her first mystery that it might seem odd to start with the childcare. But anyone who knows the sweat and planning that go into looking after one-year-old twins will be impressed at how British journalist Sampson manages to make the experience real, without exaggerating either the sentimental rewards nor the lack of time and privacy—especially as Sampson’s Robin Ballantyne is a single mother, deliberately raising Hannah and William on her own because their father, Adam, (a glamorous television journalist who confessed on hearing she was pregnant, “I just didn’t want the whole domestic deal”) has had no part, financial or otherwise, in their upbringing.
Robin was a successful maker of TV documentaries herself before taking maternity leave, and now events are forcing her back into that world. Comparing herself to a childless colleague, she says, “There had been ambition, as strong as Jane’s. I had banished it for the past year, but I could feel it lurking, and I feared that if it lost none of its heat, its return would condemn me to a life of frustration.”
Robin’s dilemma becomes more than a personal matter when she sees famous social activist Paula Carmichael fall to her death from the roof of a building near her London home. A very interesting policeman named Finney, oddly attractive in weird ways, discovers many mentions of Robin and her children in Paula’s diaries. A connection appears between Robin’s ex-lover and the dead woman—and then Adam himself is killed by Robin’s car in the street outside. With the police zeroing in on her as a prime suspect, Robin has to use her old investigative skills to find out what is really going on.
To do that, she needs time and reliable childcare. A tough German nanny battles off an attacker with her judo skills, then loses Robin’s trust by selling her story to the tabloids. Robin’s mother, a lawyer for the poor and downtrodden who also raised three daughters without a father, does her best to help—as does Robin’s youngest sister, a nurse with three kids of her own. (The third sister, suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndome, will make you weep and worry.) Various television colleagues, perfectly sketched, flit across the horizon, offering real or false hope.
Through it all, we watch Robin make her plans and choices based on what’s best for her twins. That Robin’s choices turn out also to be the saving of herself is just one more reason to hail this triumphant debut. And when Sampson switches from the past to the present tense on several occasions, it’s a beautifully effective gesture—a heightening of reality, like suddenly listening to a heartbeat.
DECEPTION, by Denise Mina (Little, Brown)
“It was during that time that the mist came into the front room,” says a would-be Scottish doctor turned would-be writer named Lachlan Harriot about the beginning of the end of his quiet life. “It was July and I’d left the front-room window open when I went to bed. When I came down in the morning the garden mist was all through the room, a swirling fog at chest level…”
That mist is the perfect metaphor for the various kinds of deception that swirl through and around Denise Mina’s wonderful new mystery, because it raises so many important questions. When did Lachlan’s marriage to psychiatrist Dr. Susie Harriot begin to fall apart—when the mist actually appeared, or long before? Since the image is mentioned in Lachlan’s own private diary, which he makes a big deal of sharing with us, could it not be just a shade too pompous and prophetic to be believable? (After all, this is a man who seems to have totally missed the fact that his wife was having a relationship with a notorious serial killer, so he might be said to be in some degree of denial.)
These questions become central when Susie is convicted of the serial killer’s murder and sent to prison. Looking (he says) for insurance documents, Lachlan breaks into Susie’s very private office and finds some frightening and incriminating material—which he proceeds to tells us about in enough detail to damn his wife forever.
Although the narrative engine which moves Mina’s book along is strong and leads up to what they call a blockbuster finale, it’s the twists and turns of Lachlan’s mind as he struggles with deceiving us about Susie’s deception that really make this a most satisfying reading experience.
DEATH IN DUBLIN, by Bartholomew Gill (William Morrow)
When the American writer Mark McGarrity died in an accidental fall in 2003, part of the sadness was the thought that there would be no more of the splendidly sharp and entertaining Irish mysteries about Dublin homicide chief Peter McGarr which he wrote as Bartholomew Gill. Fortunately, one last McGarr remained in the pipeline, and I’m pleased to report that it’s a fitting end to the series and a worthy tribute to McGarrity’s talent.
“The bar up the street from Raymond Sloane’s house was a relic from the Liberties of old,” he writes of a former working class Dublin neighborhood, “a low, dim kip clouded with smoke from the clutch of old men at the bar and a sooty fire that was smoldering in the hearth.” Such echoes of Irish writers from Yeats and Joyce to O’Casey, Beckett and Behan sound on almost every page, as McGarr and his team of detectives search for the villains who murdered a guard at Trinity College and stole the extremely valuable and culturally symbolic Book of Kells. Their investigations take them through a Dublin grown fat and smug on international trade, with political pressures and potential dangers waiting around virtually every corner for McGarr and his family. There’s also a smoky undertone of sexiness which has characterized many of the McGarr books—in this case two very attractive women anxious to ease Peter’s pain. If you’ve arrived late at the party, start here—and then move on to such Gill classics as “The Death of a Joyce Scholar.”
A Wide World of Crime
Mysteries take us to places we’d probably never choose for holidays, and give us new ways of looking at places we thought we knew (Cara Black’s series set in recent Paris is a good example of this). And until I can get to Japan, there are the homegrown mysteries of
Natsuo Kirino,
Seicho Matsumoto, Akimitsu Takagi and Miyuki Miyabe as guideposts. As for the mysterious continent of Africa…
THE BIG KILLING, by Robert Wilson (Harcourt/Harvest)
Robert Wilson, a Brit who lives in Portugal, got lots of well-deserved international attention with his wonderfully sharp and sad thriller called “A Small Death In Lisbon” several years ago. But before that, he had published in England a very interesting series featuring Bruce Medway, a classic drunken British adventurer stranded in Africa who could have walked straight out of Joseph Conrad. Now the Medway books are being published in America, and I recommend them highly—for their fine writing as well as their timeless sense of that continent’s allure and danger.
Early in “The Big Killing,” for example, Medway learns about a savage civil war in Liberia—which, in case other bloody headlines have pushed it from your memory, was also going on just a few months ago. The Liberian rebels are responsible for most of the mayhem which dogs Medway—a self-described fixer who does “jobs for people who don’t want to do the jobs themselves”—as he goes about his business: first, delivering a video for a very large (and soon very dead) porno dealer named Fat Paul, and then trying to protect a soft and gently-raised young diamond dealer who is in as much danger from the police and government officials he encounters as he is from rebels and other villains.
Wilson’s West Africa is definitely a brutal and even inhuman landscape, and at first it’s hard to see why Medway—despite all the alcohol he absorbs—sticks around, especially when his German lover gives up on him and goes back to Berlin. But one of the series’ surprising strengths is the way it finally makes Medway’s actions not only inevitable but oddly touching and even noble.
HEART OF THE HUNTER, by Deon Meyer; translated by K.L Seegers (Little, Brown)
Like all good fiction, a well-written mystery or thriller can quickly transport us beyond the headlines or travel brochures and into the social fabric of another country. Qiu Xialong’s books about contemporary China do that to perfection, and now Deon Meyer—a writer whose first two crime novels appeared only in his native Afrikaans—gives us an exciting and oddly hopeful look into what feels, smells and sounds very much like life in today’s South Africa.
“Heart of the Hunter” is the dark, explosive side of Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana books (“The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” et al), as full of love for the vast beauty of the country but also riddled by the anger of South Africa’s recent racial and political struggles. It shows vividly and often the price paid by people on all sides of those struggles.
We first meet Thobela Mpayipheli, a very large member of the Xhosa tribe, in 1984 in Paris—where he quickly and expertly kills a CIA assassin in the Rue St. Jacques with the long, thin blade of his assegai. When next we see this man, nicknamed “Tiny,” it is today, and he is riding a ridiculously small Honda motorbike from Cape Town—where he is employed as a handyman for a motorcycle dealer—towards the township of Guguletu, where he lives with a gentle, sadly wary widow named Miriam and her seven-year-old son, Pakamile. After years of serving as an agent and an assassin for various government agencies (some of them in the Eastern Bloc) and as an enforcer for a South African drug lord, all Tiny Mpayipheli wants to do is live quietly with Miriam and Pakamile on some farmland he has purchased.
But loyalties from the past ensnare him in one last adventure—helping to rescue a former colleague who appears to be caught up in some Byzantine struggle between top South African intelligence operatives and the CIA. Tiny’s story, as written by Meyer and translated by K.L. Seegers, is made up of compelling, lucid scenes of high drama and low comedy, including an epic journey on a huge, borrowed BMW motorcycle up the length of South Africa toward Zambia.
Helped along the way by a surprisingly talented old drifter/songwriter and by a horde of bikers who see him as an ally, Tiny is also up against some formidable opponents: a shrewd, ambitious woman who runs one of the intelligence groups; her manipulative, scholarly director, who hides secrets even better than she can; and an apparently berserk but finally fathomable soldier, Capt. Tiger Mazibuko, whose hatred for Tiny glows and fizzles like bad wiring.
Tiny’s trip up the road called the N1 is a learning experience, for him as well as for us. “He was riding through Du Toits Kloof Pass in the dark and he was aware that he was a caricature of how it should not be done,” says Meyer as the BMW’s powerful engine pulls the all-too-human survivor of his country’s recent past along through its layers of beauty and divisiveness.
MURDER IN THE SENTIER, By Cara Black (Soho)
Sue Grafton will probably run out of letters of the alphabet before Cara Black exhausts the geography of Paris in her crisp and eccentric mysteries about Aimee Leduc.
We knew from the first two books in the series that Leduc had a French police officer father and an American mother who split when she was 8, but now we learn that her mother also belonged to a notorious band of 1960s terrorists. Leduc, still trying to keep her computer-security business afloat (it’s 1994, when such dreams were practical), borrows 50,000 francs from a client in the Parisian rag trade (which has taken over the once-luxurious mansions of the Sentier district) to buy information about her mother from a German woman just released from prison. That sad figure’s murder, along with the recent, suspicious suicide of a noted left-wing literary lion, lead Leduc through a tangled (and occasionally impenetrable) garden of lies and cover-ups.
As usual, moments of confusion are more than redeemed by Black’s re-creation of a Paris teeming with people from elsewhere (a scene in which a Senegalese man mourns his lost homeland is particularly poignant) who all—like Leduc—probably expect too much from their fabled environment.
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Penguin)
What a gorgeous book lovers’ package this is, beginning with an absolutely perfect, battered-looking jacket designed by Darren Haggar and an evocative, old-fashioned feather pattern set of beginning and end papers by Stephanie Huntwork; continuing through the sharp and sensitive translation from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (daughter of the poet Robert Graves); and—best of all—written throughout with grace, sadness and bristling excitement by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
“I had grown up convinced that the slow procession of the post-war years, a world of stillness, poverty and hidden resentment, was as natural as tap water, that the mute sadness that seeped from the walls of the wounded city was always there,” remembers Daniel Sempere of his native Barcelona in 1945, when he turned 11. That’s the year his widowed bookseller father takes him to an ancient repository called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he is allowed to choose one volume from the shelves to own and protect. The book Daniel picks is “The Shadow of the Wind,” a novel written in 1935 by a man called Julian Carax.
Little is known of Carax, whose few novels never sold many copies but who seems to have stirred up enough anger in at least one reader to make him or her intent on acquiring and burning every last copy. Over the next 20 years, Daniel’s fate will be linked with Carax’s in many ways—some obviously melodramatic in the best tradition of writers like Dickens and Dumas, such as the stranger with the burned face who tries to buy or steal Daniel’s copy of the book, or the vicious police inspector who dogs everyone’s heels; others much more subtle, including the way the book teaches Daniel about sex, trust and life in a repressive country.
Small wonder that “The Shadow of the Wind” has already been a huge bestseller in Spain and other European countries. Ruiz Zafon has captured the magic of books as both objects of love and cultural icons, and has managed to combine our fascination with them (why else are we writing and reading this?) with a story of tremendous scope and precise focus.
BANGKOK 8, by John Burdett (Knopf)
“You have to remember we’re Buddhist,” says Bangkok policeman Sonchai Jitplecheep early in this exciting and unusual first thriller. “Compassion is an obligation, even if corruption is inevitable.”
Sonchai works out of Bangkok’s District 8—the city’s “heart and its armpit.” It was here, he tells us, that he learned to forgive his prostitute mother (his father was a white Vietnam era soldier whom she has always refused to identify) and to honor her for becoming a successful entrepreneur in the district’s flourishing sex industry.
As the only cops in the district (and perhaps the country) who weren’t on the take, Sonchai and his beloved partner Pichai were both the pride and the puzzlement of the police establishment. Now Pichai is dead, accidently bitten by a cobra in the bizarre murder-by-snake of an African American U.S. Marine sergeant who got too greedy for sex and jade, and Sonchai has to investigate both crimes—with the help of a female American FBI agent.
Sonchai’s Buddhism is a strong and compelling part of his character: he casually remarks that a U.S. Embassy official “is blithely unaware that she once accompanied me across a courtyard of startlingly similar dimensions, thousands of years ago,” and his urgent desire for revenge against his partner’s killers is tempered by equally deep reserves of forgiveness. Author John Burdett, a British lawyer, perhaps tells us more about the Bangkok sex industry than some readers might care to know, but he spends almost as much time on the pleasures of jade jewelry and Thai food. Let’s hope that Sonchai’s second adventure is in the works.
SHADOW FAMILY, by Miyuki Miyabe; translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Kodansha)
Amazingly, this is just the second of Miyuki Miyabe’s 36 mystery novels to be translated into English; the other was the best-selling and critically acclaimed “All She Was Worth,” which was named Japan’s Best Novel of the Year in 1992. Imagine the reverse happening to Ruth Rendell—just two of her dozens of books being available in Japanese.
The Rendell comparison is particularly apt: “Shadow Family” starts like one of her Inspector Wexford police stories and then slides gradually into the kind of dark psychological mystery she often writes, especially under her Barbara Vine pen name.
Etsuro Takegami is a not very distinguished Tokyo police detective sergeant who inherits a high profile double murder case when his superior is hospitalized. A 48-year-old “salary man”—a food company executive named Ryosuke Tokoroda—is found stabbed to death in his comfortable house in a farming district being turned into homes. His murder is soon linked by forensic evidence to the strangling death a few days before of a young woman, a college student and karaoke club employee who was Tokoroda’s lover.
Then, on this familiar foundation, Miyabe begins to build a bizarre structure. Takegami and his sharply drawn team discover that the murdered man had created an Internet fantasy world: a subtle, frighteningly detailed fictional family where he was the perfect father, unlike the cold and frustrated man he was with his own wife and daughter.
Tokorada was also a serial philanderer, so when a stalker begins to threaten his real-life daughter the police suspect that this might be connected with the murders. Miyabe blends her two styles with impressive ease as the answers and villains are revealed. Of special interest is a portrait of a part of Tokyo –a long way from the sleek electronic metropolis as depicted in films like “Lost In Translation”—where ordinary people live, work and play out their dark fantasies.
OUT, by Natsuo Kirino , translated by Stephen Snyder (Vintage)
Like Miyuki Miyabe, Natsuo Kirino has been one of Japan’s top mystery writers for a dozen years; but “Out” is her first appearance in English. With the heartbreaking inevitability of a Russian novel, it tells the story of a collective crime: the murder of an abusive husband and the disposal of his body by four women who work together on the night shift at a Tokyo factory that produces cheap, tasty, possibly even nutritious boxed lunches. The women are bound together in a friendship made up of financial need and a deep understanding of revenge.
When Yayoi, the youngest and most attractive of the women, strangles her philandering husband with his own belt in a blast of range, she turns for help to her co-worker Masako, an older and wiser woman whose own family life has fallen apart in less dramatic fashion. To help her cut up and get rid of the dead body, Masako recruits Yoshie and Kuniko, two fellow factory workers trapped in other kinds of domestic troubles. All of Kirino’s characters are sadly recognizable, and also like Miyabe she shows us another, darker view of a consumer economy undergoing some uncomfortable changes.
INSPECTOR ANDERS AND THE SHIP OF FOOLS, by Marshall Browne (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Minotaur)
“Anders had his hat and overcoat on. Not unusual, Matucci thought. He always appeared ready to depart, as if he was at home nowhere. It was a hint that his best work, best thinking, was to be done in solitary perambulations around whatever city was outside…”
The mordant irony of a one-legged policeman doing his best work while stomping around in a strange European city is what energizes Marshall Browne’s second book in one of the most promising new mystery series in recent memory. We first met Anders—a top Italian cop who lost a leg to a 1980s terrorist bomb—when he was mopping up the Mafia villains in a city much like Naples, in “The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders.” Now he’s with Interpol in Lyon, where he and his flamboyant partner Matucci are treated like vaguely embarrassing relatives—until all 16 members of the board of directors of a giant chemical company are blown up in Frankfurt.
Anders’s background as a bomb victim and expert is important here, but so is another unusual skill: he has just finished writing a biography of a distant relative, a poet named Anton Anders, and is the perfect person to interpret the clues left by the Chemtex bomber—in the form of quotations from a 15th Century poem called “The Ship of Fools.” With the help of an alluring French librarian, Anders works to connect the poem to an environmental action group calling itself Judgement Day, which appears intent on killing everyone involved in a proposed merger of several huge companies.