THE WITCHFINDER
By Loren D. Estleman
Mysterious Press, $23
Loren D. Estleman must have chuckled out loud as he typed these lines in his latest Amos Walker mystery, “The Witchfinder”: “Stuart Lund came in at six-two and three hundred pounds in gray silk tailoring with a large head of wavy yellow hair, blue eyes like wax drippings, and a black chevron-shaped moustache he hadn’t bothered to bleach.”
That wry and compact description of a lawyer who summons Walker to a secret meeting at a Detroit airport hotel with Jay Bell Furlong, a world-famous architect who is supposedly dying in Los Angeles, might have come straight from the best of Raymond Chandler. So could characters with names like Royce Grayling (a connected gunsel) and Lynn Arsenault (a spineless suspect). That’s why Chandler fans will rejoice that the return of Estleman’s Walker–begun in last year’s “Never Street” after a seven-year hiatus–now continues in grand style.
On the wickedly hot streets of a Detroit described as vividly and lovingly as Chandler’s Los Angeles, Walker searches for the nasty parties who faked a photo of Furlong’s last love with another man, scuttling their romance. En route, Walker takes a bullet to the head, sneaks out of the hospital too early and generally behaves as though he hasn’t heard that this classic branch of the mystery tree has been declared dead. Without him, it might well be.
PRAIRIE HARDBALL
By Alison Gordon
McClelland & Stewart, $26.99
You don’t have to love baseball to enjoy Alison Gordon’s latest book about Toronto sportswriter Kate Henry. There’s enough good mystery and touching human drama packed into the story to keep even baseball-resistant readers grinning with delight, as Henry and her significant cop, Andy Munro, venture out of their urban environs and into the Great Plains of Saskatchewan. (“You Toronto people panic if you’re away from your cappucino machines for too long,” a detective in Battleford tells Kate and Andy. “Right,” says Kate. “Fresh air and friendly people get us all twitchy and belligerent.”)
Henry’s uptight mother is about to be inducted into a local hall of fame for her part in the professional women’s baseball teams that were featured in the movie “A League of Their Own,” an occasion foreshadowed by some nasty letters warning of disaster. When one of the stars of the Racine Belles is found strangled, Henry and Munro join the investigation, and they help solve it with brains and luck. There’s also a poignant moment of understanding between mother and daughter, and the added bonus for baseball fans of some wonderful details of those early games.
RED HOT BLUES
By Reggie Nadelson
St. Martin’s Press, $22.95
Nadelson, an American journalist and documentary filmmaker living in London, has created a fascinating character for her first mystery: Artie Cohen, a New York cop who used to be Artemy Maximovich Otalsky before he left Russia as a teenager.
Cohen, burned to a crisp by working on a series of the worst crimes America has to offer, is seriously reconsidering his choice of careers when his old Russian mentor-hero, former KGB Gen. Gennadi Ustinov, is shot dead on a live TV talk show. Egged on by a slippery federal prosecutor and the beautiful woman who hosted the show, Cohen goes after the truth about Ustinov’s life and death. His search takes him through the streets of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and a shiny new Moscow as full of dangerous potholes as the old one he left behind.
ONE MORE RIVER
By Nicolas Freeling
Mysterious Press, $22
John Charles, the central character of “One More River,” bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator, that sly devil Nicolas Freeling. Both are 70-year-old British writers of crime fiction living in France. Did somebody fire a rifle at Freeling one soft summer night, as happens to Charles? “One doesn’t know when a book might suddenly start; taking one by surprise,” Charles writes in his ever-present notebook after the bullet whizzes by his head. That notebook becomes the center of the story, veering from third-person narrative to first-person confessional as Charles tries to escape from and uncover the people who burn down his house and kill another man who looks remarkably like him. Does it have something to do with his work, especially past investigations into real-life assassinations? Or is it more personal–an ex-wife, mistress or even an offspring avenging some real or imagined wrong?
Freeling keeps us in suspense just long enough to get us firmly hooked, then uses his unique amalgam of British heart and French brain to bring us home.
LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD
By Jen Banbury
Little, Brown, $21.95
A marinade of lonely-girl tough-talk enriches playwright Jen Banbury’s wonderfully raucous and raunchy debut mystery, set in a Los Angeles made memorable by fresh insights. “I took Venice Boulevard,” says Jill, who works in a used bookstore. “Past all the two-story apartment buildings where old women laid out their cast-off clothes like a distress signal. They would sit around in beach chairs waiting to sell wrinkled muumuus for two bucks a pop. Past the strip malls with the five dollar manicure places. Past Donut Heaven, Donut Time, Winchel’s Donuts, Time for Donuts, I Love Donuts, Falafel and Donuts, Jimmy’s Donuts, and Dough-nutty. Past the Hare Krishna temple. I had gone there once for a free vegetarian meal. They asked me to leave before serving me. You have to chant before you can eat and I kept saying `Hairy Hitler’ instead of Hare Krishna. The girl praying next to me blew the whistle. I was hungry and I shouldn’t have been such a wiseass. I’ve heard the food is pretty good.”
There’s also a plot, of sorts: A rare first edition of a Jack London work drops Jill into a bizarre and dangerous substratum of desperate dwarfs, failed actors and lethal antiquarian book dealers.
THUNDER HORSE
By Peter Bowen
St. Martin’s Press, $22.95
The growing crowd of fans of Peter Bowen’s gloriously unbridled books about Montana’s Gabriel Du Pre have new cause to celebrate, as the part-Medis Indian cattle-brand inspector and occasional deputy sheriff gets involved in a story of murder and greed that links the ancient Indian residents of Montana (and an even older inhabitant, Tyrannosaurus rex, the “thunder horse” of the title) with a present-day Japanese consortium’s plans to turn a bucolic spring into a commercial trout farm. Du Pre gets to drive his old pickup too fast along Montana’s back roads, drink gallons of cheap wine with a brace of fascinating friends, play his fiddle and resonate with originality and energy.
