Review by New York Times Review
ALL THE HEAVY HITTERS, from Michael Connelly in Los Angeles to Joyce Carol Oates in suburban New Jersey, came out for USA NOIR (Akashic, cloth, $29.95; paper, $16.95), an important anthology of stories shrewdly culled by Johnny Temple, Akashic's editor in chief, from dozens of volumes of regional crime fiction published since 2004 under the "Noir" banner. Although there's hardly a dud in the pack, some do elbow their way to the front. "Amapola" is a frighteningly funny cautionary tale, first told by Luis Alberto Urrea in "Phoenix Noir," about a high school kid who adopts the gangsta-goth persona of his best friend, the spoiled son of a rich Mexican businessman from Nogales, and comes to grief when he falls in tempestuous love with his friend's virginal sister. Maggie Estep found her inspiration for "Alice Fantastic" at Aqueduct Racetrack, the playground of "down-on-their-luck trainers slumping in the benches, degenerates, droolcases and drunks swapping tips," along with a few professional gamblers like the hard-bitten title character, who pays the price when she drops her guard and lets someone get a little too close. And then there's "Animal Rescue," a work of art by Dennis Lehane. This incisive character study trails after a big lug named Bob, who tends bar in the dodgy Boston neighborhood of Dorchester and discovers the meaning - and the measure - of love when he finds a pit bull puppy beaten and left for dead in a garbage can. As applied to individual stories, "noir" can be reduced to "tough" or "gritty" or just "not cozy." But the fierce regional pride that runs through this collection does capture the characters' fatalistic sense of alienation, even in their own hometowns. When Bob was a kid, "your parish was your country" and "everything you needed and needed to know was contained within it." These days, the natives are either feeling trapped or being displaced by strangers. Eloquent variations on this theme are told by forceful writers like George Pelecanos in Washington, D.C., Laura Lippman in Baltimore, Lawrence Block in Hell's Kitchen and William Kent Krueger on the west side of St. Paul, where an amiable young drifter can't even hang on to the home he has made on the bank of the river. IT'S HARD TO BE an honest man in a culture that admires criminal cunning and venerates its corrupt institutions. That should explain why an ex-con named Danny Callaghan has such a tough time staying alive in Gene Kerrigan's novel DARK TIMES IN THE CITY (Europa, paper, $17). After surviving eight years in prison for manslaughter, Callaghan re-emerges to find Dublin a changed city, a place where "all the talk was of money, opportunities and the nervous prosperity." Now he just wants to have a "quiet, limited, safe" life. But when two gunmen burst into the bar where he's having a solitary drink, Danny instinctively takes them down. And for that rash act, he's forced into the service of a ruthless crime boss. Kerrigan writes with a grim elegance that takes the edge off the blunt language and brutal deeds of his underworld villains and spares some grace for their hapless victims. In a rare calm moment, he even takes time to read the history of a bland Dublin neighborhood in its architecture. Surveying the village green that in England might hold a war memorial, he wryly notes that here there was nothing but "an outsize monument commemorating nothing in particular." THERE ARE WITCHES on Fleet Street in THE INVISIBLE CODE (Bantam, $26). There are also devils and demons and ladies who lunch in Christopher Fowler's latest madcap mystery about the strange police detectives in London's Peculiar Crimes Unit. But none of them can hold a candle to St. Bride's, provided you ignore the corpse on the marble floor of this landmark church, built on a pagan site of worship honoring Brigit, "the Celtic goddess of healing, fire and childbirth." Those hints of the supernatural are enough to attract the decrepit but brilliant detective Arthur Bryant and his suave partner, John May, who apply their own unorthodox methods to unmask those witchy women. And yet, clever though they be, these theatrical flourishes are only an excuse for this erudite author to show us the weirder sights of the city, including the hard-to-find Museum of London, where one might chance upon a lovely lecture on the Great Plague of 1665. PIETER VAN IN, a Belgian police inspector with the good fortune to work in the beautiful medieval city of Bruges, could have posed for one of those drunken, gluttonous, lecherous burghers cavorting in a Frans Hals painting. His colleagues put up with this intemperate lout because he's almost preternaturally observant, alert to the petty details that can help solve a perplexing case like the one in THE MIDAS MURDERS (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), a new police procedural (its rhetorical excesses intact in Brian Doyle's translation) from Pieter Aspe. Shortly after an indiscreet conversation at a local restaurant, a German businessman is found bleeding to death on a snowy street. We're talking big business here, so connecting this crime to a terrorist bombing isn't inconceivable. It's all intricately plotted by Aspe, and handily solved by Van In between bouts of colorful behavior.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 5, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
London's perpetually-in-jeopardy Peculiar Crimes Unit gets a reprieve in Fowler's excellent 10th mystery featuring senior detectives Arthur Bryant and John May (after 2012's The Memory of Blood). Oskar Kasavian, the Home Office security supervisor who oversees the PCU, hires Bryant and May unofficially to deal with a personal problem. His much-younger wife, Sabira, has begun acting strangely, and with Kasavian due to take the helm of a major European antiterror initiative, it's vital that any scandal be avoided. When Sabira insists that devils are out to get her, the two sleuths take her fears seriously. They look into a possible tie to the death of Amy O'Connor, who dropped dead in a church from unknown causes shortly after two children identified her as a witch and plotted to kill her. In the light of the challenges that Fowler has given his heroes in prior books, it's particularly impressive that he manages to surpass himself once again. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this latest volume of the adventures of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit (after The Memory of Blood), Detectives Bryant and May, who have been with the unit since its founding during the Second World War, are looking for a new case to work on. The unexplained death of a young woman in one of the city's many churches holds promise, but the elderly sleuths are summoned to the office of their unit's unsympathetic overseer. He is concerned about his younger immigrant wife. She is having "episodes," raving about witches and conspiracies, and drinking too much in public, none of which is to the benefit of a husband in the highest ranks of the civil service. The two sleuths cautiously investigate, expecting a trap, as they know their unit has made many enemies over the years. May begins interviewing suspects and collecting evidence while his partner uses a more holistic approach, visiting some of his more esoteric friends: amateur historians and a white witch among them. VERDICT Fowler continues his series of thoughtful and rollicking mysteries, providing twists and turns and much information about the offbeat history of one of the world's greatest cities. Newcomers to the series may struggle to catch up with the relationships among the characters, but longtime fans will be thrilled and satisfied by this latest offering.-Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green (c) Copyright 2013. 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
Two cases, from different but equally unexpected quarters, emerge for the staff of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit. Beloved of fans but reviled by the Home Office, the PCU is being systematically starved for cases by Oskar Kasavian, the security supervisor hoping to diminish its capacity to bring scandal on her majesty's government. So naturally, Arthur Bryant, the irascible polymath who's one of the team's senior members, goes out hunting for cases on his own. He's fascinated by the death of Amy O'Connor, a part-time bar manager who was found in St. Bride's Church after suffering a fatal heart attack with no apparent cause. This is the sort of thing we should be investigating, he tells his more sedate counterpart John May. Before they can establish their authority to intervene in a case that's officially none of their business, another mystery arrives courtesy of none other than Oskar Kasavian, whose much younger Albanian wife, Sabira, is convinced she's being hounded by evil spirits. Promised the moon (honors and titles, long-range security, freedom from ritual attempts to shut them down or zero out their budget) if they can figure out what's tormenting Sabira, the PCU team sets to work. But Sabira's behavior becomes increasingly erratic--she keeps insulting the well-bred wives of her husband's Home Office colleagues in distressingly public settings--till she finally turns up dead in Sir John Soanes' House, the legendary London museum, beneath one of the paintings in William Hogarth's series The Rake's Progress without a mark on her to indicate how she died. What can her death possibly have to do with Amy O'Connor's? Mr. Bryant and a covey of diverse experts expatiate informatively on witchcraft, code-breaking and national defense. But there's less warmth or humor or real mystery than in The Memory of Blood (2012) and other recent PCU outings.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
