Thanks to author Browne’s enviable ability to bring a setting to life with just a few unusual details (what would an Italian restaurant in a city half French and half German be like, for example) and the relatively deep pockets of Anders’s Interpol employers, we also get to visit some places off the beaten tourist track: Frankfurt, Munich, Lyon and especially Strasbourg—where on my next visit I’m sure I’ll be able to hear, if I listen carefully in the night, the wanderings of a man with a prosthetic leg…
SOME BITTER TASTE, by Magdalen Nabb (Soho)
If you didn’t make it to Florence this summer, don’t despair. It was probably too crowded, anyway—and there’s a new Marshal Guarnaccia investigation to keep you abreast of the sights, smells, tastes and traffic problems of that great Italian city.
Guarnaccia, of course, is a non-commissioned officer in the
caribiniere,
the cops who keep the peace and solve local crimes. Above him is a sleek, smart captain—an officer who Guarnaccia fears thinks too highly of the Marshal’s intuitive skills (we know better: they are superb). Not only is the Marshal a rather bulky and decidedly unsleek figure who has to wear dark glasses because of an allergy to sunlight, he’s also a Sicilian—separating him even further from the ancient, wealthy Florentines whose domain he supervises.
Part of the wonderful joke kept afloat by British-born author Magdalen Nabb is that this unwieldy outsider knows the city better than its landed gentry. “Isn’t that a copy of a statue in the Boboli Gardens?” the Marshal asks a soon-to-be-dead Brit in his stately garden. “Sir Christopher followed his glance and smiled. ‘No, no, it isn’t, but your memory doesn’t deceive you. The one in the Boboli Gardens is a Renaissance copy of this one, which is Roman, the second century A.D.’”
Like Florence itself, Nabb’s books are not just about old artifacts. This one deals with a modern problem—Albanian immigrants, many of them illegal, with criminal backgrounds—and the still-smoldering fires of resentment of Italy’s treatment of its Jewish citizens during World War II. And the author never forgets that it takes fully-realized characters (including Guarnaccia, his loyal but often baffled wife and their two teenaged sons) to bring a series to life, no matter how glorious its setting.
UNIFORM JUSTICE, by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly)
Much of the world is still in a mess, but at least the American mystery scene has had some order restored to it: after several years of absence caused by a dispute between the author and her original publisher, a new Donna Leon book about Venice police commissario Guido Brunetti—the 12th in a memorable series—is ready for our immediate pleasure.
Leon, an American who lives in England and Italy, is probably the best mystery writer you’ve never heard of—unless you’ve picked up her bestselling books at foreign airports or bought copies of the British editions on the Internet. She uses the relatively small and crime-free canvas of Venice (she has admitted in interviews that there are many more murders in her books than in the real life of that floating city) for riffs about Italian life, sexual styles and—best of all—the kind of ingrown business and political corruption which seems to lurk just below the surface of every enterprise. She also has Brunetti and his family eating better than any actual meal I’ve ever had in Venice (his wife, Paola, a college teacher of English literature, is a superb cook, and their teenage son and daughter always manage to make it home for lunch and dinner).
Brunetti himself is a somewhat dour figure, who reads Greek and Roman history for pleasure and often seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Not for the first time in his career he found himself wondering how much longer he could do this work,” he thinks at one point during a frustrating, sad investigation into the faked suicide of a military cadet which quickly takes on political and social overtones.
We share his distress, and silently urge him to continue—especially now that the publishing dispute has been settled. Luckily, Paola is waiting at home with something called “Gugliemo’s soup,” which contains 12 heads of garlic, is believed to be a sure cure for everything from worms to high blood pressure—and is, as Mrs. Brunetti adds, “an even surer way to get yourself a seat on the vaporetto tomorrow.”
DON’T LOOK BACK, by Karin Fossum (Harcourt)
If you miss the great Martin Beck mysteries by Maj Sowall and Per Wahloo, set in Stockholm, or find Henning Mankell’s currently popular series about the dour Swedish cop Kurt Wallander just too much of a downer, you should be as delighted as I am to welcome to American bookshelves Inspector Konrad Sejer—a disarmingly thoughtful, refreshingly gentle and totally likeable senior police investigator in Oslo, Norway.
This is the fifth in Karin Fossum’s Sejer series, well-received in Europe but the first to be published here. From Felicity David’s expertly unobtrusive translation, we learn gradually that Sejer is a widower with one daughter and a half-Somalian grandson, Matteus, on whom he dotes. (He even enjoys taking the child to Legoland.) There’s also a large dog called Kollberg, who is cut some slack by Sejer’s condo association because they like the idea of a detective inspector living there.
But Sejer’s bland exterior hides a fierce intelligence and the sharp instincts of a natural-born cop. Called in to investigate the disappearance of a child in a mountain village, Sejer deftly alternates respect for the family with a toughness toward possible perps that’s frightening because of its rarity. That case is solved quickly: the child went to look at some rabbits at the home of a harmless man with Down’s Syndrome. But when they both report somewhat belatedly that they saw the naked body of a woman at the edge of a nearby lake, Sejer and his ambitious, able young assistant Skarre return to the town, where a dark mystery of loss and repression begins to take shape.
It turns out that the murder victim, 15-year-old Annie Holland, was an enigma—an athlete full of strength and vigor, but also the troubled victim of physical and mental turmoil. Various scenarios about her fate are explored, and the one Fossum chooses to conclude with is as stark as a classic tragedy and as common as the people next door.
“You have good instincts,” Sejer’s boss says to him at one point. “But there’s one thing you do have to realize… You are
not
the hero of a detective novel. Try to keep an objective mind.” Fossum’s subtle, understated artistry makes sure we all do.
SOUTHWESTERLY WIND, by Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza; translated by Benjamin Moser (Holt)
The next stop on our Grand Crime Tour is Rio de Janeiro, where the estimable academic and novelist Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is ending his beautifully sad and seductive series about a memorable cop—Sergeant Espinosa, in charge of the Copacabana Precinct in that Brazilian city. A 29-year-old man named Gabriel, who works at a boring job in a large office, has no love interest and lives with his overprotective mother, comes to Espinosa with an unusual problem: a psychic has predicted that Gabriel will kill someone before his next birthday—just two months away.
Where other policemen might give Gabriel the rude boot or suggest a trip to a psychiatrist, the sympathetic Espinosa decides to have Gabriel followed—by one of his associates who is recovering from bullet wounds received in a previous book. Two murders of people within Gabriel’s fragile orbit occur quickly, and the way Garcia-Roza goes about having Espinosa find out what’s really happening should send readers scrambling for the first two books in the series—“The Silence of the Rain” and “December Heat”—as well as hoping he’ll change his mind and bring back his extremely interesting creation.
BELSHAZZAR’S DAUGHTER, by Barbara Nadel (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)
The Jewish community of Istanbul is the unlikely but fascinating setting for this first mystery by British author Barbara Nadel, who manages to quickly convince us that she has a deep understanding of the long and basically friendly relationship which Jews have enjoyed with their Turkish neighbors.
That relationship is threatened by a series of crimes that start when an old man named Leonid Meyer, a Russian Jew, is found beaten to death in the shabby Balat district, his body disfigured by acid and his room smeared with blood in the shape of a swastika. A veteran police inspector, Cetin Ikmen, is put in charge of the investigation. As Robert Cornelius—a young Englishman involved in the case through his affair with a mysterious young Jewish woman called Natalia—describes him, Ikmen is “disheveled, red-eyed, reeking of both booze and cigarettes… like some sort of crime novel character, a refugee from the 1950s.”
But Ikmen is also the best cop on the Istanbul beat, a mix of Maigret and Columbo with more recent dashes of Michael Dibdin’s Auerlio Zen and Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti. Aided by his assistant, Suleyman—a young man from a privileged family who often surprises the working class Ikmen with his insights and intelligence—the inspector plunges into several murders that link many layers of cultural crimes. If we’re lucky, the success of Nadel’s first novel in her native England will translate into a similar triumph here, prompting her to bring Ikmen back in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
DOCTORED EVIDENCE, by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press)
If Donna Leon ever decides to spin off her increasingly popular mystery series starring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venetian police, she could do a lot worse than devote a whole book to the elegant and intriguing Signorina Elletra, who ostensibly works for Brunetti’s stuffy and stupid boss but who spends most of her time on her computer, finding out secret things for the Commissario and his ace assistant, Vianello.
In Leon’s latest Brunetti outing it is Elletra—at one point wearing shoes “with heels so high they would have raised her above even the worst alta acqua,” Venice’s notorious floods—who finds the link between the murder of a nasty old woman and the secret past of a top government official. As Brunetti’s brilliant wife Paola (who also cooks up a succulent dish of lamb stew and polenta) helps him discover from a book she is reading, the deadly sin which led to the old woman’s killing wasn’t greed as everyone first suspected but pride.
Aside from crime, great food and the sights and smells of Venice, Leon also gives us sharp insights into the way Italy is governed. “An English friend of his once remarked that living here was like something he called ‘the loony bin,’ ” the Commissario muses. “Brunetti had had no idea of what the loony bin actually was, nor where it was located, but that hadn’t prevented him from believing that his friend was correct: further, he thought it as precise a description of Italy as any he had ever heard.”
DEAD LAGOON, by Michael Dibdin (Pantheon)
Here’s a wonderfully mixed bag—a mystery about an Italian policeman, written by a British author currently living in Seattle. Michael Dibdin brings his ironic investigator Aurelio Zen (star of “Ratking,” “Vendetta” and “Cabal”) back to his Venetian roots for a book that glistens with sadness and crackles with energy.
Zen’s temporary return to Venice from Rome is a private affair: He’s using his vacation time to earn some extra money by poking into the disappearance of a wealthy American. Since his family home sits damp, empty and unrentable, Zen camps out there-which brings back a flood of memories and connections. There is an old contessa tormented by household ghosts; a boyhood friend neck-deep in a dangerous political movement; even a Hamlet-like wraith with a revelation about Zen’s own family history. Dibdin’s descriptions of daily life in the non-tourist sections of Venice in winter are instantly evocative, deepening our interest in the narrative without slowing it down for a second. The same can be said of his mordant observations about current Italian politics and police work. “Dead Lagoon” is rich and complex, the kind of mystery novel that enriches the form and justifies all those hours we spend reading books we hope will be like it.
THE OTTOMAN CAGE, by Barbara Nadel (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)
Having explored Istanbul’s Jewish quarter with much artistic force in “Belshazzar’s Daughter,” Barbara Nadel now brings to equally interesting life the large Armenian population of the Turkish capital. A major part of Nadel’s success is due to the continuing presence of Cetin Ikmen, a veteran detective who is the brains of the city police’s homicide division. Constant smoker, drinker of large quantities of anything alcoholic, this father of nine children is very smart but seriously underpaid. Ikmen lives “the life of a struggling working-class Turk”—in a “crowded, reeking apartment in Sultan Ahmet, an area of the city that not only boasted most of the famous Istanbul monuments but also a large shifting population of backpackers, drug dealers, pimps and illegal immigrants.”
Ikmen’s best friend since they were schoolboys, Dr. Arto Sarkissian, also works for the police—but in the much better paid position of criminal pathologist. In spite of a certain snobbery on the part of Arto’s wife, the two men are very close—and it’s Sarkissian who opens the door to the generally more affluent Armenian community when the body of a young drug user at first thought to be Armenian is found in a strangely empty apartment in a building attached to the famed Topkapi Museum, in a neighborhood known for its “Ottoman Mansion Hotels” as an inducement to history-obsessed foreign tourists.
If Cetin is a very modern Turk, his young and able assistant, Mehmet Suleyman, reflects another tradition. “It hadn’t been so long ago that he had existed safely inside his old beliefs,” Nadel writes of Suleyman. “If you lived a good life, Allah would provide a lovely perfumed garden complete with willing little slave girls in the next, far better existence beyond the grave… Exactly when that had all changed so drastically, he could not now recall.”
Ikmen’s investigation into the young man’s death becomes tangled up with ambitious plans funded largely by wealthy Armenians to curtail public drug use. And if some of Nadel’s villains are too obvious too early, her impressive ability to conjur up a character like Citen and the details of the city in which he lives is more than enough to make such flaws unimportant.
American Blood
I haven’t spent nearly enough time in New Orleans, but thanks to the mysteries of such writers as Dick Lochte, James Sallis, Julie Smith, James Lee Burke, Toby Dunbar and Robert Skinner I feel I know it well. Detroit is another terra incognita, alive in my mind because of books by Jon A. Jackson, Loren D. Estleman and Elmore Leonard. Chicago, of course, belongs to Sara Paretsky—but she has lots of competition.
Alaska warms up under the touch of John Straley and Dana Stabenow; the Southwest (and especially its Native American population) is the turf of Tony Hillerman, Kirk Mitchell, et al. My visions of Cincinnati have been shaped originally by Jonathan Valin’s Harry Stoner series and more recently polished by the husband and wife team writing as Cathie John.
California mystery stars include Michael Connelly, John Shannon, Jan Burke, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, Stephen Greenleaf, Domenic Stansberry and T. Jefferson Parker—a few names from a long list.
Boston is the home of Jeremiah Healy, William Tapply, Dennis Lehane, the ubiquitous Robert Parker and the much-missed George V. Higgins. And just a few miles south, in Brattleboro, Vermont, Archer Mayor shines with a singular light…
THE SURROGATE THIEF, by Archer Mayor (Mysterious Press)
Far from the flashier big city settings of bestsellerdom, Archer Mayor—rooted in the rough granite soil of Brattleboro, Vermont—is producing what is consistently the best police procedural series being written in America. Only Reginald Hill, creator of the Yorkshire odd couple Dalziel and Pascoe, is a serious rival—and his books do have the colorful hook of a protagonist (the original 600-pound gorilla, Andy Dalziel) who might explode at any moment.
Mayor’s books about Joe Gunther range from strictly local crimes to national concerns which link Brattleboro to the world’s problems: his last one, “Gatekeeper,” manages to make a sudden wave of drug-related violence in Vermont a believable problem. In “The Surrogate Thief,” Gunther is involved in a case that is painfully personal. Thirty-two years ago, when Joe was a young Brattleboro cop anxious to learn his trade, he made some mistakes and compromises as he investigated the murder of a sullen grocery store owner who nobody liked. Gunther’s wife was dying of cancer; the killing seemed to have been the work of a burglar who soon vanished; Joe let it slide into a cold and neglected file.
Now events have come back to haunt him: a gun used in a fascinating, frightening scene of marital violence turns out to have been the same one fired during the ancient murder. Joe, who has moved through political and police thickets to become the field force commander for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, feels with some justification that he must look into the case again. While his ambitious lover Gail Zigman runs for state office and becomes too preoccupied to absorb Joe’s concerns, Gunther both instinctively and scientifically follows an old trail to a man who disappeared and was reborn.
Mayor is especially good at writing about women, from the understandably distracted Zigman to Joe’s wise and funny mother and a terribly sad former high school queen who now can’t leave her shabby apartment because of chronic fatigue. As always, Gunther’s hand-built team of cops is both interesting and supportive—even that loosest of cannons, the “infamously difficult” Willie Kunkle, who moved with Joe to the VBI. Back in Brattleboro, Mayor says with the quiet irony that lights up his work, “Nobody here had ever admitted missing having Kunkle around.”
SPEAK ILL OF THE LIVING, by Mark Arsenault (Poisoned Pen)
Arsenault’s second mystery about investigative reporter Eddie Bourque, who’s now scraping out a living writing and teaching in the mill town of Lowell, Mass., is even better than his Shamus-finalist debut,
Spiked
. Like Archer Mayor in his Vermont-set Joe Gunther series, Arsenault excels at depicting ordinary folks adjusting to changing economic circumstances. He also has an abiding respect for the role of print journalism in telling their stories. “News writers can’t afford writer’s block; it’s a luxury for people without deadlines,” Bourque muses as he sits in a Lowell diner and punches into his laptop a story for the Associated Press about banker Roger Lime, supposedly carjacked and burned to death, who suddenly resurfaces alive six months later, as shown in a kidnapper’s photo sent to Lime’s wife.The published story brings a letter from Bourque’s older brother, Hank, who’s serving a life sentence for murder. “I know who’s doing this,” Hank writes, sending Bourque off on a dark and dangerous search for truths both personal and public. Arsenault’s extremely likable hero has a knack for getting info from tough female cops, but best of all, he’s a completely believable journalistic icon—a man who makes the right choices because he believes in the value of his work.
SIX-POUND WALLEYE, By Elizabeth Gunn (Walker)
If it takes a village to support an excellent police procedural series, Elizabeth Gunn’s fictional town of Rutherford, Minn., should have a statue to the genre in its town square. Her ensemble of police characters and her deadly eye for the telling details of everyday life put Gunn up there with the best: Ian Rankin and Reginald Hill in the United Kingdom, Archer Mayor in the U.S.
The sports metaphors that have provided the titles for Gunn’s four books about Jake Hines, the head of Rutherford’s investigations unit, are an important part of her literary equipment: She makes even the most urbanized and/or anti-athletic reader quickly understand how large these activities loom in the lives of most Americans. In fact, it’s not fishing but ice hockey that takes up a lot of Jake’s attention here, as he has to skate carefully around the troubles of the teenage son of his friend and mentor, Rutherford’s chief of police, while looking into the bizarre shooting death of a boy waiting for a school bus.
Readers new to the series might be surprised when the dead boy’s father, a pathetic bully, uses a racial insult to attack the dark- skinned Hines, the child of a mixed marriage. “I try not to waste any energy on dinosaurs,” Jake tells a colleague. “I mean, the N word, in the twenty-first century? Please.” But when Hines seeks to ease his soul with a casual visit to his foster mother, Gunn’s compilation of tiny details fills our heart with everything we need to know about this interesting and credible man.
PILLAR OF FIRE, by Robert Irvine (St. Martin’s)
Robert Irvine has written seven previous books about a Salt Lake City-based detective named (after an ancient Christian prophet revered by Mormons) Moroni Traveler, but his latest is so strong that he deserves to be treated as a genuine discovery. Set in a harsh Southwestern landscape made familiar by Tony Hillerman, where tangled issues of religion as tough as any fathered by Umberto Eco are stirred up by winds from the past as deadly as the best of Ross Macdonald, “Pillar of Fire” also manages to be original and totally riveting.
Traveler’s complicated relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gives the book an immediate edge of danger and mystery. He and his father/partner know most of the Mormon leaders and have rattled the bones in many of their closets, but the Travelers also have status in the Gentile (non-Mormon) world that occasionally makes their services necessary.
When the daughter of a church elder runs off to join a charismatic healer and a cult of radical dissidents in the desert town of Fire Creek, Moroni is persuaded to help rescue the elder’s dying grandson. Not the least of Irvine’s many accomplishments here is to make the town a major character in the book—a place first poisoned by an accident of geography and now doomed by warring theologies.
TOTAL RECALL, by Sara Paretsky (Delacorte)
The really good writers find ways to defuse our quibbles early on. On Page 86 of Sara Paretsky’s latest, and probably best, book about private detective V.I. Warshawski, a writer friend of her lover’s says about Warshawski’s frenetic work schedule, “If you learn anything as you bounce around Chicago like a pinball in the hands of a demented wizard, I will listen breathlessly to your every word.” And just a few pages later, Warshawski’s journalist buddy, Murray Ryerson, asks her:
“ ‘What’s the real story for you here, Warshawski? Radbuka and Wiell? Or Durham and the Sommers family?’
“I frowned up at him. ‘They both are. That’s the problem. I can’t quite focus on either of them.’ ”
With those two deft strokes, Paretsky lets us know that she knows that Warshawski’s constant zooming around Chicago on foot or wheels, never stopping until she drops from exhaustion or hunger, is not just a distraction but an important part of this particular story, and that the tangled plot elements—possibly faked recovered Holocaust memories, historically vicious insurance fraud, the twisted ambitions of a black politician and a Swiss businessman—will eventually come together with a bang that lights up their darkest corners.
By the time that happens, 200 pages further on, we have also been allowed to see another side of Dr. Lotty Herschel, Warshawki’s raspy, much-loved friend. In alternating, first-person sections, Herschel tells about going to England from Germany just before World War II as part of the Kindertransport program that saved many children but also split up many families; about the cruel treatment of a jealous relative and the cool kindness of a British neighbor that led to her medical training; about the terrors of wartime life and love, and the scars they can leave.
Herschel’s memories are made necessary by the sudden appearance of a man calling himself Paul Radbuka, who claims kinship with Herschel and her friend Max Loewenthal. Sponsored and coached by Rhea Wiell, a fascinating, controversial psychologist, Radbuka stirs up a storm of avoided memories—and also precipitates several violent attacks.
The other strand of Paretsky’s story deals with black factory worker Aaron Sommers, whose life-insurance policy was apparently fraudulently cashed in a decade before his recent death. Lurking in the background here is a charismatic black alderman named Louis Durham and a suave Swiss businessman and his wealthy Italian wife, who now own the insurance company. Poor Ralph Devereux, the Ajax Insurance exec who took a bullet in the shoulder for love of Warshawski in her very first case, “Indemnity Only,” is caught in the middle once again, asked to risk job and limb to help her find the truth.
I do have a couple of quibbles about “Total Recall”: the way a radio obligingly blurts out relevant news updates several times too many, for example. And if a breakfast Spanish omelette at Warshawski’s favorite Lakeview eatery, the Belmont Diner, really costs $15 (including tip), she should probably consider switching to Denny’s.
But those are very small potatoes compared to the riches on tap here: several terrific stories; new insights into one of the genre’s most interesting character actors, Lotty Herschel; a wonderfully graphic virtual road map of Chicago’s shifting geography. Oh, and did I mention that Paretsky still writes with the kind of dazzling, diamond-hard clarity that can break your heart on every other page?
SOUTHTOWN, by Rick Riordan (Bantam Hardcover)
There’s a particularly heartbreaking moment early in Rick Riordan’s new Tres Navarre mystery when a veteran FBI agent named Sam Barrera shows up for work at the agency’s field office on East Houston St. in San Antonio. First, the guard at the door doesn’t seem to recognize him, then Sam can’t find his ID. And finally an older agent comes by, sees that Barrera is in trouble, and gently reminds him that he retired from the FBI 20 years ago.
Barrera’s deteriorating mental processes have a major effect on Navarre, the former UC Berkley literature professor who came back home to San Antonio to pursue a career as a private investigator four books ago (winning major awards and legions of loyal readers). Sam, who now barely manages to run his own detective agency by writing constant notes to himself, holds the key to a dangerous puzzle: why does a brilliant and cold-hearted man named Will Stirman, sent to prison for selling illegal Mexican immigrants as slaves and now on the loose after a bloody escape, seem so intent on taking revenge on Navarre’s boss, Erainya Manos, and her adopted 8-year-old son Jem who plays on a soccer team which Tres coaches?
“Southtown,” named for an old Latino neighborhood now rocketing upscale and leaving its own memories behind, is in danger of stumbling over a too-familiar genre gimmick: the villain with apparently limitless brains and financial resources. But it never falls, thanks to Riordan’s inherent fairness and imagination. He manages to make Stirman totally understandable in his rage against the people he blames for destroying his life
,
and by doing so turns him into a worthy opponent for the shrewd, sensitive Navarre.
IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER, by Julia Spencer-Fleming (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)
St. Martin’s annual Malice Domestic contest has promulgated some interesting mystery debuts in its 12-year history—Donna Andrews’s “Murder with Peacocks;” “The Doctor Digs a Grave,” by Robin Hathaway; “Simon Said,” by Sarah Schaber; and Susan Holter’s “Something to Kill For” among them. Julia Spencer-Fleming’s first novel is an especially worthy addition to that list, not only because it covers some familiar narrative territory in fresh ways but because it is so perfectly rooted in and shaped by its location—the upstate New York town of Millers Kill, in the Adirondack Mountains. When Clare Fergusson, a newly-appointed Episcopal priest, remarks to a local doctor how hard it is to believe that the murder of a young woman could happen in such a place, the doctor replies, “I’ve seen way too much to think we’re invulnerable just because we’re small. Small towns have the same evils that big cities do, just in smaller numbers. And instead of some anonymous stranger, the evil is always someone’s neighbor or husband or friend. That’s the hard part, that you can’t blame some ‘other’ when awful things happen. The ‘other’ is one of us.”
It’s this sense of community claustrophobia which hangs over Millers Kill and gives “In the Bleak Midwinter” so much paranoid power. Clare is a tough and resourceful woman, a former Army officer who has handled many stressful situations, but what happens in her new parish almost overwhelms her. First there’s an abandoned baby left out in the bone-chilling cold on her church doorstep. Then comes the discovery of the body of the young woman who was the child’s mother, and the growing knowledge that some members of her small, upscale congregation know more about both events than they’re telling her or the slightly thick but definitely attractive chief of police. In place of the witty dialogue which a less secure writer might serve up to indicate the growing bond between the married policeman and the feisty cleric, Spencer-Fleming is smart enough to leave spaces for our imaginations to fill.