Review by New York Times Review
The touchy-feely vibe of BRITTEN AND BRÜLIGHTLY (Metropolitan/Holt, paper, $20), an elegant graphic novel by Hannah Berry, has something to do with its format - the tall, slim, inviting layout of a picture book - but just as much to do with the intimate, even claustrophobic, content of its narrative. Set in London during some uneasy period when it rains without end on men in double-breasted suits and women in berets, the story tracks the metaphysical crisis of Fernández Britten, a melancholy "private researcher" who has earned the nickname "the Heartbreaker" for confirming the suspicions of clients who hire him to spy on their cheating lovers. After a career of exposing the bestiality of human nature, Britten longs to uncover a higher truth, the kind that elevates the beast and confers nobility on his own sleazy trade. The morose P.I., whose shadow-rimmed eyes and tiny, pinched mouth convey his despondent state, thinks he's found his means of redemption when an unhappy heiress hires him to disprove the police investigation's conclusion that her fiancé's death was a suicide. Instead of bringing her satisfaction or solace, Britten discovers a truth so ugly that his instinct is to suppress it. But what kind of hero would that make him? It's the classic existential bind of the postwar detective: a cynical sleuth tries to redeem his soul through a selfless act, only to find that honesty conflicts with an ingrained code of honor. Although Berry has her bit of fun with the genre traditions - notably in the bizarre detail that Britten's trusted partner, Stewart Brülightly, is (quite literally) a lecherous tea bag that, under stress, infuses in the detective's waistcoat pocket - she writes in a darkly poetic vein about love and betrayal, deceit and despair, in a plot so complex it would give Raymond Chandler a headache. Unlike the generations of trend-hopping moviemakers and novelists who have reduced the bleak noir sensibility to brutal acts committed in picturesque alleys, Berry uses her pen to capture the spiritual desolation of the human figures in her landscape. The lines of her drawings are sharp and penetrating, the monochromatic colors diluted in tearful washes of blues and blacks as she leans in to catch the insanity in a smile, the mute anger in the snuffing out of a cigarette. But the bravura storytelling device is the perspective, the eerie sense of disorientation as she swoops in to examine a parade of toy cowboys in an empty apartment or draws back to watch the rain lash two faraway figures with a single umbrella. From whichever angle you look at it, the truth doesn't bear telling in this cold and heartless world. Every time we're afraid we've seen the last of Bernie Gunther, Philip Kerr comes through - as he does in A QUIET FLAME (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95) - with another unnerving adventure for his morally conflicted hero. A Berlin homicide cop conscripted into the SS during the course of the novels known as the Berlin Noir Trilogy, Bernie resurfaces in 1950 - on the same boat as Adolf Eichmann - in Buenos Aires, a vibrant city as depraved and dangerous as the one he left behind. Unlike other fugitive Nazi officers Juan Perón welcomed into Argentina, Bernie isn't allowed to slip into some anonymous job. Instead, he's pressed to solve the grisly mutilation murders of young girls, cases so similar to those he had to leave unsolved in Berlin when Hitler came to power that he suspects the same killer may now be on the loose in Argentina. Pursuing that lead, Bernie builds up contempt for government mendacity, expressing his reckless views in the wisecracking idiom of the hard-boiled detective, rather than the suave tones of the undercover agent the Peronists would like him to be. But while his attitude is fashionably cynical, he cares too much about the future of civilized societies to pass himself off as a pessimist. Anna Pigeon, the whip-smart and normally fierce park ranger in Nevada Barr's wilderness adventures, is all out of sorts in BORDERLINE (Putnam, $25.95). Anna and her husband are drifting down the Rio Grande on a white-water rafting trip, trying to restore her equilibrium, when the spring rains unleash a flash flood that traps a pregnant woman trying to cross the border from Mexico. Barr hits her stride whenever Anna is actually on the river - using a jackknife to perform a C-section on the dying woman and climbing up steep canyons with the newborn in her arms to escape the sharpshooter who keeps picking off the rafters. But nothing else seems to inspire Barr, and the novel's lame plotting, with its obvious villains, is a comedown from her usual impeccable storytelling. Before it ducks into the shower and re-emerges as a "Pretty Woman" fantasy, David Cristofano's first novel, THE GIRL SHE USED TO BE (Grand Central, $22.99) promises to be something special: the haunting cri de coeur of a hurt and angry young woman whose life was stolen from her when she was 6 and had the bad luck to be with her parents when they witnessed a gruesome mob hit. Melody Grace McCartney can barely remember the various identities she has furiously shrugged off since she went into the witness protection program, but she's about to bolt again when she's kidnapped by the mobster assigned to kill her. The hit man is a dark prince with awesome taste in women's fashion, and readers who like vampire stories should go for this romantic fairy tale. But before he went all goofy on us, Cristofano seemed to be headed somewhere more interesting than the Lifetime network. In her first graphic novel, Hannah Berry writes (and draws) in a darkly poetic vein about love and betrayal.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
After 20 years in the Federal Witness Protection Program (WITSEC) and eight aliases, Melody Grace McCartney hardly knows who she is. On the run since she and her parents stumbled on a gruesome murder by mobster Tony Bovaro when she was six years old, Grace saw WITSEC's promised protection fail her mother and father when they were killed 12 years later. Now she feigns personal danger to be relocated just because she's bored and wants a change. But before her new case officer can move her from suburban Maryland to rural Wisconsin, Tony's son, Jonathan, tracks her down to present an alternative: protection from his family and a life of more safety and freedom than she has ever known. While federal officials pressure her to stay in WITSEC and show her Jonathan's violent side, her attraction to him grows, and she must decide a course for the rest of her life. This is a compulsively readable, skillfully constructed first novel with well-drawn characters and a plot that twists and turns to what seems the best possible conclusion, marking Cristofano as a writer to watch.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cristofano's intense, romantic debut revolves around the Federal Witness Protection Program. When Melody Grace McCartney is six, she and her family witness mobster Tony Bovaro gut Jimmy "the Rat" Fratello at a restaurant in New York's Little Italy. They go into WITSEC in exchange for testifying against Bovaro. Eight years later, due to a foolish slip on Melody's part, a Bovaro goon finds her parents and kills them, but WITSEC whisks Melody to safety. By the time she's an adult, Melody has gone through a numbing parade of eight identities, the latest as a math teacher. She's about to enter yet another new life when she meets John Bovaro (aka Jonathan), who at age 10 also saw his father slicing up Jimmy. Jonathan, who's been tracking Melody's movements ever since and is obsessed with making things right, persuades her to run off with him. Despite Melody's questionable attraction to Jonathan, Cristofano's mad love scenario sizzles like garlic in hot olive oil. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
