Review by New York Times Review
HISTORICAL mysteries often convey a sense of yearning for people and places irretrievably lost in time. That feeling surfaced in Mark Mills's haunting first novel, "Amagansett," as a lyrical lament for a Long Island fishing community whose traditional way of life was doomed by the booming prosperity of postwar America. Although a keen sense of loss and longing also suffuses Mills's second novel, THE SAVAGE GARDEN (Putnam, $24.95), the youth of its protagonist and the thrill of his exploits as an amateur sleuth keep depression at bay in this romantic and gracefully executed literary puzzle. Adam Strickland is drifting toward a degree in art history at Cambridge University in 1958 when his mentor comes up with a fascinating thesis topic and the funds to pursue it. Adam is to spend two weeks as the guest of the aged Francesca Docci at her villa in the Tuscan hills, studying a Renaissance garden built by a Florentine banker in memory of his wife, who died in 1548 at the age of 25. With precise references to well-known Renaissance paintings and famous gardens like Bomarzo and the Boboli, Mills creates an enchanting vision of wooded glades and grottoes, temples and reflecting pools, amphitheaters and classical statues of "petrified gods, goddesses and nymphs playing out their troubled stories on this leafy stage." But Adam is struck by certain discordant elements in the iconography of the garden - including a rather provocative marble statue of the banker's wife - and it's only by consulting sources like Ovid and Dante that he's able to unlock the garden's sad and ultimately shocking secrets. Mark Mills Although the aesthetic clues unearthed by Adam's classical scholarship are the most elegant aspect of the novel's design, the allegory of the Renaissance garden isn't the only mystery to be solved. As he did in "Amagansett," Mills uses a suspicious death as a way of examining the scars of war that never heal in a tight-knit community. Here on the estate, it's the murder of the elder Docci son and heir, ostensibly shot in the last days of the war by German soldiers occupying the villa, but a source of deep curiosity to Adam because he hears conflicting accounts of it from everyone in the household. Struggling to keep his head in this seductively drawn company of educated and refined landowners, Adam applies his academic approach to the tantalizing mystery and, at no small cost to his own ego, eventually solves it. But in the process this naïve young man also learns more than any outsider needs to know about the desperate measures families will adopt to survive the wounds of war. Playing the hero in a crime novel is a tough job at the best of times, but that professional burden falls especially hard on lawmen in western mysteries who have taken up environmental causes. In FREE FIRE (Putnam, $24.95), Joe Pickett, the Wyoming game warden who normally gives chase to cattle rustlers, out-of-season hunters and bug-eyed wilderness survivalists in the rugged outdoor novels of C. J. Box, is entrusted with nothing less than the well-being of Yellowstone National Park. Not even the governor grasps the magnitude of the threat to its natural resources when he dispatches Joe to investigate the bizarre case of a man who got away with killing four people because the murders were committed on a patch of ground beyond the legal jurisdiction of three states and, given a loophole in the law, federal prosecutors as well. "When I think of crime committed out-of-doors, I think of Joe Pickett," the governor says. So do we. And Joe doesn't let us down, leading us on an exhilarating tour of the park that covers every natural wonder, from showy Old Faithful to secret thermal springs spewing microbes, found nowhere else on earth, that may have great scientific and commercial value. But Box reaches too far with a convoluted plot about the environmental threat of "bio-mining" for these rare microbes, a subject that taxes his expository skills and undercuts Joe's greater value as a guide to nature in the raw. Hugh Davoren, the narrator of Neil McMahon's noir western thriller, LONE CREEK (HarperCollins, $24.95), admits that "wanting the old ways to stay was backward, selfish and above all futile." But that doesn't stop this cowboy existentialist from playing judge, jury and executioner when he discovers two shotgunned and gutted horses buried in the dump at the Montana ranch where he works as a construction hand. Davoren's rationale for dispensing violent justice to those who are destroying the old West would be more persuasive if he were less self-absorbed - and not such a sucker for the wiles of dangerous women. Nonetheless, McMahon is a writer and a half, and whenever he peels away from his brooding hero to look at the landscape or listen to the thoughts of humbler men, his words carry for miles. Maverick cops who write their own rules out of frustration with the criminal justice system are hardly unknown in detective fiction, but it's rare to find one whose decline and fall is as tragic as that of Detective Inspector Harry Synnott, the Dublin police officer who loses his soul in Gene Kerrigan's gripping procedural, THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR (Europa, paper, $14.95). Synnott is well aware that his old-fashioned values are out of sync with those of the new, entrepreneurial Ireland. But while the Celtic Tiger may have joined the modern world, Synnott can see that "we're still committing the same old crimes," and it eats him up when a rape case is compromised by his hard-nosed ethical code. To Synnott's grief, his efforts to game the system on another case go seriously awry, endangering the life of a young informant. "You're not the first policeman to find himself tripping over an ambiguous moral line," a superior officer observes. While that's hardly any comfort for Harry Synnott, it's good news for readers who can appreciate the moral complexities of this flawed hero. In Mark Milk's second historical mystery, a young British scholar unearths the sad, shocking secrets of a Renaissance garden.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Box set the standards so high with his Joe Pickett series that, once in a while, he's had a hard time getting over the bar himself, as with In Plain Sight (2006), where he just tripped it with his toe. In ree Fire, however, he gets over cleanly. Pickett, having been fired as a game warden, is working as foreman of his father-in-law's ranch when Wyoming's loose-cannon governor, Spencer Rulon, reinstates him--not to work his old district but to investigate, without official support, a crime in Yellowstone National Park. A lawyer has found a legal loophole that allows him to kill four campers and walk away scot-free, enraging Rulon. (A remote, uninhabited part of the park, soon dubbed the Zone of Death, has murky jurisdiction and no residents to form a jury.) But, sure as Pickett is hard on government vehicles, there's something even more sinister than a twisted legal mind behind the murders. Box is a master at working New West issues into his stories--here it's something called biomining--exploring pro and con arguments without missing a storytelling beat. And, mining series gold, he's forged a perfect alloy of familiar and fresh. Though Joe's far out in no-man's-land, as professionally on his own as he's ever been, the family man's moral compass is as strong as ever. And setting the action in the bubbling Yellowstone caldera--which could blow sky high any minute, we're told--is a masterstroke, lending both urgency and the long view to the proceedings. Once again, recommended for practically everybody. --Keir Graff Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When four environmental activists employed by Yellowstone Park are murdered in an isolated area, the Wyoming governor sends outspoken Joe Pickett, fired in his last outing, In Plain Sight (2006), from the state's game and fish department, to investigate in Anthony-winner Box's absorbing seventh crime novel, his best yet. Helped by astute park ranger Judy Demming and his antisocial pal, falconer Nate Romanowski, Joe gradually connects the murders to competition for bio-mining rights in Yellowstone's hot springs. Joe's often harassed family is on the sidelines, except for a startling appearance by his long-estranged father. Box skillfully weaves ominous scientific phenomena and legal loopholes peculiar to Yellowstone into his story of corruption, greed and deception. The author vividly evokes Yellowstone's natural beauty, but the book's real power emanates from Pickett's (and Box's) passion for preserving the wilderness and stopping those who would cynically destroy it. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The recently fired Wyoming game warden checks out the wilds (and crimes) of Yellowstone National Park. Box lives in Wyoming. National tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fired from his job as Game and Fish Warden after wrapping up his colorful sixth case (In Plain Sight, 2006), Joe Pickett returns to nab the perpetrator of the perfect crime. According to his own confession, small-time lawyer Clay McCann, feeling bullied and insulted by four campers he encountered in Yellowstone Park, shot them dead. A ingenious technicality he's discovered, however, prevents him from being tried and convicted. Wyoming Governor Spencer Rulon, a former prosecutor, can only slap McCann's wrist, but he's determined to figure out what Rick Hoening, one of the victims, meant by an email that hinted at secrets that could have a major impact on the state's financial health. So he asks Joe, now working as foreman at his father-in-law's ranch, to poke around the park while maintaining full deniability for the Governor. The situation stinks, but Joe's so eager to get away from his wife's poisonous mother and go back to his old job that he agrees, and in short order there's a spate of new killings to deal with--some committed by McCann, some not. As usual, there's little mystery about which of the sketchy suspects is behind the skullduggery. But, as usual, the central situation is so strong, the continuing characters so appealing and the spectacular landscape so lovingly evoked that it doesn't matter. Middling for this fine series, which automatically makes it one of the season's highlights. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
