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 Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Following The Rage (one of Booklist's top 10 crime novels of 2013), Kerrigan delivers another spare, cut-to-the-bone noir in which a well-meaning ex-con finds himself trapped in the vice of circumstance. Danny Callaghan is having a beer in a Dublin pub when two armed men barge in, seemingly intent on killing another of the pub's patrons. Danny instinctively intervenes, saving the intended victim's life but winding up in the middle of a gang war between two of the city's drug lords, one of whom has unfinished business with Danny. In the aftermath of the incident, Danny realizes that no one neither the drug lords nor the cop investigating the case believes that his involvement was purely coincidental. So begins the doomed attempt of a good man to get out of harm's way. Danny, unfortunately, has an Achilles' heel: he can't just walk away; he's compelled to set things right, to even the scales. But the scales in recession-ravaged Dublin are set permanently askew. It's a classic noir setup complete with the disaffected wife and child with whom Danny longs to reconnect, though his every move makes reconciliation even more impossible but Kerrigan manages to inject new vigor in the formula, not with any surprise plotting (there are no surprises in noir) but with the crispness and submerged power of his understated prose. Kerrigan's grasp of contemporary Dublin and its underworld denizens puts him shoulder to shoulder with the best Irish crime writers (Ken Bruen, Benjamin Black, Declan Hughes), but his mix of noir and poetry also suggests another emerging superstar from a different continent, Urban Waite (The Carrion Birds, 2013).--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
U.S. readers will welcome this outstanding crime novel, a 2009 Gold Dagger Award finalist, from Irish author Kerrigan (The Rage). Danny Callaghan, out of prison for seven months after serving eight years of a 12-year sentence for manslaughter, has kept clean since his release, driving for his friend Novak, who owns the Blue Parrot pub in Dublin. When Callaghan impulsively comes to the rescue of a patron in the pub targeted by two gun-toting thugs, the crime boss who ordered the hit, Lar Mackendrick, retaliates by forcing the ex-con back into the life under threat of killing those closest to him. Kerrigan's spare, incisive prose depicts an Irish underworld and a population caught in a closed circle of poverty and violence; short, brutal lives are the norm, and drugs offer a dangerous bridge between the haves and the have-nots. As one disillusioned policeman puts it, "We've managed to create a lot of young thugs who know nothing about life except how to take it." Callaghan makes a memorable attempt to escape in this superb standalone. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge & White (U.K.). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
One moment, Dublin ex-con Danny Callaghan is minding his own business; the next, he's back in the cross hairs of both cops and criminals. Recently released from prison after a nine-year stretch for manslaughter, Danny, 32, is grimly determined to stay out of trouble. But fate intervenes when prematurely gray Walter Bennett appeals for help during his drubbing by a pair of leather-jacketed thugs in a pub. Almost instantly, Danny curses himself as a blasted idiot for stepping in, even as he wonders why anyone would want to kill the feckless Walter. As Danny has feared, his scuffle sparks interest from police and local gang members. Pub owner Novak, who sympathizes with Danny, lies ineptly to DS Michael Wyndham when he's questioned about the incident. And lady's man Karl Prowse, whom Danny bested, has an awkward debriefing with his boss, kingpin Lar Mackendrick (a central figure in Kerrigan's debut novel). Before long, the police interest in Danny and Mackendrick naturally puts Danny in the hot seat with both groups. Unfortunately for him, Walter is not the innocent victim that he played for his rescuer. All this threatens Danny's budding relationship with the levelheaded Hannah. And once he has his toe again in criminal waters, is there any turning back? Kerrigan's fourth crime yarn (The Rage, 2013, etc.) captures a landscape of moral ambiguity with a crackling pace and terse, apt dialogue. His world suggests an Irish Elmore Leonard whose compromised men struggle to tread water in a treacherous sea.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
