Season of darkness A mystery

Count on it. Whenever people lose faith in their political leaders, the popular culture reflexively responds by killing off parents. Younger heroes, from Harry Potter to baby X-Men, are easily redirected to reliable surrogate authority figures, but in troubled times mature protagonists like police officers and lone-wolf detectives are more often left reeling from the deaths of fathers and the treachery of mentors. Mark Billingham, who writes gritty police procedurals featuring Tom Thome, a detective with the London police, dives directly into the spirit of the times with BLOODLINE (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which examines the volatile parent-child dynamic from an unexpected angle. On the most conventional level, Thorne's personal hopes of getting married and becoming a father are dashed when his lover discovers that the baby she's carrying "is not viable." But the counterweight to this facile narrative point is a psychologically twisted and strikingly original plot involving the legacy of a serial killer, Raymond Garvey, who killed seven women in four months and died of a brain tumor in prison. Now, 15 years later, someone is murdering the grown children of Garvey's victims, presenting Thorne and his colleagues on the murder squad with the daunting task of finding and protecting these survivors, some still too traumatized to look out for themselves. To make the job even more complicated, a man claiming to be Garvey's son has raised a troubling question: whether the brain trauma that altered Garvey's personality might absolve him of responsibility for his crimes. The relentlessly swift pace and high emotional pitch of the narrative may say "thriller," but Billingham has become too sophisticated a writer to settle for the cheap theatrics that galvanized his early novels. Grim as it is, the violence serves a purpose, making us consider all the innocent people whose lives are touched and often crushed in the aftermath of a crime. In one sensitively written scene after another, Billingham probes the lives of the "other victims" of the homicides, from bereft parents to kindly neighbors to perfect strangers. "He knows that it will pass eventually," Billingham says of a conductor who falls into a deep depression after two people are killed under the wheels of his train. "Anyway, he would worry about what kind of a man he was if he was not changed by it." Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they're tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair. As alienated antiheroes go, they don't get any darker than the protagonist of THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who calls himself Christian and is, in fact, dying. Although he often sounds like a poet, Christian isn't much for human emotions. But he does take pride in doing a "clean" job, and it's a professional affront when an unknown assassin steps between Christian and his designated target and botches the kill. Even as he piles up the images of impending death and decay, Sallis deals Christian a final twist of fate - the creature connections he has spent his life running away from. Dale Sayles, a Phoenix homicide detective whose life is no bowl of cherries, finds himself commiserating with the dying hit man because his own wife has just gone into a hospice. More inexplicably, an abandoned boy named Jimmie has been dreaming the killer's dreams. All three share the essential human bond of loss. "People leave us," Jimmie tells himself. "All our lives are a going-away." Maureen Jennings has always had a keen eye for marginalized members of society in critical need of a champion. (In a series of historical novels set in Toronto in the 1890s, she has even sent her big-hearted police detective, William Murdoch, into battle on behalf of mistreated animals.) The detective she introduces in SEASON OF DARKNESS (McClelland & Stewart, $22.95), which takes place in England a year into World War II, lacks Murdoch's highly developed sense of social injustice. But as the only police inspector in his insular Shropshire village, Tom Tyler can still identify those who could use his protection, including a contingent of young Land Girls who have come to work on the farms. When one of them is murdered, and then another, Tyler finds himself torn between loyalty to his neighbors and his sense of duty - a conflict that could easily take a Tom Tyler series through the end of the war. Readers who lament the loss of Henning Mankell's great Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, can still get their fix of Scandinavian gloom from the novels of Kjell Eriksson. THE HAND THAT TREMBLES (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $24.99) offers compassionate insights into the minds of people who tend to brood during those long winter nights. Ann Lindell, a conscientious cop based in the cathedral city of Uppsala, considers the human foot that has washed up on a remote beach and wonders why the handful of people who live in this isolated region don't die of loneliness. But even those who manage to escape - like the respected Uppsala county commissioner who simply walked out of a meeting and disappeared - take their melancholy thoughts with them. And while the two narratives don't really mesh, Ebba Segerberg's translation of Eriksson's austere prose beautifully captures the spiritual chill of this desolate landscape. Does the brain trauma that altered a killer's personality absolve him of responsibility for his crimes?

Why was Elsie Bates killed early one morning-first hit by a car, then fatally shot and left by the side of the road? It's 1940 England, and the country is recovering from the retreat of the British army from Dunkirk. Small-town DI Tom Tyler now has a big-city crime on his hands, and there's nothing cozy or sweet about the villain. Complicating the situation is the temporary German internee camp plunked down in the village's midst. Mix in paranoia, MI5, and a little post-traumatic stress disorder, and all bets are off. You can be assured of this, though: one victim isn't enough for this murderer. VERDICT Canadian master storyteller and screenwriter Jennings-known for her 19th-century historicals (e.g., the Murdoch series)-launches a trilogy with this superb entry. Readers will be swept away by the sagalike tone and the characters' singular problems and traits. Tyler's family suffers in this first volume, and I'm anxious to see where Jennings takes everyone in the next installment. Think the British television series Foyle's War for comparison. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In spite of the fact that she'd got only a few hours sleep, Elsie Bates was in great spirits. Nothing like a nice bit of dock to make a girl smile. When he'd told her this was his first time, she'd expected him to be clumsy and done too fast, but he wasn't. She'd helped him out here and there but mostly he'd learned all by himself. Of course, like any man born to Eve, he'd started to show a bit of possessiveness right off the bat, and she'd had to make it clear that nobody owned her. Elsie grinned at the memory, then impulsively pushed down on the accelerator as far as she dared. The sun wasn't yet up and the road, which was hemmed in on either side by tall hedgerows, was pitch black. She had her headlights on, inadequate as they were with the strips of blackout tape across them, and she was driving as close to the middle of the road as she could, the lorry rattling and shaking on the rough surface.   She started to sing to the tune of the "Colonel Bogey March."   Hitler has only got one ball, Goering has two but they are small   Wait 'til she told Rose about last night. Rosie kept saying she was saving herself, but as Elsie reminded her, "There's a war on, my pet. Butter's rationed but that don't mean we have to be."   Himmler has something sim'lar, But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.   Elsie fingered the strap of her dungarees and smiled at the feel of the two bank notes she'd sewn in there. Two quid would go a long way. When she'd told Rose the story, her friend had been nervous.   "Oo, Elsie, be careful. People don't like to be blackmailed."   "Who said anything about blackmail? I didn't say nothing. Nothing at all except to mention what I'd seen, and out it popped: 'Ow much to keep that to yourself? Didn't come from me first." She'd pinched Rose's thin cheek. "We won't be greedy. The occasional quid will do nicely. Stroke of luck, weren' it? Me being there at that moment. Next leave we get, we're going to Birmingham for a few larks. Nobody'll wonder where the dosh is coming from. If asked, we'll say it's our wages saved up, which is a joke."   "You're as cunning as an old cat," said Rose. "I just hope you've got as many lives."   Elsie had taken the remark as a compliment. She'd learned at too early an age to be that way. You had to if you were going to get out of that bleeding hellhole of a slum in any way intact. She made the sign of the cross over her chest. "May God see fit to drop a bomb on all of them."   Hitler has only got one ball, The other is on the kitchen wall. His mother, the dirty bugger, Cut it off when he was small.   The lorry went over a bump, gave a short cough, a splutter or two, then went silent and began to roll to a stop.   "Sod it, not again."   It was the third time this month the bloody thing had acted up. Elsie managed to steer over to the side, as close to the hedgerow as possible, before the momentum died. The road was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and she'd bring a lot of aggravation onto herself if she blocked the way completely. She tried turning the ignition key but the lorry was dead as a doornail. Sod, sod, and more sod. She was on a tight schedule. She had to pick up the girls at the hostel on time. Miss Stillwell, the warden, could be a bloody tartar. "Late again, Miss Bates? Do pull up your socks, or I shall have to put you on report." Toffee- nosed old cow. If ever a woman acted like a dried- up spinster, it was her.   Well, no sense in sitting here on her arse. Good thing she'd brought her bike. She climbed down from the lorry. Somewhere along the way her back light had been knocked out, but the front lamp was working. Not that it was a lot of use, with the obligatory taped strips across it.   The woods pressed in close here, narrowing the road even more. Elsie didn't like the country in the dark. She was used to paved streets and houses crammed together; a sense of the surrounding humanity. You could go for miles out here and not meet a soul. The rooks were putting up a God- awful clamour. Old Morgan had told them that sometimes birds can be as good as a watch dog, giving off warnings that there's danger near.   She almost wished she'd brought the gun with her. As she pedalled, she began to sing again to the tune of "Land of Hope and Glory."   Land of soap and water Hitler's having a bath Churchill's looking through the keyhole Having a jolly good laugh Be . . . e . . . e . . . e . . . cause, Hitler has only one small ball . . .   She was glad for her overcoat. The pre-dawn air was chill and damp, just a bit of a hint that summer was ending. Fresh though, very fresh; one good thing you could say for the country. Since she'd been here, she gained some weight and a good colour, which they had all admitted when she went home last time. After she'd signed up with the Land Army, her dad, the miserable bugger, had said she wouldn't last a week, which only made her determined to show him. It hadn't been easy. When she'd first arrived in Shropshire, she'd never even seen a live cow before, let alone the bloody huge bull with the ring in its wet nose and its enormous goolies hanging down. The work in the fields was backbreaking, the hours appallingly long, and at first many of the farmers had been contemptuous of the girls, not willing to take into account their inexperience. Now the Land girls had earned their grudging respect. They worked as hard as men and learned fast. Elsie, herself, had been promoted to forewoman after only two months. When she'd written to tell Ma and Dad and the others, nobody'd bothered to answer. Sod them anyway.     Dawn was starting to seep through the trees and the exercise was getting her blood flowing. She kicked her feet off the pedals and did a little swoop from side to side just for fun. Whoopee! There was something to be said about this war. She'd never have had this experience stuck in the filthy London back- to- back housing where she'd grown up. She kicked out again. Whoopee! There was a dance in the village tonight and she'd be there, new frock, new sweetheart.   Hold on, was that a car? Maybe she could cadge a lift. She glanced over her shoulder. She heard the roar of the car as it emerged out of the darkness, the slitted headlights gleaming like cat's eyes. It was travelling fast. Too fast. Elsie swerved out of the way.   "Hey, slow down," she yelled.   But in a moment the car was upon her.   Excerpted from Season of Darkness by Maureen Jennings All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.