Review by New York Times Review
SOLVING ONE OF Keigo Higashino's fiendishly difficult mysteries must be very gratifying. (I wouldn't know, since this Japanese puzzlemeister consistently outwits me.) In Giles Murray's translation of NEWCOMER (Minotaur, $27.99), Higashino's fabled Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective, Kyoichiro Kaga, he of the "razor-sharp mind and bloodhound nature," has been dispatched to the Nihonbashi precinct to investigate the inexplicable murder of a middle-aged woman who lived alone and seemed to have no enemies. Kaga directs his inquiries to Amazake Alley, a narrow street of small stores with loads of charm. ("Few other districts in the capital had shops that specialized in wicker suitcases or shamisen lutes.") In each of these businesses, Kaga finds some minor mystery to solve: Why did the clock shop owner's dog get lost on his walk? Who bought the cakes found at the crime scene? "I notice details," Kaga explains. "That's the sort of person I am." The characters, it must be said, are thinner than the dough used to create those delicate pastries; but in a fair exchange, the author has succeeded in making problem-solving logistics sexy. Since Kaga plucks all his clues from minor background details, their trivial nature is itself important. As Higashino notes, "The precinct detective had looked into things that the rest of them had dismissed as insignificant." Things like where you choose to sit in a taxi or whether you like sweets or who gave the victim a new pair of kitchen scissors. In addition to illustrating the subtlety of the author's narrative style, these minutiae add up to a tidy and quite credible solution. Not that I saw it coming. STEPHEN KELLY'S NEW Inspector Lamb novel, hushed in death (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), would seem to push all my buttons - and possibly yours. It's a traditional mystery set in 1942 in a British country house that's been reconfigured as a sanitarium for military men suffering the "traumatic effects of combat." There's a murder on the very first page and plenty of suspects (or possible additional victims) among the patients and staff. There's even a ghost! Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Lamb of the Hampshire Constabulary, who served on the Somme in the previous war, cuts a dashing figure as the sleuth in charge of the investigation. And Dr. Frederick Hornby, director of Elton House, was at Ypres. Both men still have nightmares filled with the faces of the dead. The setup is so familiar and so calculated that it's impossible not to feel manipulated. But it's the writing that really grates. "I left the house and came up the path from the village, as I usually do," the housekeeper begins. And then, dear reader, I fell asleep. IF YOU'RE GOING to write a theater mystery, who better to bump off than a theater critic? In her comic novel, ASHOT IN THE DARK (Bloomsbury, paper, $17), Lynne Truss does the dastardly deed during a performance of "A Shilling in the Meter," a slice-of-life drama being given a tryout production at a seedy theater in Brighton in 1957. A properly loathsome person, the famed and feared A. S. Crystal has already started writing his review on the train down from London, and a nasty piece of work it is too. But before the review can be published - indeed, before the play has ended - Crystal is shot dead. The mystery takes an amusing turn once the clever young Constable Peregrine Twitten starts second-guessing his superiors. "You are an impetuous, arrogant pipsqueak," shouts the detective in charge, who tries to fire him before realizing he could use this pipsqueak's supersize brain to his own advantage. We should be hearing more from this clever young know-it-all. CHILDREN have A way of softening up even the most hardboiled antiheroes. They don't come much tougher than Ken Bruen's Irish roughneck, Jack Taylor, a man with bad habits who does good despite himself. Jack can't escape from other people's children in Bruen's latest novel, IN THE GALWAY SILENCE (Mysterious Press, $26), which finds Mr. Tough Guy ("I'm not great with kids") babysitting for his girlfriend's 9-year-old son. "The boy was small with blond hair," he observes, which makes young Joffrey sound nonthreatening even for the child-averse Jack. But the kid is a world-class whiner with a perpetually curled lip, "from attitude rather than design." As if regular outings with Joffrey, who is staying with relatives while his mother is away, weren't penance enough for his many sins, this dangerously hotheaded private detective agrees to find out who murdered a rich Frenchman's twin sons. It's not the kind of case Jack would normally take, but the way these men were killed - ducttaped to a wheelchair, their mouths sealed with superglue, then tossed into a river - probably appealed to his sense of the hideously absurd. But it's another case, involving kidnapping and pedophilia, that really riles Jack, who, despite his macho posturing, is one of those decent souls who are sickened by cruelty to children, even a little brat like Joffrey. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Truss transplants the quirky, clever wit that drove her nonfiction best-seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2004), to fiction in this adaptation of a radio show starring Brighton, England, police officers Steine, Brunswick, and Twitten and featuring assorted oddballs on both sides of the law. Newbie Twitten, who's thought to be too smart for his own good, hopes his career is on the upswing when he happens to be seated beside a malodorous, mean theater critic just as the man is killed. Inspector Steine believes the crime is related to a massacre in Brighton years before, and the ensuing investigation takes delightful twists and turns that reveal sordid secrets and long-ago crimes underlying the resort town's jolly character. It is, at times, difficult to keep track of the numerous characters involved in this post-WWII drama, but a close reading brings rewards. Truss' language, unsurprisingly, sparkles, and her portrayal of class and its exasperating effect on even the British underworld is memorable. Readers of Agatha Christie are a natural audience for this study in peculiarity.--Henrietta Verma Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British author Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) makes her crime fiction debut with this hilarious series launch. One morning in 1957, London theater critic A.S. Crystal takes the train to Brighton, where he's to attend the try-out of a new play, A Shilling in the Meter, at the Theater Royal. That same morning, Constable Peregrine Twitten, an eager beaver who won a prize "for forensic observation," reports for duty to Det. Insp. Geoffrey Steine, the less than clever head of the Brighton Constabulary, who in 1945 failed to break the Aldersgate stickup case, to which Crystal, then an assistant bank manager, was a witness. That evening at the Theater Royal, something in the play prompts Crystal to remember a piece of crucial information about the Aldersgate robbery, but he's shot dead before he can share it with the police. Twitten sets out to investigate Crystal's murder and his link to the unsolved case, aided by competent Sgt. James Brunswick and despite lack of support from the feckless Steine. Truss successfully combines wry humor with a fair-play mystery. Agent: Anthony Goff, David Higham Assoc. (U.K.). (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The shooting of an acerbic reviewer during the premiere of a play at the Theatre Royal opens endless avenues of investigation for the incompetents of the Brighton Constabulary in this effervescent farce.Six years after the Middle Street Massacre wiped out all 45 members of the Giovedi crime family and its rival gang, Fat Victor's Casino Boys, DI Geoffrey Steine, who'd arrived from the City of London Police just in time to hear the news that most of the town's leading criminals had killed each other, is still convinced that there's no crime in Brighton and that he's the reason why. The situation changes with a bang when an unknown member of the audience interrupts the opening night of Jack Braithwaite's play A Shilling in the Meter to keep exacting critic A.S. Crystal, a "Robespierre with BO," from filing his scathing notice by shooting him where he sits as he's calling out, "Tell Inspector Steine from me he's even more of a fool." The person to whom Crystal addresses this unfinished injunction is PC Peregrine Twitten, a dewy-eyed smarty-pants who's rounding out his very first day on the job at Brighton by attending the play in the seat next to Crystal after having been dismissed from several earlier positions by bosses who thought him too clever, too clueless, or both. So although the officers nominally in charge of the case are Steine and Sgt. Jim Brunswick, Twitten is convinced that only he can solve a case whose body count rapidly rises. He turns out to be right, though not at all with the results he expected.As in Cat out of Hell (2015), Truss piles up ingenious plot twists, preposterous coincidences, snarky asides, and characters out of P.G. Wodehouse, this time replacing her murderous felines with a setup out of the genre's golden age. Readers who can suspend their disbelief are in for quite a workout. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
