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February 2007

January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
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December 2005
November 2005
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compiled by
Barbara Fister

NOTE: I have moved my notes on what I'm reading to my blog and to LibraryThing in case you're loking for them.

March 2007
Helene Tursten / THE TORSO
Karin Fossum / WHEN THE DEVIL HOLDS THE CANDLE
Jo Nesbo / THE DEVIL'S STAR
Couldn't make up my mind this month, so I'm going to include a roundup of several interesting Scandinavian mysteries. Tursten writes a procedural series with a female lead, Detective Inspector Huss. She's involved in a gruesome series of killings, apparently committed by someone with a taste for dissection. The investigation crosses borders, over to Denmark where the coffee's terrible and the sexual mores are shocking. Tursten somehow balances work-day procedural characteristics and family life with what could be a lurid thriller but does what Scandinavian fiction does best: develop characters within a social situation that raises interesting issues. Fossum takes a more subtle psychological approach, when two adolescents who engage in petty crime for kickes get in over their heads, falling afoul of a distsurbed woman and fatally injuring an infant in the course of a purse-snatching. Jo Nebso is the greatest suprise of the lot. The plot, concerning a serial killer who is drawing a devil's star around the city of Oslo, is a little silly, but the writing is terrific and the characters wonderfully three-dimensional. Kudos to the translators and to US and UK publishers who have enough faith in readers to bring this fascinating work to our shores.

February 2007
Matt Beynon Rees / THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM
If you want to give up on the Middle East, there seems to be plenty of reason to do so whenever you read the day's news. But if you want to understand the Palestinian experience, read this book. It will break your heart, but it will also give you hope. Omar Yussef is an unlikely hero - a crotchety middle-aged schoolteacher who tries to instill some knowledge of the world and critical thinking in his students, only to have them resort to the simpler answers provided by militants. When a Christian neighbor's home is shelled by Israelis, and he tries to get the Palestinian fighters who are using his rooftop to leave, he's charged with being a collaborator. Omar Yussef knows something's wrong, and he puts everything he values on the line to find out what really happened. This portrayal of a claustrophobic, dysfunctional world sheds light on the issues that you won't find in news accounts - which is why Rees, the former Bureau Chief for Time Magazine, turned from the black-and-white simplicities of journalism to the more nuanced language of fiction.

January 2007
Thomas Zigal / THE WHITE LEAGUE
A terrific book about a crimes of the past haunting the present - and more than one crime. Paul Blanchard, the well-to-do owner of a coffee business in New Orleans, is approached by a bigot with political ambitions who asks Blanchard to find financial support for his campaign from the members of the White League, a secretive racist organization from the past. If Blanchard refuses, the politician will expose his responsibility for an event that landed his chidhood friend in prison. It's daring to create a story around a main character as reluctant and flawed as Paul Blanchard, who isn't an action hero but is more devoted toto inaction and avoidance, but somehow Zigal pulls it off. This book has a wonderful sense of place, subtle character development, and wrenching ethical issues framed around true historical events. It's bound to be on my "best of the year" list.

December 2006
Dan Fesperman / A PRISONER OF GUANTANAMO
An FBI agent, fluent in Arabic and good at interrogation, has been put to work at Guantanamo, where he has been ordered to turn a blind eye to some of the interrogation techniques in use by other government entities that go against FBI standards. A soldier drowns and washes up on Cuban soil under mysterious circumstances and the agent is put in charge of the investigation. When a trio of spooks shows up, including an old friend, it seems there's something very strange going on, and seems connected to a mistake the agent made many years ago that put him between Cuban agents and US policy. Fascinating setting, strong characterizations - an all-around excellent book.

November 2006
Sara Gran / DOPE
A short, spare story set in 1950s New York with a winningly lost heroine named Joe Flannigan. She has shaken off her heroin habit, but still feels the pull. She's a conwoman and grifter who is hired to find a Barnard dropout for her parents - suburban parents who are unhappy about their "dope fiend" daughter's descent into a pulp fiction life. Joe knows her way around the places the girl might be, having been there herself. But there are twists and turns along the way, some that Joe should see coming but doesn't, because for all her mean-streets experience she can be fooled by people she wants to believe in. It has a nice noir feel, and a good sense of place. The ending is a shocker.

October 2006
Eric Stone / THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD
The author's background, as a journalist working in the Far East, pays off in this book in which an American writer based in Hong Kong agrees, reluctantly, to help a co-worker's brother who wants to free his prostitute girlfriend from the control of her pimp. Unfortunately, she works for a Russian mobster who isn't likely to do the right thing, or even the three-streets-down-and-around-the-corner from right thing. The setting is vibrant and authentic, moving from Macau to mainland China, from Hong Kong to Vladivostok, a tour of the colorful, sleezy, and violent back streets as our hero gets deeper and deeper in trouble. In some ways the narrator is a classic knight errant, in other ways just errant, but I like him, and I really like the setting, which is well done (with even the Russian swear words managing to be pretty authentic). There is some graphic violence in the book, but it's not gratuitous, and unfortunately isn't the product of a fevered imagination but is based on real events the author covered as a reporter.

September 2006
Don Winslow / THE WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE
Frank Machianno enjoys simple pleasures: cooking, Italian opera, helping his daughter get to medical school by working at several small businesses and selling bait on a San Diego Pier. But life hasn't always been so simple, and his past work - as a mafia hit man - comes back to make life complicated. Don Winslow's newest novel plays out on a much smaller scale than his ambitious depiction of the drug trade in his previous book, but the layered structure in which we figure out what parts of Frankie's past have led to his current predicament make for a compelling character study. Starting out with a slow pace that matches Frank's simple lifestyle, the book takes off when someone sets him up for a fall and, as we learn more of his past, the tension accelerates to high-tension finish.

August 2006
Arnaldur Indridason / JAR CITY
I don't usually review multiple books by the same author on this page, but I can't help myself this month. In JAR CITY, a man has been murdered and police find a strange note on his body. In the course of the investigation, they remain unsure of the meaning of the note, but they learn their victim was responsible for a violent rape - perhaps more than one. Meanwhile, Erlander, the lead detective, is coping with a pregnant daughter whose drug addiction has her in its grip. The title comes from the past practice of preserving human organs in jars for study or simply to satisfy macbre fascination. Now, something similar is going on: the DNA of every Icelandic citizen is collected and analyzed in a huge database that can help find genetic links that can cure diseases and solve crimes - or perhaps lead to them. A wonderful book by a tremendously talented author.

July 2006
Minette Walters / THE DEVIL'S FEATHER
Connie Burns knows evil firsthand. She reported on it from West Africa, and now is covering it Iraq. Man’s inhumanity is her beat, but one man in particular is an elusive subject. She believes this violent mercenary who hates women uses third world conflict as a cover for serial murder. She goes after the story when she spots him in Baghdad but he escapes. Soon after, she’s kidnapped and released three days later without visible harm. She can’t pursue the story any further. She’s too terrified. Accused of inventing her kidnapping for attention, she retreats to an isolated house in a bucolic English village where her defenses are no match for her fear. But a blunt-spoken woman farmer with no love for false convention helps her prepare for the mercenary’s return. In the process they learn Connie’s elderly landlady may have been confined in the same prison – one of deliberately-inflicted fear. Walters is an unusual writer - deeply interested in puzzles , curious about social issues, and able to probe deep into the psychology of her characters. This book is perhaps her best, an amazing book that explores the power of fear. As Connie Burns conducts her personal war on terror she learns how it works, both abroad and at home – and so does the reader.

June 2006
Peter Bowen / THE STICK GAME
A young man commits suicide and his mother wants to know why. Gabriel DuPre makes the connection between the boy and the campsite where he and his friends try to connect to their Indian traditions. A spring runs out of the rocks, and it is suspiciously clear - not home to any of the usual bugs and tiny critters. Could his suicide, and some of the birth defects and other problems in his community be connected to the huge Persephone mine? All the experts say no - but there's a lot of money involved. This is a terrific series. As always, the language is pitch perfect, the humor and seriousness mixed with a sure hand, and the characters are - real characters. If you haven't read Bowen yet, what are you waiting for?

May 2006
Bill Pronzini / SPOOK
A very enjoyable entry in the long-running Nameless Detective series. A delusional homeless man who talks to ghosts is murdered and workers at a nearby office who only knew him as "Spook" want to know who he was so they can put a name on his grave. The police are investigating it as a homicide, but they aren't getting very far. As Nameless and his two partners, testy young Tamara and a tightly wound newcomer named Jack Runyon, uncover Spook's haunted past they also inadvertantly identify his killer - and put themselves in danger. I must be mellowing; I've always been irrated when first person and third person are mixed and matched, but in this case it worked without a hitch. A good, solid story, well told.

April 2006
Arnaldur Indridason / SILENCE OF THE GRAVE
Though Scandinavians may enjoy a low crime rate, they have a high concern for human welfare and social justice that seems to have shaped this region's rich crime fiction tradition. Set in the author’s home of Reykjavik, and artfully translated from Icelandic by Bernard Scudder, this novel opens with a scene that's both shocking and matter-of-fact. A medical student at a children's birthday party notices an infant chewing on something that looks oddly familiar. Sure enough, it's a human bone, brought home by an adventurous elder sibling from a building site on the sprawling edges of the capital city. The police are called in to investigate, but have little to go on. The only conjecture they can make is that years ago there might have been a dwelling place nearby, thanks to a current bush that someone must have planted in the windswept and barren landscape. But as a physical anthropologist slowly uncovers the bones and the police try to find out who it might have been, another story is unfolding. It’s commonplace, unfortunately, and yet shocking in its raw violence. A bitter and twisted man marries a woman who has a disabled child. He moves them to an isolated place and proceeds to terrorize her with physical and emotional abuse. Though she tries to find a way out, she’s trapped, thanks to poverty, isolation, and indifference. The suspense lies in how the woman will survive from one day to the next - and whether it’s her body buried near the currant bushes or someone else’s. Gradually we realize her story, urgent though it is, actually lies in the past; we’re learning what happened in parallel with the police investigation. Though the story is bleak, its characters are hauntingly real and the narrative structure is exhilarating in its layered, nuanced excavation of the truth.

March 2006
Mo Hayder / THE DEVIL OF NANKING
Published first in the UK under the title TOKYO. An unusual book, weaving together the first-person stories of a man and a woman, one Chinese, one English who have little in common except they both have had their lives changed by the Japanese rape of Nanking, a historical moment of inhumanity that was little known in the West until Iris Chang published her book about it in 1997. The Chinese man in this novel kept a diary of the horrific events as he tried first to ignore the peril, then help his pregnant wife escape the city after the Japanese have occupied it and begun their slaughter. Years later, he has the only existing copy of a film that the Englishwoman wants to see. She travels to Japan, obessed with verifying something she read in a book about a particular horror, and tries to persuade the man, who now lives in Japan, to show her the film. He, in turn, asks her to help him expose the secret of an elderly Yakuza who takes a mysterious medicine to preserve his life, something she may have access to since becoming a hostess at a nightclub that he frequents. I found this a fascinating story, and though I worried it might exploit a truly dreadful event for the purposes of entertainment, I didn't find it manipulative or sensationalist. In fact, I suspect the author was so haunted by Iris Chang's book (the novel is dedicated to her) that she felt compelled to write about it in the form of crime fiction. The writing is compelling, and the two stories interleaved so that they come together well. Some of the images drawn from historical accounts of the Rape of Nanking are likely to stay with me for a long, long time.

February 2006
T. Jefferson Parker / THE FALLEN
Robbie Brownlaw is an San Diego homicide detective who is called in to investigate the apparent suicide of an investigator for the city's ethics commission. Given the city's ethics could use quite a lot of investigating, and that the deceased formerly worked for the SDPD Internal Affairs Division, he had plenty of enemies, and consequently there are plenty of reasons to suspect the suicide is a set-up. Brownlaw sets about systematically checking out every possible lead, learning along the way that the victim had a trove of blackmail material connecting powerbrokers to a high-priced prostitution ring. He's good at his job, but he has one advantage he hasn't revealed to anyone. A few years ago he was thrown from a sixth-floor window of a burning building by a disturbed man and barely survived; ever since he has had synesthesia, a neurological condition that makes sounds take on color and shape. This is an imaginative adaptation of an uncommon but well-documented bit of neurological arcana, cleverly adapted to a crime fiction setting. In Brownlaw's case, his synesthesia makes people's emotions, revealed in the sound of their voices, visible as colored shapes. For him, it acts as a crude sort of lie-detector. Robbie Brownlaw is a terrific character - a genuinely nice guy whose brush with death made him aware of what matters. In some ways it distances him from people who are caught up in chronic restlessness, always searching for something more, something better, and there's a touching loneliness about him at times. Knowing whether someone is lying, or frightened or sad doesn't necessarily mean Brownlaw can connect to them. But he's determined to solve the case in front of him, and watching him proceed, step by step, makes The Fallen both a solid police procedural and a fascinating character study.

January 2006
Lisa Cody / BUCKET NUT
This was something like! A great book with a great lead. Eva Wylie is a big lady with an even bigger heart who lives in an old trailer in a junkyard, where she and two dogs provide night security. She gets by, doing odd jobs for a Chinese businessman whose businesses aren't all on the up-and-up and whatever else comes her way, but her heart is in the theatre of showbiz wrestling. While moonlighting in a bar that suddenly errupts into a brawl, she rescues a singer who has fallen off the stage in a cloud of teargas and takes her home to recover. Eva has to adjust to the novelty of having a friend. But not for long, since her new friend is on the lam, one step ahead of a load of trouble. Threaded through the book is Eva's quest to be reunited with her sister, who was separated from her when they were young and in foster care. I love this character's narrative voice. She addresses the reader as if we're just having a good chin-wag: cocky, cheerful, funny, and oddly vulnerable. Liza Cody hits it spot-on. This one's going to be on my top ten for the year, and it's only January!

December 2005
Nicci French / CATCH ME WHEN I FALL
Holly Krauss is a brilliant inventor of successful retreat weekends for disengaged employees, a creative whirlwind of ideas, charming everyone who encounters her. But she rides her exuberance like a bicycle without brakes, and it can accelerate until she’s flying right over the top. One bad decision made at the start of the book leads to another. Before long, she owes the wrong people money, her business is in jeopardy, her husband is having an affair, and she keeps losing things: keys, papers, nail clippers - and possibly her mind. Told first from Holly’s unraveling perspective, then from that of her business partner and best friend Meg, who patiently does her best to put things back together, French's storyline, that wobbles artfully between farce and tragedy, is a craftily-constructed trompe l’oeil: an author in total control of her material, giving us first-hand experience of life out of control. I enjoyed this novel far more than an earlier one that I tried by this author, which seemed to use sexual obsession as its sole power source. Though the plot itself offers plenty of adrenaline-pounding moments, what’s most thrilling about this book is its sympathetic and genuine depiction of a woman with bipolar disorder and the effect it has on everyone who cares about her. I really thought this was brilliantly done.

November 2005
Denise Mina / FIELD OF BLOOD
Paddy Mehan is a young woman with a vocation: though she's only a lowly copyboy, she wants to be a journalist, even though nobody at the Glasgow daily where she works or in her conservative working-class Irish Catholic family offers her the slightest encouragement. In spite of it all, and in spite of typical teenage insecurities, she notices some inconsistencies in the police handling of a terrible local tragedy and begins to investigate. In a crime reminiscent of the Jamie Bulger case (the senseless murder of a toddler by two young boys that shocked the UK in the way the Columbine school shootings riveted attention in the US) the book opens with a similar scenario. For no apparent reason a toddler is taken by two boys to a remote place and killed. The police consider it a senseless act by two disturbed youngsters. But as Paddy looks deeper, this awful crime is not as inexplicable as it may seem. Mina is a fine writer who takes her time developing characters and the communities they are part of. The newsroom and Paddy's family - and their belief that the only way for her to lead a good and safe life is to marry a good Catholic boy as soon as possible - are brilliantly brought to life in all their complexity. And woven through the story is that of another Paddy Mehan, a man who twenty years earlier was falsely accused of a crime. In an afterword, Mina explains that this secondary story is based on a real case - and on her meeting the man who insisted all along that he was innocent and the victim of an elaborate conspiracy. She reports, "he wasn't prepared to accept that his life, like most uneventful lives was nothing but a series of comic mishaps and tragedies strung together ... it seemed as though he was insisting that God existed." In a way, this novel explores that urge to make meaning and the comfort we take in the shape and purpose of crime fiction, where wrongs are righted and justice triumphs. Through Paddy's investigation we know more about what led to the terrible events in the prologue, but because Mina is a fine writer with a probing imagination and respect for her readers and her material - they're still fundamentally incomprehensible.

October 2005
John Burdett / BANGKOK TATTOO
Another amazingly original novel, as poetic, exotic, hilarious, and engaging as the first in the series, BANGKOK 8.The narrator, a Buddhist policeman who works on the side in his mother's brothel for elderly farangs (foreigners) addresses the reader as he explains how things work in Thailand. Murder, as his entrepreneurial mother points out, is bad for business, and the particular murder that opens the book is difficult to tidy up since their most elegant working asset seems to have killed an American CIA agent. Sorting out what happened without creating a nasty international incident involves investigating Muslim moderates in the south, dealing with European drug smugglers, and following the trail of a talented if somewhat unhinged Japanes tattoo artist. Burdett is a wonderful stylist. A British drug smuggler is described as having a "shaved skull like a pink coconut that belongs at the end of a battering ram, a fat round face bursting with Neolithic fury, small eyes, ironmongery hanging from his pincushion ears, short and incredibly muscular arms and legs, a frown characteristic of the intellectually deprived, tattoos on both forearms screaming of his inextinquishable love for Mother (left forearm) and Denise (on the right, in indigo, from elbow to wrist), and puncture marks in all major veins" (99). If Dickens were reincarnated as a Buddhist in Thailand and took as his subject the economics and ironies of gender identities and the sex industry in a post-colonial world, he might write a book like this.

September 2005
Don Winslow / THE POWER OF THE DOG
This tangled set of interlocking stories examines the connections among money, drugs, and political power that makes the War on Drugs a much larger theatre of war than it might appear. We follow several characters from the 1970s into the 90s: a DEA agent who gets a friend killed and in a fit of remorse goes after the drug lords responsible, setting off unintended consequences; an Irish hitman from Hell's Kitchen who gets involved in an alliance with the Italian Mafia and, through them,covert operations run for the US government in Central America; a Sinaloan drug lord who has something of a conscience, but who is unable to do anything but sow destruction; a young, top-dollar call girl who crosses all of their paths sooner or later; and the one truly good person in the book - an activist bishop who doesn't quit smoking because he knows he'll be assassinated before long. Crossing the porous border between Mexico and the US, and the even more porous border between organized crime, drugs, and US foreign policy, this story is brutally violent. Though the carnage becomes numbing after a while I'm sure that's intentional - it's not gratuitous, it's filling in the blanks in the news accounts. Winslow is as angry here as John LeCarre in ABSOLUTE FRIENDS, and like that novel this book has its didactic moments. It's audacious and complex and deepens as it goes along, coming together in the end with a double-barreled climax. This is one of those books that some readers will find daunting for its length, its complexity, its violence, and its impassioned politics. But I thought it was stunning. This book will be on my "best of the year" list.

August 2005
Abigail Padgett / THE LAST BLUE PLATE SPECIAL
There are few writers as original and interesting as Abigail Padgett. Her Bo Bradley series, featuring a child protection worker who is bipolar, is refreshingly intelligent and impassioned. This sequel to BLUE (2001) features a strong, intelligent, slightly obnoxious social psychologist heroine named Blue, now partners (in every sense of the word) with the forensic psychologist Roxie, and they bring their different skills to bear on a new case. Powerful women are dying, all felled by the same sort of stroke, and Blue is certain the statisical odds are against it being coincidence. It's unusual to find an author willing to portray a heroine as scholarly and opinionated, full of passion and arcane knowledge, eccentric and a little prickly, but always with something intelligent to say. (In fact the Publisher's Weekly review when it was first published in 2002 says it will appeal only to a small niche audience: feminists. Grrr. At least Library Journal got it right, suggesting it's a book that belongs in all public libraries.) I'd love to read more from this author, but unfortunately this seems to be her most recently published book. Maybe we need more feminist acquisitions editors.

July 2005
Peter Bowen / STEWBALL
There's really nothing like the Gabriel DuPre mysteries. Though the plots are generally as hard to grasp as smoke, the metis characters are vivid and Bowen brings the Montana landscape to life with a unique narrative voice that is laconic, droll, and oddly poetic. This entry in the series, focused on high-stakes bush races, is one of the best. DuPre agrees to find out what happened to an old man named Badger and in the process enlists the help of one of his formidable daughters, this one a superb rider who develops an uncanny relationship with the talented race horse named for the horse in the ballad "who never drank water, but always drank wine." I'm not usually particular about reading series in order, but this may be a hard book to follow without already knowing the cast of characters. Best start with an earlier book in the series - but trust me, that's no hardship.

June 2005
Kris Nelscott / STONE CRIBS
Smokey Dalton, a black PI living in Chicago under a false name in 1970, is still trying to protect young Jimmy who walked into danger at the start of this excellent series, A DANGEROUS ROAD. Smokey is working for his wealthy but principled lover, trying to rehabilitate the slum housing she inherited. Here, he gets involved in more than one problem - a woman, pregnant after a rape, has gone to the wrong abortionist and is close to death. Her sister hires Smokey to find out who she went to so she can warn other women who may be desperate for abortions. In the process he has to find out who killed a friend, leading him into a part of the South Side controlled by gangs and the lawless police squad assigned to them. Tying it all together is the plight of children who live and die in terrible poverty. The "stone crib" of the title is both literal and figurative. Nelscott brings the time and place to life through the eyes of a deeply engaging narrator.

May 2005
Natsuo Kirino / OUT
Beautifully translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, this novel begins in a boxed lunch factory, where women workers on an assembly line put together ready-to-eat carryout meals under difficult conditions. Four women on the night shift become unexpected partners in crime when one of them impulsively murders her abusive husband. When Masako finds out what happened, she quickly volunteers to help her coworker dispose of the body--demonstrating the cool head, strong stomach, and quick thinking that she needs as the coverup sends out ripples of consequences. Each of the four women is in a bind: trapped in a distant relationship, caring for an elderly invalid, deep in debt--and all of them are desperate for a way out of their hopeless situations. Meanwhile someone is assaulting women on the night shift in the yard of the factory, a crook with a terrible secret in his past is angrered when he comes under suspicion of the murder, and a loan shark comes up with a new way to make money. As the women struggle to extricate themselves, they find things spinning out of control - "like riding downhill with no brakes" Masako says. "You stop, all right - when you crash." Kirino makes the everyday reality of these women very real. She has the psychological acuity of Ruth Rendell and the sociolgist's eye of Minette Walters - while being wholly original. Kirino is well-known in her own country; good for Kodansha and the talented Stephen Snyder for bringing her to our shores.

April 2005
Kevin Guilfoile / CAST OF SHADOWS
I actually read this back in January when the lovely folks at Mystery Scene Magazine sent it to me for review. It's an interesting book that plays with a "what if" scenario: What if people could choose to be not only organ donors, but DNA donors? In this near-future, cloning is a reproductive technique for parents who can't conceive. A doctor, whose daughter has been raped and murdered, is expert at this controversial new practice and so has become the target for groups opposed to it. When the police return his daughter's effects, unable to find her killer, a vial of evidence is inadvertently included and the doctor realizes he can use it to clone her killer. Though it all sounds outrageous, Guilfoile does a good job of making it believable, and continues to play with the theme by having a hot new multi-player game sweep the country, Shadow World, where people can lead complex double lives (and can pursue other players who may be killers in real life). Though there are touches of SF and horror (the clone makes for a spooky child) the story itself is solidly in the mystery/thriller genre, managing to be quite thoughtful about the issues and far less sensational than it sounds. Further evidence that a well-wrought mystery can treat a complex subject with intelligence and wit without stooping to exploitation.

March 2005
Jan Burke / BLOODLINES
The greatest strength of this book is the setting that brilliantly conveys the romance and excitement of the newsroom over several decades. A baby and its parents go missing the same night an ace reporter survives a savage beating and witnesses the odd burial of a car. Twenty years later, rookie reporter Irene Kelly is on the scene when the car is accidentally uncovered, along with the bones that might be the missing family. Woven throughout the book are stories of journalists learning the ropes and teaching others about the game. There's a scene when the presses in the basement start up and the floors start vibrating that was so good it raised the hair on the back of my arms. My only real criticism is that the elaborate plot itself seems less exciting than the setting. Because that aspect of the book is so well done, and because the journalists are so much more vivid than any other characters on the scene, detection takes a back seat to journalism.

February 2005
Con Lehane / WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND
Brian McNulty is a bartender with a deep sense of right and wrong, but not a lot of ambition. Sitting on the loading dock behind the midtown Manhattan hotel where he works, he watches a tugboat on the East River, thinking "I had a real talent for doing nothing. I was lulled into contentment by the gentle swaying and the warmth of the sun and the cool of the breeze." He doesn't get to practice his specialty for long. A body bobs up in the river, a friend from the old days, another old friend is suspected of the murder, and McNulty finds himself trying to figure out what happened. Worse yet, he's been promoted. Being a boss is hard for a union activist. As he tries to find out what happened to the dead friend, and whether a live friend was involved, Brian heads to Atlantic City and into his own past. Though the plot has plenty of twists and unexpected turns, it's McNulty who shines in this mystery, a narrator with a great voice - funny, rueful, self-deprecating, and original. What he lacks in ambition he makes up for in loyalty and working-class solidarity. And though generally McNulty goes for straight up, humor back, here and there you'll find passages with real if understated emotional clout. One of them is a story told by his cab-driving Eritrean friend Ntango describing how as a boy he went looking for his father after he was taken away by soldiers. McNulty muses "I imagined my own father gone, and my search for him; I imagined Kevin [his son] searching the city streets and back alleys, looking for me. During most of my waking time I hid from myself the knowledge that in places all over the world children searched for their parents along dirt roads." In a way, the whole story is about searching for lost friends and old principles and coming to terms with unpleasant but unavoidable truths. I missed the Upper West Side geography of Con's first book, BEWARE THE SOLITARY DRINKER, since I once lived on the same block as Oscar's Bar, but loved having another chance to hang out with Brian McNulty. He's one of a kind.

January 2005
John Sanford / HIDDEN PREY
The most recent in the Lucas Davenport series with impossible-to-remember titles. Lucas has mellowed in middle age, and so have the author's more sensational plot lines that made Minneapolis the Serial Killer Capital of the World for a while. In this book, a Russian from a freighter docked in Duluth goes to an assigned meeting in an isolated bit of the docks area and is shot dead. All of this is told from the point of view of a street person who finds herself in danger as a witness to the murder - and makes for a very confusing crime scene. The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (I love Minnesota's name for crime busters - so confident that we always get our man) calls in the guy who cleans up messes for the governor. Here the mess is an international incident and there are investigators from Russia and the FBI involved. What they don't know is that a sleeper cell of old-school commies is stirring to life to deal with the crisis. Sanford does a great job of telling a story that hinges on the history of the Iron Range, where in the thrities a radical left movement was quite active. And he understands how a young man might get caught up in the excitement of the cloak-and-dagger adventure, especially if he has a fondness for daggers. It's a wild concept, but it really worked for me. It helps that Sanford gets Minnesota speech patterns so right. His dialogue is a map of the state.

December 2004
Chris Haslam / TWELVE STEP FANDANGO
A British ex-pat in Spain leads an easy-going life dealing just enough drugs to keep himself and his unpleasant German girlfriend in coke. Opportunity blows the door off its hinges when an old friend, who isn't really a friend, turns up with a badly infected leg and a life-altering stash of cocaine hidden in his motorbike. But when Martin tries to seize the opportunity, quite a few nasty people take exception. Or as Martin puts it: "I had been buying, selling, and ingesting the stuff for the last five years, and it seemed all the trouble I had never experienced had simply been paid into a high-interest hassle account that had matured last Friday night with Yvan's arrival." Though Martin is an implausible hero - there's not much about him that's likeable - his voice is so self-deprecating and droll it's impossible not to root for him as each step takes him deeper into trouble. He simply can't reconcile his lifestyle preferences with the costs associated: "I could graze with the sheep or run with the wolves. I wanted to graze with the wolves." Though that's not an option, watching Martin try is surprisingly entertaining.

November 2004
John D. MacDonald / THE DEEP BLUE GOODBYE
The first book in the Travis McGee series, and a wonderful introduction to a character who is both totally original and foundational to contemporary U.S. crime fiction. McGee is he original "off the grid" hero who is tough but sensitive, a tomcat with principles, attuned to nature and allergic to city life, credit cards, and fakery of all kinds. It's interesting that he came on the scene when he did--a product of the Organization Man generation who refused to play along, predating the big 60s dropout by a generation. Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING, was published just one year before this novel; they are in the same, grand tradition of millennial ecology. In one passage, for example, imagining a stolen jewel hidden in a ball of wax inside a gatepost, McGee falls into one of his metaphysical fugue states: "Bugs would eat the wax. Chaw the old canvas. And one day there would be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through glass. Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came..." Here, McGee faces a strange sort of doppelganger, a villain as attuned to nature as he is, strong and fast and aware, but without a moral bone in his body. And, as McGee will do again and again, he acts on behalf of a woman in trouble. Not all of the books in this series are set in Florida, but you can't take the Florida out of McGee. That natural environment on the edge of land and of the modern world is part of who he is. There's a huge streak of nostalgia in McGee. You find some of it also in Randy Wayne White and James W. Hall, who also try to stick to the roads less traveled, to remember the pleasures of the simple, natural life in a world gone wrong. Say what you will: when Travis McGee came on the scene, MacDonald got it right.

October 2004
David Rosenfelt / FIRST DEGREE
New Jersey lawyer Andy Carpenter is funny, he's charming, he tells the story in present tense but is magically not annoying. He has a nice dog and a girlfriend who is set up to take the fall for a murder. He has to get her off. Pure fun, well paced and with a nice balance of humor and suspense. Okay, so this lawyer is a little naive when he doesn't see the setup coming, and an essential clue is Fedexed direct from Lady Luck, but still Rosenfelt can be counted on for a rollicking good time.

September 2004
Jeff Lindsay / DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER
What an amazing book! Inventive and funny and touching, this takes the tired old serial killer formula and makes it something very new - told from the p.o.v. of a totally disarming serial killer (no pun intended). The narrator is a man with a dark self, one that is compelled for reasons Dexter doesn't understand but accepts, to torture and dismember people every now and then. Fortunately, Dexter had a smart and loving foster father who saw the monster inside him and turned him into a more or less socially responsible monster who only kills people who deserve it. None of this would work for a moment without the oddball humor of Dexter's voice and the fact that he knows how empty and peculiar he is. Although he doesn't really have feelings, he does want to look after his foster sister, a hapless Miami PD cop. Things get disturbing when Dexter finds someone else killing people in a weirdly familiar way. As if there's another Dexter out there, teasing him, wanting to play, but not playing by his foster father's rules. There's something incredibly touching about this guy's situation - his own self-awareness of difference, of being outside the human experience, able to pass for human but utterly baffled by emotions he doesn't have. The pop-psych explanation, while it works in the context of the story, is total nonsense - but I'll suspend my usual skepticism just because the book really works in spite of itself, and the writing is both funny and eerily, wonderfully poetic. I suspect this will be on my top ten this year.

August 2004
Laura Lippman / BY A SPIDER'S THREAD
A Tess Monaghan story, and a very satisfying one. An Orthodox Jewish man's wife takes off with their three children and he can't understand why. Tess can, pretty quickly after meeting him. He's stuffy, strict, and doesn't appear to have been paying much attention to the stifling life his wife has been leading. But things are all much more complicated. This stuffy old client is a well-rounded character, his fleeing wife has some very mixed up motives, and their little boy Isaac is the real heart of the story. What a wonderfully nuanced cast of characters! The plot is well done, but it's working out what's really up with these people that fascinated me. We get one clue after another, carefully laid down in just the right order, and each page seems to bring another insight. Lippman has a knack for leaving it up to the reader to decide how to judge these complicated people, and never stoops to manipulating the reader's feelings just for effect.

July 2004
Peter Moore Smith / RAVELING
I read this book when it first was published in 2000, and was so riveted from the first page I missed my subway stop and came to somewhere in Queens. Rereading it, the same thing happened (only I wasn't on the subway) - it felt like getting drunk, or falling in love. Just - wow! The narration is amazing, but unusual. The first person narrator actually says he's omniscient, and he often describes events he can't possibly have witnessed, sometimes even assuming his brother's voice. It's hard to tell, also, how much to believe, given the narrator is hospitalized early on in the story, diagnosed as schizophrenic. It doesn't add to his credibility that, when he was nine years old and his younger sister disappeared without a trace, that he spent a certain amount of time not speaking, but crawling around on his hands and knees, a growling "wolfboy." This disturbed kid, now an adult, insists his brother killed his sister, even after the meds start to calm his delusional state and he stops hearing the light fixtures talking to him. His psychologist (who needs therapy badly herself) wonders about his claims and begins to piece together what really happened to the little girl whose disappearance years ago caused this family to unravel. Some of it's pretty brutal, much of it is wrenchingly sad, a lot of it is surprisingly funny, and all of it is brilliantly, beautifully written. One of the most original, most involving stories I've ever read.

June 2004
Jess Walter / OVER TUMBLED GRAVES
I'm posting this earlier in the month than usual, but can't resist raving about this terrific novel. The book opens as Detective Caroline Mabry confronts a man in a Spokane city park during a botched drug bust. The buyer pushes the dealer off the bridge where they're meeting and Caroline is forced to choose: attempt to save the dealer or go after the man who coolly pushed the teenaged dealer to his death. Soon after, the first body of a murdered hooker is found on the riverbank and the hunt for the man on the bridge kicks into high gear. This beautifully written novel turns the conventions of serial killer fiction on its head. Rather than creating typical cliffhanger suspense and gore (what the book jacket, with its breathless summary and blurb from James Patterson, seems to promise - yawn) it's really about our own fascination with crime, our hunger to enjoy the thrill of brushing close to some imaginary face of evil - and about the sad, sordid reality behind it. It features two wonderfully-drawn police protagonists and a pair of dueling profilers whose competition reveals just how absurd most of our assumptions about serial homicides are. The ending, if not a total surprise to the veteran mystery reader, is a terrific wrap-up for this premise. It's no surprise that the author, a journalist as well as a gifted novelist, covered a serial killing in Spokane and knows up close and personal that our fascination with the drama of these crimes overshadows the sad reality of the victims, women whose marginal status makes them invisible until enough of them die to become a hot story. I can't recommend this book strongly enough. As close to perfection as it gets.

May 2004
William Kent Krueger / BLOOD HOLLOW
The newest in the Cork O'Connor series. A young woman goes missing, leaving a party on her snowmobile into an oncoming storm, and Cork pushes his search too far, right into the leading edge of a northwoods blizzard. That's the start to a story that crosses seasons and the country in search of what happened to the girl. A troubled ex-boyfriend is arrested for her murder. While fleeing the law, the young Ojibwe turns to his people's traditions and goes on a vision quest and the surprising vision he gets is of Jesus, wearing jeans, an old flannel shirt, and Minnetonka moccasins. When legions of the hopeful show up expecting miracles from him, the murder investigation gets complicated. This is a rich and surprising story that subtly explores questions of loyalty and of faith within a well-wrought plot, one in which at the end you're both surprised and kicking yourself for not seeing the end coming. Always a strong series, this entry takes some risks and handles them deftly.

April 2004
Elmore Leonard / GLITZ
A re-read of one of my favorites of all time. Vincent Mora is bringing in groceries when a slimeball demands his wallet. Instead of handing it over or playing the tough guy, Vincent wearily explains the obvious. You think I'd drive a car like that? It's a cop car, asshole. Now go lean on it. Not smart; he ends up shot, with red wine and pasta sauce all over him. That's just for starters. Add a beautiful Puerto Rican hooker, some goombas at an Atlantic City casino, a bad-tempered parrot, an ex-con nutcase who wants to look Vincent in the eye when he shoots him, a touch of garlic and simmer gently. It's got what Leonard does best: a weird but quite believable bad guy, vivid settings, a cast of criminals who are treated with generosity even though they're, well, pretty bad, a great female love interest, a sexy, cool, intelligent, funny, totally likeable hero who doesn't indulge in angst, but from time to time thinks about the slimeball who tried to mug him. Vincent ponders ways he could have handled it that wouldn't end up with shooting and killing the would-be mugger. A tough guy who's really bothered when he takes a life. I like that. Lots of humor, dialogue that's absolutely right, a great sense of timing, a plot that keeps twisting ... you can't do better than this.

March 2004
Ed Dee / THE CON MAN'S DAUGHTER
This is a terrific read, with totally convincing settings, a twisty plot, and characters who are so real they cast shadows. Eddie Dunne is an NYPD cop who left the force after too many questions were raised during an IAB investigation, spent some lost years working for a Russian mobster and drinking too much, and is finally getting his life together in his hometown of Yonkers, just north of the Bronx. The past comes back with a vengeance when his adult daughter is abducted, apparently by crooks surprised during a break-in, but Eddie knows his daughter's fate is tied up with his own past mistakes. He goes back to Brighton Beach to find out whether the Mafiya is behind the abduction. The NYPD and FBI get involved, hoping to use this kidnapping to score some points against the highly-organized crime being conducted by some highly scary people. Eddie can play rough, too, and half the tension is in wondering how far he'll go, especially since his six-year-old granddaughter, who loves him unconditionally, stands to lose everything. Dee handles this explosive material like a seasoned member of the bomb squad, never playing on the reader's emotions, cool and competent, leaving all the worry up to us. Apart from the author's ability to write about crime and law enforcement with utter confidence - Dee was a twenty-year veteran of the NYPD and knows his stuff - he gets the Brighton Beach setting totally right, even to contemporary Russian slang and a scene in M & I International, the best Russian deli this side of the Carpathians, that's so authentic it'll make you hungry. Highly recommended.

February 2004
Ian Rankin / A QUESTION OF BLOOD
A terrific book in a series that goes from strength to strength. A man goes into a school and shoots three students and himself. Why? Rebus and Siobhan assist in the investigation that cuts close to the bone. Rebus, like the shooter, is familiar with the grueling emotional toll taken by membership in the SAS. Even more close to home--it turns out one of the murdered students is related to him. To make things even more complicated, a man who'd been stalking Siobhan has been burned to death in his apartment; that same night Rebus turns up in A&E with burned hands. It's all a great juggling act, with lots of characters and complexities, but it all works beautifully.

January 2004
David Corbett / DONE FOR A DIME
A highly original, beautifully written, and daringly structured novel. I'm used to good mysteries taking clichés and making them fresh, but in this case there's not one cliché in sight. This story, set in a depressed, ramshackle community south of the San Francisco bay, starts with the murder of a musician. The first third of the book follows the murder investigation as two cops bring in the most obvious suspects and try to nail it down. Then we abruptly move to another crime-in-the-making, a shady character who is using a young firebug (connected to the murder in the first section) to set the place alight for some even shadier clients. The third part deals with the aftermath, as the scam spins out of control, the sinister dealings of some local business types are matched in cynicism by the feds and the brass, and a detective tries to put it all together even though the only person who's willing to help is the criminal who lined it up and has fallen out with his crew. The writing is superb, the characters deeply realized, and though the time frame is only two days, it's worked out with amazing texture and depth. Exhilarating, draining, sad, and brilliant. Though it's hardly a feel-good story, when I read a book this good, it makes me hopeful for the industry. No high concept, no tricks, no gimmicks, just honest, solid writing, straight from the heart.

December 2003
Greg Rucka / A FISTFUL OF RAIN
The description doesn't sound like much: a member of an alternative rock group that has suddenly rocketed to the big time is abruptly let go because either the lead singer is jealous of her talent or her drinking has gotten so out of control the lead is doing her a favor. She goes back home to Portland and finds a lot of trouble waiting. Some of it is from a tangled past hinted at in a prologue and much of it is new and scary. Someone abducts her at gunpoint, takes her clothes, then mysteriously releases her. Someone puts photos of her, naked as a jaybird, on the Internet. A threatening masked man seems to have the ability to walk into her highly alarmed house at will. And the father she hates has just got released from the joint, after serving time for killing her mother, and wants a reconciliation. What makes this a great book is that Rucka somehow gets this first-person, female voice absolutely right and makes her world come alive. This was a page-turner for me, the kind you wish you could slow down and savor, it's that good.

November 2003
Robert M. Eversz / KILLING PAPARAZZI
Nina Zero rocks! In this book, the second in a series (after SHOOTING ELVIS), Nina gets out of prison and needs to keep her nose clean or her tough PO will violate her. (Typical of this book, the parole officer is a complex and likeable tough lady who isn't on stage a lot, but when she's there, she's real.) Nina makes an arranged marriage and finds herself attracted to the guy in spite of herself--and then he's murdered. Even minor characters in this book are drawn in indelible originality. But most of all--Nina Zero is a knock-out character! Smart, scarred by life, funny as hell, fast on her feet, full of feeling and hard as nails. I know next time someone wonders whether men can write convincing female characters, Eversz's Nina Zero will be my Exhibit A.

October 2003
Rebecca Pawel. DEATH OF A NATIONALIST
Unlike many historical mysteries, there's little time spent establishing the historical credentials of the story. We see the place much as the characters do, not as the past or as an exotic setting that needs explanation, just as their world--and it's one that's badly out of whack. Set in Spain, shortly after the defeat of Republicans by the Falangists and right before the German invasion of Poland, it concerns a member of the Guardia Civil who wants to know who murdered a colleague and left him lying dead in the street. At first he assumes a Republican woman found at the scene was responsible, and she's summarily executed, but a child's school notebook has been left by the murdered man's body and it raises doubts. Meanwhile, a Republican, on the run, wants revenge for the death of the executed woman. The child and her teacher are caught in the middle of a game of cat and mouse. Pawel describes this tormented, chaotic world, where people are starving and living in constant fear, in simple prose so understated it makes the dreadful events she describes that much more striking. She's generous to characters on both sides, who are thoroughly caught up in opposing beliefs about the other and blindly devoted to their own causes, but on the whole decent people in a terribly dysfunctional world.

September 2003
Laura Lippman / EVERY SECRET THING
A real knock-out of a read. The plot involves a terrible murder of a baby by two children who years later are released from prison. And when another child disappears they're natural suspects. What's really fine about this book is the development of the characters who are drawn with astonishing depth. This isn't a thrill ride, it takes its time laying things out--but I couldn't put it down. A thought-provoking exploration of an unspeakably sad crime that is never explicitly described. In fact, working out what actually happened is something the reader has to do gradually because in this book, as in real life, it's not all that clear - and even then the awfulness is in who committed the murder and why and what effect it has had on everyone since, not in the drama of the moment. The author's strengths are firing on all cylinders.

August 2003
John Baker / DEATH MINUS ZERO
Excellent. Part of the Sam Turner series. Geordie is one of my favorite characters of all time. I was nervous about reading this, having had the head's up that the bad guy, Norman, was a scary dude. Well, he is, but not in a horror story way. So many books make monsters out of the villains, but this guy's kind of dumb and very matter of fact about his decisions. He's not too bright (for example, tries to set a murder up to look like a suicide after shooting the guy in the back of the head. Uh, Norm--?) He's totally incapable of having feelings for anyone else. And he doesn't recognize the violence in himself; he always thinks his moves are justified. I usually hate it when thrillers interleave the killer's POV with the chase, but this time it works, in part because Norman's self perceptions are so out of odds with everyone else's. And because he's so genuine.

July 2003
Sam Reaves. DOOLEY'S BACK
This book opens with a bang--and it just gets better. The protagonist is a cop who left the Chicago PD two days after turning in his badge. A bottom dweller who killed his wife got cut loose when the evidence that nailed him is ruled inadmissible. When he's killed, everyone's pretty sure it's Dooley's work, and while they can't exactly blame him, he has to disappear. Eight years later, he's back and can't seem to avoid trouble. His former CPD partner is deep in his own nightmare, one that started after a similar personal tragedy--and the story that unfolds is told in a deceptively simple style that lucidly lays out personal relationships with enormous depth and subtlety and power. It reminds me a little of early Elmore Leonard crime novels; Reaves has a similar knack for dialog that carries a lot of punch and authenticity, and the wise guys are not larger than life, but considerably smaller, another touch of authenticity. An added bonus is a very real Chicago--I can't think when I've read a book that does a better job of conveying the flavor of the city north of the ship canal without any travelogue stuff. It's just there. Add some terrific moral issues and a love interest that is shaded and subtle and sad and satisfying and you have an excellent piece of crime fiction. This one's going on my top ten for the year. I'm tempted to read it again--in which case it might be on the list twice!

June 2003
Lawrence Block / SMALL TOWN
A post-9/11, post-apocalyptic reflection on a city much loved by the author and the myriad connections that weave together New Yorkers--at least those who live in Manhattan below 110th and have pretty good incomes. It also involves a lot of sex that is extravagantly pornographic. There is s lot of burlesque about writing and publishing that is full of inside jokes and details that could bore people who aren't interested. And while there is some clever plotting, the story isn't really classifiable as mystery--because we know who did it--or thriller, because it moves in a leisurely, circular way around the crimes, establishing plot points almost entirely as coincidences. So this is not your standard mystery. What it is, I think, is a fetish. A weird collection of stray things picked up and pounded into a shape that coheres, the product of an obsessive need to create order out of chaos, to shape the broken bits of that shattered city into something fabulous. And everyone's doing it! One character is obsessed with sex, making it her art form; another is a former police commissioner who drops a shot at being the next mayor when he becomes totally caught up in this case and stops returning calls or meeting his obligations; a third is a man crazed with loss who feels a need to paint his beloved city with fire and blood. This theme is played with variations over and over.A fairly minor character in this densely-populated novel is an old man, an outsider artist who creates naive art from cast-off rubbish. One of his pieces is based on a large wire spool into which found objects are driven: an art dealer reflects, "she couldn't hope to guess what had prompted a wild-eyed little black man in Brooklyn to stab knives and forks into the wooden spool, to pound nails and screws and miscellaneous bits of hardware into it, to screw in a brass doorstop here, the wooden knobs from a chest of drawers there. Why he had done it--and, most mysterious of all, how had he managed in the process to create not a mad jumble, not a discordant conglomeration of junk, but an artifact of surpassing beauty?" That's a précis of the book--a strange mélange of obsession and love, a bizarre concoction of characters and plot lines and glimpses of New York all brought together in a layered and wry and funny and fond story that does none of the things a mystery should do--except bring a strange sort of order out of chaos.