Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

This is a book unlike any other I’ve reviewed, or perhaps even read. Written by an “anti-Mafia prosecutor in Bari,” according to the book’s back cover, this award-winning novel has become the basis for an Italian television series.

Gianrico Carofiglio’s debut novel features Bari attorney Guido Guerrieri, a successful thirty-eight-year-old who accepts, if not with comfort, the Italian legal system that includes client retainers that don’t show up as income, biased judges, and malevolent police. He’s adept at getting his clients off, although he acknowledges to himself the pain of the victims as his guilty clients walk free.

As the book opens his marriage has just unraveled, with his wife of several years demanding a legal separation.  He has become “a mediocrity,” in her words, and her leaving sends Guerrieri into a year-long bout of insomnia,  panic attacks, and depression.  On the day of their separation, an African woman walks into his office with a retainer for him to use to free her friend, a Senegalese living legally in Italy.  Abdou Thiam, who makes his living selling counterfeit watches, handbags, and such on the Bari beaches, is accused of abducting and killing a nine-year-old Italian boy visiting his grandparents.

Circumstantially, the case appears strong.  The defendant admits to knowing the boy, saying they were friends.  He has a photo of the child in his apartment, has children’s books in the apartment although he has no child of his own, and has no alibi for the day of the crime.  Although the prosecutor doesn’t include it in his charge against Thiam, there’s a strong presumption of pedophilia underlying his case.

There are two types of trials in Italy, the shortened procedure or a trial in the Assize Court.  If a public prosecutor believes he has sufficient cause for a trial, he can go before a judge and request a shortened procedure in which the defendant is tried by a single judge who then decides his guilt or innocence.  No witnesses are called and usually the only evidence presented is that offered by the prosecution.  The advantage of this type of trial to the prosecution and the court is its brevity; it is much less time-consuming than a full trial at the Assize.  The advantage for the defendant, if he chooses it, is that his willingness for a speedy trial usually results in a significantly reduced sentence, as opposed to what he may expect if found guilty in the Assize.

But Abdou Thiam says that he is innocent and refuses to have the shortened procedure, insisting that he wants a full trial. In Italy that consists of a six-person jury and two judges.  The novel doesn’t explain what is needed for a guilty verdict.  Does it have to be unanimous or can it be a majority?  What if the jury votes one way but the judges vote another?

Involuntary Witness is definitely an off-the-beaten-track mystery, but if I explain why I will give away the ending. The book is almost more of a novel featuring a crime than a crime novel.  It gives the reader a deep look into the attorney’s life and the way the court system works, but it leaves unanswered many questions I wish it had addressed.  Since the book was written for an Italian audience, it assumes that its readers are familiar with that country’s trial system.  I would have appreciated a note somewhere in the novel explaining this and several other aspects of the courts.  But it’s a fascinating book regardless.

Finding information about Gianrico Carofiglio is not easy if you don’t read Italian. There is a very brief biography of him at Amazon.com.

It’s difficult for an author to write a trilogy featuring a former police detective that goes from just after World War I to the middle of World War II and make it believable. After all, the question facing authors as to whether or not to have their characters age is a hard one.  But in the third book in this series featuring former Scotland Yard inspector John Madden, Rennie Airth shows that it can be done, and done convincingly.

The Dead of Winter opens with a prologue. It’s 1940 in Paris, and Maurice Sobel, a French Jew, is getting ready to leave his country, one step ahead of the invading Nazis. His wife and sons have already reached America, but Sobel wants and needs to close his business and bring some capital with him to the United States.  He converts the money he receives for his business into easy-to-carry diamonds he purchased from a Dutch dealer working in Paris.

Two nights before his planned leave-taking he receives a phone call from a friend who knows that Sobel is getting ready to leave France, asking if he would be willing to take two Polish refugees along with him to Portugal.  Sobel agrees, and on the night he receives the diamonds and is doing last-minute preparations prior to departure, he hears his doorbell ring.  Sobel opens the door, expecting to see his traveling companions, and it is the last thing he does.  His throat is encircled by a thin wire, and Sobel drops to the floor, dead.

Now it’s November 1944, and the war has been going on for more than five years in Europe. Men too old to fight have been given jobs on the Home Front.  One of these air wardens, whose job it is to see that the blackout in London is strictly observed, is walking his beat when he sees a young woman in front of him carrying a basket and a bundle.  She seems apprehensive but refuses his offer to walk with her and help her carry the items, saying her destination is just around the corner.  When he turns that same corner less than a minute later, he stumbles over her; her slight body is twisted, and she has a broken neck.

Scotland Yard is almost ready to call the murder one of the too-frequent acts of violence that have come to the city since the beginning of the war.  The only reason the Yard hesitates is that the girl, Rosa Nowak, is identified as a land girl, a farm helper, who is working for former Inspector John Madden of the Yard.

Rosa came to England as a refugee, having lost her parents and siblings to the Nazis, and her quiet demeanor and inexpressible sadness had touched Madden’s family.  Madden wants to make certain that Scotland Yard is doing all it can to find her killer.  When a prostitute comes forward several days later to say she may have seen the man who killed Rosa, the police are anxious to get a complete description of the man.  But before they can call her in for a second interview, her landlady calls the Yard to tell them that she has been killed, garrotted.

Other murders follow, and Scotland Yard fears it has a paid assassin on its hands, perhaps the first that the country has seen.

Rennie Airth’s trilogy seamlessly takes the reader from World War I England to World War II England.   Years have gone by, but John Madden is as interesting a character as he was in the first novel.

You can read more about Rennie Airth at his web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Copacabana. The word brings up pictures of a beautiful beach, bikini-clad bodies, and Brazil’s national drink, the caipirinha.  So where do police corruption and murder fit into this picture?

Inspector Espinoza, chief of the 12th precinct in the city, has seen three policemen, one in his own precinct, killed within a few days.  Strangely enough, there doesn’t seem to be a big effort on the part of their fellow officers to find the killer or killers.  Espinoza decides to form a small task force with three of his subordinates to look into the deaths further, but they are stymied by the lack of cooperation they’re receiving.  It’s obvious there’s a coverup going on, but why?

More investigation turns up the fact that all three men were married but had mistresses.  Each lived a double life, one at home with his wife and children, the others without them in a nearly empty apartment.  Plus each of their mistresses had her own apartment.  What were they hiding?

Then two of the policemen’s mistresses are murdered. Across the street from the third mistress’s apartment, a woman named Serena sees what she thinks is a third murder.  She sees a woman directly opposite her window arguing with someone, a purse flying out the widow, almost immediately followed by the woman’s body.    She’s sees a police car and an ambulance at the scene a few minutes later, but when she questions the building’s doorman the next morning, he tells a different tale.  The woman was alone, there was no purse, and the woman threw herself out of the window.  Case closed.

Upset at the differences between what she thinks she saw and what the doorman tells her, Serena tells the story to her husband, a high official in the government, but he tells her it’s her imagination getting the best of her.   And even if it happened the way she tells it, it’s not her business.  If the police are satisfied, that’s the end of it.

But Serena isn’t satisfied, so she calls Inspector Espinoza to tell him her story. And that leads to even more complications.

The reader has been led to believe that it was the third mistress who went out the window.  But, in fact, it was not.   The third mistress, Celeste, in a later  interview with the police acknowledges that she and the other women knew their lovers were taking “tips,” or bribes, to supplement their salaries.  She doesn’t know the details, but since she’s the only one of the mistresses alive, she’s sure she’s next on the killer’s list.  Then she disappears.

Garcia-Roza paints a picture of a city with a culture of corruption. It’s easy for murders, even of policemen, to be only superficially investigated, and as for their mistresses, who really cares?  Perhaps it’s easy for Espinoza to get so involved with his police work since his personal life is rather empty.  Married and divorced, with a son who lives with his mother in the United States, he has a relationship with a woman that seems to go no further than a night of sex when it’s convenient for both of them.   He’s a man who’s cold inside.

You can read more about Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza at this web site.

It’s not too often that I laugh at the last line of a mystery novel, but One Good Turn made me do just that. This book somehow is mysterious, funny, and touching all at the same time, not an easy feat.

The story opens with a man, who calls himself Ray, driving in Edinburgh during the city’s yearly Fringe Festival. He’s lost in the maze of unfamiliar streets and crowds, and as he tries to avoid hitting a pedestrian standing in the middle of the road, a Honda rear-ends his car.  From that car comes a huge man wielding a baseball bat, and the next thing Ray knows he’s down on the ground with the bat poised for another strike at him.  But just then someone throws something at Ray’s attacker, throwing him to the ground as well.  A crowd gathers, the police arrive, and a kind of pandemonium ensues.  When the smoke clears, so to speak, Ray and the man who threw the missile are taken away in one ambulance, and the attacker gets into his Honda and leaves the scene.

The only reliable witness, the only person to have taken down the Honda’s license plate, is Jackson Brodie, a former army officer, policeman, and now a private detective. Jackson’s main problem is that he doesn’t need to work, having inherited two million pounds, but despite having a beautiful home in France and an enchanting girlfriend who’s acting in a Fringe play, he’s bored.  Then, later that same day, as he’s walking down a dark street near where his girlfriend’s play will be performed, he’s set upon by the “Honda man,” as Jackson thinks of him, and the man’s vicious dog.

While all this is going on, the reader meets Gloria Hatter.  She’s married to Graham, whose sleazy construction firm is known throughout Scotland by the motto Real Homes for Real People.  Unhappily married, with two ungrateful grown children who don’t appear to like either of their parents, Gloria spends her time agonizing over the tragic fates that befall innocent people and animals.  Thinking of leaving her loveless marriage, Gloria has been siphoning money from their joint bank account, five hundred pounds daily, with an eye toward leaving Graham and the crookedness he represents behind her.  And then she gets a call.  Graham is in a coma, having been brought to a hospital by the prostitute he’d been in bed with, a Russian dominatrix complete with handcuffs and chains.

How, you may ask, do all these disparate characters get together?  What can possibly be the connection between the mysterious Ray, aka Paul Bradley; Martin Canning, aka Alex Blake, the man who threw what turns out to be his laptop at the Honda man; Jackson Brodie, middle-aged millionaire who still want to be a policeman; Julia, the actress whose rehearsals keep getting longer and longer; and Gloria Hatter, meek housewife/embezzler.

The way Kate Atkinson ties everything together is a marvel.  Everything seems illogical at first–did I mention that there are a lot of Russian prostitutes/house cleaners running around this novel–but it all makes sense at the end.  Although the story takes place over only a few days, there’s enough plot in it for a month.  This is a truly enjoyable novel, even for readers who don’t ordinarily enjoy mysteries.

You can read more about Kate Atkinson at her web site.

Dexter Bolzjak was a Pittsburgh high school ice hockey phenom. College scouts came to see him play in goal, and the night of the state championship was his golden opportunity to shine.  The score was zero-zero in the third period when slap, slap, slap–three goals slid past Bolzjak in the final eight minutes.  That was the end of his dream of a college scholarship, but his night only got worse from that point on.

Years later, when we meet Bolzjak, his mother is long gone; he hasn’t spoken to his father, who lives in the same neighborhood as he does, for six years; he works in a vegetable market separating good onions from bad ones; and he lives in a windowless basement in the house of his only friend.  Not much of a life.

Michael Ayoob’s first novel takes the reader to some very, very dark places. The night he lost the game was the night Bolzjak realized that his parents were splitting up and the night that he was abducted by four masked men and sodomized.  Not surprisingly, his life went downhill from then on.

While Bolzjak is eating lunch one day at a restaurant, in walks Lou Kashon, part-owner of a Pittsburgh food warehouse.  With bloodshot eyes and filthy clothes, Kashon doesn’t look like a man who has either self-respect or money.  But he lays a $100 bill in front of Bolzjak and walks out.  The next day Bolzjak sees him again, and this time Kashon tells him to come by his house–he’s got a job for him.

Bolzjak already has two jobs, to his way of thinking.  Number 2 is his job at the veggie warehouse; number 1 is building a shelter of straw, sticks, and bricks to keep himself from remembering the night of his attack and its aftermath.

And the job Kashon wants Boljzak to take is anything but simple. He tells Bolzjak that years ago, just before World War II, he was in love with a local girl and she with him.  They were engaged, and she was going to wait for him to come home from overseas.  The local girl didn’t stay local for long, though, and she didn’t wait.  She changed her name from Agnes Zabrowski to Mercy Carnahan and became one of Hollywood’s most famous movie stars.  She was glamorous, sexy, mysterious–all the things that made an actress a star in the 1940s and ’50s.  And then she walked off a stage and disappeared, and no one has heard from her or seen her since.  Certainly not Lou Kashon.

Now he wants Bolzjak to find Mercy Carnahan. Although Kashon lives in a house with holes in the floors, filthy dishes in the sink, and dead cats in the freezer, he also has a drawer full of money in his bedroom.  Find Mercy Carnahan, he tells Bolzjak, and it’s all yours.

In Search of Mercy is a novel of self-discovery, as well as a mystery.  It’s the story of Dexter Bolzjak trying to come to terms with why his life has gone so far off the rails.  Has he been using the horrific events of the championship night as an excuse to do the things he’s done–drop out of school, estrange himself from his father, lose a relationship because of the nightmares that have lingered for years and for which he refuses to get help?  Or is all that simply beyond his ability to change?

Michael Ayoob’s novel is a voyage that is dark, dark, dark. It takes the reader into places that are truly uncomfortable, not only for his hero but for other characters in the book as well.  But it’s well worth the trip.  In Search of Mercy won the 2009 Private Eye Writers of America award for best first private eye novel.

You can read more about Michael Ayoob at his web site.

Reinventing oneself is not an easy thing to do. It’s not easy to leave behind your friends, family, home, and career and start over again.  But sometimes it has to be done.

Adam Kindred has just gone through what he believes is the most difficult time in his life. But it’s about to get worse, much worse.

A brilliant climatologist at an American university who has just invented a revolutionary cloud chamber that might aid drought-stricken countries, he has a one-night stand with a graduate student that wrecks his marriage and his career.  Unhappy and ashamed, he leaves the United States for England, the country of his birth, and has a job interview at an English college that he feels has gone very well.

He stops for a quick dinner at an Italian restaurant and is seated near another solitary diner.  They exchange some casual words and the other man leaves.  A few minutes later, as Kindred gets up to go, he sees that the other man left a transparent folder behind, filled with papers.

On the front of the folder is a business card with the man’s name and two addresses–one is obviously his office, so the other must be his home.  On the spur of the moment Kindred decides he’ll deliver the folder to the man’s home.   If  only he had  brought it to the man’s office instead, how differently things would have turned out.

When he arrives at the building and goes to the apartment, he’s surprised to find the door open.  Getting no response to his greeting, Kindred walks into the apartment and finds the man, a Dr. Wang, on his bed, bleeding from a knife wound.  The place has been trashed, obviously searched, with cabinet drawers open and clothes strewn all around.

Kindred wants to call the emergency services number, but Wang tells him to pull out the knife.  Kindred does so, and Wang dies.  As the frightened Kindred leaves the bedroom to find a phone, he hears the door from the balcony into the bedroom open–someone is there, and it’s a good bet it’s the murderer.  Kindred flees the building, but he’s all too aware that his signature is on the guest book he had to sign to enter the building and his fingerprints are on the knife he dropped in his haste to find a telephone.

The next day, after debating with himself all night long about calling the police and telling them what happened, he glimpses a newspaper headline:  ADAM KINDRED–WANTED. SUSPICION OF MURDER. That’s when Kindred decides he has to reinvent himself, leave his past behind, find the man who killed Dr. Wang, and clear his own name.

There’s a lot of plot in Ordinary Thunderstorms. There’s Adam Kindred’s step-by-step reinvention of himself; there’s the man who has been hired to find Kindred, kill him, and regain the briefcase that belonged to Dr. Wang; there’s the company executive whose firm is about to launch a drug that will cure asthma in children but who is having his own medical and emotional issues; and there’s the attractive policewoman who can’t understand Scotland Yard’s decision to release, without explanation, a man they arrested for gun possession.  This novel will keep you reading and guessing until the end.

William Boyd is the author of more than a dozen books, some mysteries and some not.  You can read more about him at his web site.

Once a Barnburner, always a Barnburner.  That’s how Conway Sax got hooked into the murder business.

In Purgatory Chasm Sax is a recovering alcoholic, and the Barnburners were his group within Alcoholics Anonymous. They formed a tight-knit group within the larger one, and if one Barnburner was in trouble, the others helped.  But some were able to be of more help than others.

When Tander Phigg needs help getting his Mercedes back from the auto mechanic who is supposedly repairing it, he calls on Sax.  Phigg tells Sax that he brought his car to Das Motorenwerk more than a year earlier, gave the mechanic $3500 as a down payment for repairs, but now he can’t get either his car or his money back.

Since Sax had been a NASCAR driver and had worked on Phigg’s car years before, he’s persuaded to try to get either the car or the money returned.  But his visit to Motorenwerk isn’t exactly what he expected–first the owner laughs at his request, then he’s hit so hard on the head that when he wakes up he’s several hundred feet from the garage, on the ground, with no memory of how he got there.

Sax’s life hasn’t been easy. His father, also an alcoholic, left the family in Minnesota when Sax was eleven, but the boy persuaded his mother to let him go to New York to live with his father several years later.  In retrospect, Sax thinks, it probably wasn’t the smartest move he ever made, literally or figuratively.

Time has passed since then, time during which Sax threw away his racing career, as his father had done before him, with alcohol and ended up in a Massachusetts prison for manslaughter.  He’s still on parole, with eleven months left to serve.

On the plus side, Sax is rehabbing a house to sell it, has a sharp girlfriend with a funny eleven-year-old daughter, and is still sober.  On the minus side, he hasn’t seen his father in years, not since he spotted him panhandling at a tollboth and left him standing there.

Sax can’t seem to stay out of trouble, so it’s not much of a surprise that he goes back to Phigg to tell him what happened at Motorenwerk and to get more of the story out of him.  But the surprise is that Phigg is hanging by the neck in a shack behind his semi-built house, hanging as in dead.

Sax’s motives are all over the place. He wants to get the car/money back, even after Phigg’s death, because he said he would.  When Phigg’s son, Trey, returns from Vietnam with a wife and child, he wants to get the money to give to Trey.  And when Sax’s father turns up after years of no contact, he wants to help keep the old man sober.

Steve Ulfelder, himself an amateur race car driver and co-owner of a company that builds race cars, is a natural storyteller. He’s written for trade journals and newspapers, but Purgatory Chasm is his first novel.  It’s a look into the tough men (and women) who drive around tracks at breakneck speeds, looking for their moment of glory.  This is a tough read about people who lead tough lives but whose humanity and caring will touch you as they try, with some successes and some failures, to straighten out their lives.

You can read more about Steve Ulfelder at his web site.

A man and his fiancee are driving in her hometown in New York state.  A sudden tornado-like storm whips his car off the road and down a ravine.  When he regains consciousness, he’s surrounded by police and emergency technicians, and he frantically asks them to help him find his fiancee.  But she’s nowhere to be found.

That’s the hook of On Borrowed Time by David Rosenfelt. Richard Kilmer, the novel’s protagonist, is distraught and insists on going back to his fiancee’s parents’ house, where he and Jen have just spent four days, on the chance that she somehow got out of his car and was able to make her way back there.

But when the police take him there the house looks slightly different, older and less well-kept, than the house Richard and Jen left only an hour earlier.  And the woman who answers the door says that she’s never seen Richard before and that her husband has been dead for many years.  When Richard asks about her daughter, she slaps him across the face and slams the door.

Richard returns to his apartment in New York City, still reeling from the accident.  He talks to his two closest friends with whom he and Jen spent several evenings, but they say they never met her.  He goes to the art gallery she and a friend owned, and there’s a different business in that location.  What is going on?

Richard is a free-lance investigative journalist, so he decides to make his next story the search for Jen. After the story appears, he’s contacted by hundreds of cranks–some say they know where Jen is, some claim to be Jen, and some tell him they could get in touch with Jen on the “other side.”

But one night Richard gets a call that is very believable. A woman phones to say she thinks she knows who Jen is and can prove it.  She sends a photo to Richard on his computer, and when he opens his e-mail he’s looking at a photo of his fiancee.

The woman who called Richard, Allison Tynes, claims that her identical twin sister has been missing for several months.  Allie flies to New York from Wisconsin, and when Richard meets her she is, in fact, the double of his missing fiancee.  Together they decide to find out if Julie Tynes and Jennifer Ryan are, or were, one and the same person.

The chapters narrated by Richard  are interspersed with chapters narrated by someone called The Stone.  He is the mastermind of the plot involving Richard, Jen, and a mysterious drug that will make him billions.  But who is he, and why is he having Richard followed and his apartment bugged?

David Rosenfelt has written a real page-turner, a mystery with a touch of medical science fiction built in.  I don’t know how much of what turns out to be the core of the plot is “science” or “fiction,” but it certainly makes for a thrilling ride.

You can read more about David Rosenfelt at his web site.

After a wonderful trip to Greece two summers ago, I’ve become interested in all things Greek, both ancient and modern.  The Pericles Commission has only increased my interest.

Gary Corby’s first novel tells the story of how democracy came to Athens. The world’s first democratic city state didn’t have a smooth beginning.  In fact, it took 130 years from the first written constitution (about 590 b.c.e.) until the time that Athens finally became a one citizen (read male), one vote democracy (461 b.c.e.).

The novels opens in 461 with the murder of Ephialtes, an Athenian lawmaker who has just successfully pushed through reforms to bring democracy to the city-state. Three days after the laws are passed, he is shot by an arrow and his body falls in front of Nicolaos, son of Sophroniscus; apparently there were no last names in ancient Greece.

Nicolaos, a young man just out of his army training, isn’t certain what he wants to do with his life, but he is sure he doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, a sculptor. When Ephialtes’ friend, the renowned politician and orator Pericles, comes upon the scene a few moments later and offers Nicolaos a commission to find the person or persons responsible for the crime and who are thus imperiling the new democracy, Nico accepts.  To revert to traditional rule, Nico thinks, would mean he would have no chance  to rise in society and he would be “doomed” to be an apprentice to his father.  He would do anything, try anything, to avoid that.

Pericles believes that the Council of the Areopagus conspired to kill Ephialtes.  The only problem is that his own father, Xanthippus, is a member of that Council.  There is no government police force or investigative body in Athens; the family or friends of the victim must investigate the crime. And there are no jails, either; the punishment is execution, fine, or exile.

Ephialtes was married but also had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter. His hetaera, Euterpe, is a voluptuous, sensual woman who attracts every man she meets, but it is her daughter Diotima, a priestess-in-training to the Goddess Artemis the Huntress, who is intriguing to Nico.  She is as determined as he is to find the murderer of her father.

Gary Corby’s first novel is a delightful piece of writing. His greatest skill, I think, is incorporating the history of Athens, which probably isn’t well known to most readers outside Greece, into the story.  His explanations of marriage customs, funerary details, and daily life more than two thousand years ago are clear and fascinating.  Things that are so commonplace now, at least in the Western world, were unthinkable then–one person, one vote; marriage by choice, not via law; education for men and women;  all those things were unknown at the time of The Pericles Commission.

Corby gives a brief history of Athens at the beginning of the book, followed by a list of the characters and whether they are historical figures or not.  So skillful is he in his writing that without that list a reader would think that all the characters actually lived in ancient Greece.

You can read more about Gary Corby at his web site.

It’s not exactly two for the price of one, but it is two books that should be read consecutively.

The Butcher’s Boy won the Edgar in 1983 for Best First Novel, a wise decision on the part of the judges. Now, in his nineteenth novel, Thomas Perry finishes the story of the Butcher’s Boy, whose true name we never learn, and Elizabeth Waring, an attorney and researcher with the Department of Justice.

The Butcher’s Boy has been killing people since he was sixteen, under the tutelage of The Butcher, real name Eddie Mastrewski.  The Boy had been orphaned with no close relatives to take him in, so Mastrewski, a neighbor, unofficially adopted him and taught him two trades.  One was Mastrewski’s official trade, that of a butcher who owned his own shop, and the other a paid assassin for the Mafia.  The second one was more monetarily rewarding.

After blowing up the truck of a labor union man who is suspicious of the way his union’s pension fund is being handled, the B.B. is on his way to murder a U.S. senator when he is set upon by two muggers in a dark alley. He kills them both and then successfully kills the senator, completing the job he was hired for, but his face shows bruises and cuts made by the muggers.  That apparently sets off a wave of concern at the higher levels of the Mafia that he may be attracting too much attention, and a contract is put out on the B.B.

Elizabeth Waring, who has a desk job at the Department of Justice, is the only person there who begins to see a pattern in a number of suspicious death notices that pass through her desk every day. She sets off to investigate the labor union official’s death but is pulled off that job before she can accomplish anything.  She’s sent to investigate the death of the senator, which she originally resents, but then she comes to believe there is a connection between the two deaths.  But she’s the only one.

In The Informant, ten years have passed since we last saw the B.B. and Elizabeth Waring. It’s not giving away the ending of The Butcher’s Boy to say he wasn’t captured–if he had been, there would have been no Informant. The B.B., who is now calling himself Michael Schaeffer, has been living a quiet life in England when he’s spotted by two killers who are sent by the Mafia to assassinate the B.B. and his wife.  He decides he has to return to the States and take out the men who ordered his death.

Schaeffer’s killing of the first man sets off a Mafia meeting in Phoenix, where the second man he wants to kill is asking his fellow Cosa Nostra bosses to band together to kill the B.B. He gets the agreement he wants but is killed within an hour by Schaeffer.  When his body is discovered, the other bosses are even more determined in their quest to eliminate the B.B. from their lives once and for all.

In the meantime, Elizabeth Waring is fighting a losing battle with her supervisor to follow the clues leading to the B.B.  Frustrated, she decides to act first and ask permission later, certain that she can find the B.B. and get him to turn informer because she believes he won’t be able to outrun the Mob.

These two books are fascinating journeys into the lives and minds of two very different people. The chapters alternate between the Butcher’s Boy and Waring, and following their thoughts and plans makes for exciting reading.  And the ending of The Informant ties everything together believably.

You can read more about Thomas Perry at his web site.

In 1994 Lawrence Block was named a Grand Master, the highest award given by the Mystery Writers of America. Agatha Christie was the first recipient, and others include John D. MacDonald, John LeCarre, Sue Grafton, Graham Greene, and this year’s recipient, Sara Paretsky.  Pretty good company to be keeping.

Block’s latest book is A Drop of the Hard Stuff, the seventeenth in the Scudder series.  It takes the reader back to the first year of Matt Scudder’s hard-won sobriety.

Scudder was a New York City policeman until a bullet he shot while chasing a suspect ricocheted off a wall and killed a little girl. Shortly after that, Scudder left his wife, two sons, and the police department.  He moved into a single room in a Manhattan hotel and tried to drink himself to death.

The first few books in the series take place during the time Scudder is drinking heavily and experiencing blackouts.  Eventually, after a number of tries, he pulls himself together and joins Alcoholics Anonymous and lives “one day at a time,” as they say in A.A.  At this point in time he has been sober for years.  A Drop of the Hard Stuff begins when Scudder and his friend Mick Ballou are talking over old times.

Scudder tells the story of his meeting up with a boyhood chum from The Bronx, Jack Ellery.  As Scudder sort of drifted into becoming a policeman, Ellery sort of drifted into becoming a criminal.  Ellery had been drinking for many years, and as he told Scudder, he never got into trouble when he was sober, only when he was drunk.  He’d been imprisoned several times but never did major time.

Now Ellery is out of jail, and he’s achieving sobriety through A.A.  One of the steps in the program is making amends, going to the people you hurt or injured when you were an alcoholic and asking them how you can make it right. Ellery is jumping ahead to the Eighth Step before he’s done all the previous steps, trying to make amends, and he has a list of all the people he’s wronged.  But the responses from those people aren’t what he’d hoped, and one of them wants him dead.

Block is an incredible writer.  I was caught from page one.  He has a way with dialogue that makes the reader think she’s/he’s part of the conversation in the book.  And some of his sentences simply jump out of the page at you.  Scudder, in remembering a new suit he’d bought years ago when he was still married:  “I’d bought the suit to impress…my wife had admired that suit, and so had my girlfriend.”

The Matt Scudder series needs to be begun, if not from the first novel, at least as close to the beginning as possible.  Otherwise the struggles Scudder has with alcohol can’t come across in a meaningful way, and his victory over drink won’t be as important to you as it should be.  You’ll find yourself rooting for him to overcome his dependence on alcohol, angry when he slips, and cheering him on when he succeeds.  But you know that every day is a struggle for him, and seeing it from the beginning heightens its impact.

Lawrence Block has written several other series as well as stand-alone novels, books for writers, and a memoir.  He’s a truly gifted author in every genre, but I like his Matthew Scudder books the best.

You can read more about Lawrence Block at his web site.

Imagine you’re in Spain, writing a travel book about Barcelona that is a follow-up to your guide on Madrid.  You get a phone call from the New York Police Department saying that your sister has been found dead in your apartment and that you need to come home to identify her body.

Claudia has always been in trouble, has been a drug addict for years, so although it’s sad that she’s died so young it’s not really surprising.  The surprise comes when the detective brings you to the city morgue and you look at the body and say, “That woman isn’t my sister….I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

That’s how The Damage Done opens. The older sister, Lily Moore, has always been the responsible one, the one who took charge after their father’s sudden death one Christmas, their mother’s descent into alcoholism and her suicide one New Year’s Eve.  But now Lily is bewildered, and things are spiraling out of control all around her.

Her former fiancee, wealthy hotel magnate Martin Sklar, still hasn’t given up pursuing her and is putting pressure on her to return to New York permanently and marry him.  Her sister’s neighbor, Sarah Lyons, is taking an extraordinary interest in Claudia’s disappearance.  The two detectives assigned to the case aren’t sure it’s not simply an accidental death, but they can’t explain why the woman found in the apartment introduced herself to the superintendent, who knew Claudia, as Claudia’s cousin, and to Sarah Lyons, who didn’t know Claudia, as Claudia Moore herself.

Lily tries to follow the trail that her sister left behind. It takes her to the apartment of her sister’s friend, a Pakistani man named Tariq, whom Lily has always suspected was involved in Claudia’s drug use; while she’s there, Tariq’s girlfriend attacks her.  Then Martin tells Lily that Claudia had been in touch with him, asking him for money for another attempt at rehab, but when he agreed and told her to pick up his check, she never showed.  And then there’s the mysterious woman from Hong Kong who spoke to the police about Claudia but now seems to have disappeared.

Hilary Davidson has created a very believable heroine in Lily Moore. At the beginning of the novel she appears to be the opposite of her sister, a very successful, put-together professional woman who has endured a life that would have destroyed someone weaker, as it appeared to have done to her sister.  But the more one reads, the more Lily’s own demons come out.

She’s still dealing with the deaths of her parents–her beloved father, who perhaps wasn’t quite as wonderful as she remembers; her emotionally disturbed mother, who used to lock Lily and Claudia in a closet for hours to protect them from some imagined harm; her off-again, on-again feelings for her former fiancee, whose business practices she abhors but whose touch still arouses her.

The supporting characters are well-drawn too–Jesse, a gay photographer, Lily’s best friend; the two police detectives; Tariq, a very successful businessman who travels with bodyguards; the ex-fiancee Martin; and Martin’s son Ridley, a sullen teenager with emotional problems that his father will not see.  This is a debut worthy of the three awards for which it has been nominated.

You can read more about Hilary Davidson at her web site.

It’s a familiar beginning to a crime story. A woman, divorced from an emotionally and physically abusive husband, believes that she and her daughter are free of him.  Nevertheless, she continues to take steps to distance herself from him, changing her job and moving to a different apartment.  But still he finds her.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino starts off with this premise. But within a few pages it changes direction.  When Yasuko Hanaoka’s former husband, Shinji Togashi, finds her and her daughter, he says he wants to reconcile with them.  Having gone through this routine with him before, Yasuko refuses to discuss it and gives him money, not for the first time, to get him to leave.

Before he goes he tries to talk to his teenage stepdaughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.  Infuriated, he begins hitting her, and Yasuko tries to pull him away.  The daughter then tries to come to her mother’s rescue and, even more angry, Togashi starts punching both of them.  Desperate to protect herself and her daughter, Yasuko grabs the cord that heats the kotatsu table (it’s a heated table, apparently very common in Japan) and strangles him from behind.  Togashi is dead.

Frightened, Yasuko starts toward the phone to call the police and confess her crime when there’s a knock on her door.  Her neighbor, a man she barely knows or has spoken to, appears there to say he heard a commotion and came over to see if Yasuko and Misato are all right.  When he sees the body on the floor, it’s obvious to him what has happened.

Ishigami, the neighbor who is almost always referred to only by his last name, is a brilliant mathematician teaching below his abilities at a local high school. He’s a man proud of his logical mind, and realizing that Yasuko and her daughter were protecting themselves and that the death was more accidental than deliberate, Ishigami devises a plan to help them get rid of the body.

He has only one condition, that the mother and daughter must follow his advice to the letter. When the police find out that Togashi is missing or dead, they will certainly question his ex-wife, Ishigami tells the mother and daughter, so they need to do exactly what he tells them to avoid suspicion.

And the police do come. Detective Kusanagi doesn’t exactly suspect Yasuko, but there’s something odd in her low-key yet completely alibied story that doesn’t quite ring true for him.  He goes for some help to an old friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who happens to  have been a classmate of Ishigami, and who is known as Detective Galileo as an acknowledgement both of his knowledge of physics and his assistance to the Tokyo police in previous cases.

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most famous mystery writers, and one can see why in this excellent novel. The plot is skillful and the characters believable.  The translation appears flawless, with the characters speaking so naturally that the reader doesn’t realize that the words were originally in another language.

Many of Higashino’s books have been made into films or television programs.  He doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web site, but you can read a brief biography about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keigo_Higashino.

A foster child without a name or birthdate.  A man who may or may not have fathered a child.  A missing young woman. They all come together in this fast-paced, hard-boiled mystery by Thomas Kaufman.

Willis Gidney, a name he made up himself, has had a tough life. Abandoned by his parents as an infant, he spent years in foster homes and state institutions that might have been found between the pages of a Charles Dickens novel.  The only thing that saved him from a life of crime was the intervention of a Washington, D.C. police captain.

During his first ten years Willis learned to lie, steal, play truant, and fight.  During his years with Captain Shadrack Davies, he learned to love books, slowly developed a moral code, and found a career for himself.

Now Willis is trying to make it as a private detective on the tough streets of our capital; Willis thinks its initials stand for Dysfunctional City. He’s approached by an old friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, to find a young woman Jackson may or may not have fathered twenty-five years ago.

Willis manages to track down the woman whom Jackson says is the mother of the young woman he’s looking for.  Collette Andrews, the woman who had a one-night affair with Steps Jackson, is now cool, beautiful, married to a wealthy State Department diplomat, and refusing to acknowledge that she’s the mother of Bobbie Jackson.  She demands that Willis leave her house.  A few hours later she calls Willis, saying she needs to talk to him, but when he arrives at her house the police are there and she’s dead.  And Willis is under arrest.

There’s a lot of plot in this debut novel. The agri conglomerates come in for bashing, as do corrupt congressmen, suspect political donations, inept or uncaring welfare officials, and mysterious “abandoned” city rental properties that are using extraordinary amounts of electricity each month.

And then there are the mobsters who first try to cajole, then threaten and beat up Willis, and finally try to force him off the road.  He’s used to the hard-knock life, but this is getting out of hand.

On the positive side, there’s a new romantic interest in his life. Lillian McClellan, cyber sleuth, wears her hair in dreads, has dimples, and smells of sandalwood.  Who could resist?  Willis tries for a while, but it’s a lost cause; he’s smitten.

Thomas Kaufman is an Emmy award-winning cinematographer, and I’m guessing he likes short, quick shots because that’s how he writes.  It can get a bit confusing, as Drink the Tea goes back and forth from Willis’ childhood to the present and back again, all in the same chapter.   It can be frustrating when you’re trying to find the name of a character who appeared in a scene several chapters back or trying to remember just how a particular minor character is related to Willis.

But that’s a small quibble about a very well-written, fast-moving novel.  It is not, however, a book for those who like cozies; it’s more a book that will make you shake your head about the cruelties people inflict on each other. Drink the Tea won the PWA’s (Private Eye Writers of America) award for the Best First Private Eye Novel in 2010.

You can read more about Thomas Kaufman at his web site.

Talk about your dysfunctional families.  The Mackeys of the Liberties section of Dublin put most other families to shame.

Faithful Place is the street, ill-named as it may be, where the Mackeys live.  The protagonist, Francis (Frank) Mackey has managed to escape his family and his childhood home, but all the other members of his family either still live there or haven’t gone far.

Frank is now a member of Dublin’s Undercover Squad, divorced, and the father of a nine-year-old daughter. Both his sisters are married with homes of their own.  But Frank’s brothers, Shay and Kevin, are still unmarried and live with their parents although they are well into their thirties.  And the Mackeys’ overbearing mother and alcoholic father are still at each other’s throats as they were all the years their children were growing up.

What got Frank out of Liberties was his plan, as a nineteen-year-old, to run away with his sweetheart Rosie Daly.  Very much in love and forbidden by Rosie’s father to see each other, Rosie suggests boarding the ferry to England and getting jobs there.  It takes them several months to save the required money, but finally all the plans are in place.  Frank is waiting for Rosie at midnight on the specified night, but she never shows.  And she’s never seen again.

Still desperate to escape his family, Frank gets as far as the other side of Dublin and becomes a member of the police force.  And for twenty-two years he has kept his distance from his family, his only contact being his younger sister Jackie.  As the story opens, Jackie has contacted Frank with incredible news–Rosie’s suitcase was found in a derelict house on Faithful Place, hidden behind the fireplace.  And Rosie’s suitcase turns out to be a modern-day Pandora’s box.  Secrets that have been hidden for years burst into the open when it is discovered.

Faithful Place is not a part of Dublin on the tourist route. It’s changing a bit as the new economy brings Yuppies into the area, but by and large it’s still the same families living there who have lived there for generations.  The men work in factories or are on the dole; the lucky ones work on the line at Guinness.  There’s very much a sense of not getting above yourself, not trying to be better than your parents or your peers.  If you do that, you’re definitely under suspicion.

Frank has moved out and on successfully, and that doesn’t sit right with his family. His older brother Shay is resentful, dreaming of the day that he will buy the bicycle shop he’s worked in for years, but he’s still living in the flat above his parents.  His younger brother Kevin seems younger than his years, never venturing far from home.

Tana French paints a devastating portrait of a neighborhood and a people stuck in place. The same arguments, the same rivalries, the same unhappiness exist more than two decades after Frank has left home.  It’s no wonder he didn’t want his young daughter to even know of the existence of this family.  And he’s furious when he finds out that his sister Jackie and his ex-wife have been secretly bringing his daughter to Faithful Place to visit his family.  Ms. French’s portraits of a family and a community coming apart is vivid and frightening.

Strangely, Tana French’s web site is three years out of date.  But you can read more about her at http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-french-tana.asp.