A TOAST BEFORE DYING
By Grace F. Edwards
Doubleday, $21.95
“I headed uptown to Esplanade Gardens, a co-op development that stretched in an L shape from Lenox Avenue and 146th Street to Seventh Avenue and 148th Street. . . .
“One Christmastime when I was growing up, I went to Rockefeller Center for the tree-lighting ceremony, but every year after that I walked up Seventh Avenue to Esplanade to watch the terraces come alive with light so stunningly bright that Soviet cosmonauts on a fly-by recorded it as a pulse from a supernova. And in a way, it was.”
That Harlem moment comes from the strong and poignant pen of Grace F. Edwards, whose first Mali Anderson book, “If I Should Die,” was one of the best mysteries of 1997.
Anderson’s second outing, “A Toast Before Dying,” is equally impressive, as the ex-cop (fired for slugging a racist, sexist colleague) spends a hot Harlem summer working on her master’s degree in social work, looking after her jazz musician father, missing the vacationing young nephew she’s been caring for since her sister’s death–and getting involved in a couple of murders at a notorious saloon called The Half-Man Bar.
The story is tense and expertly crafted, with some fine new characters, such as the disabled drug dealer Flyin’ Home, whose wheelchair is pulled by two big dogs, and the retired opera singer Miss Adele, who lives at Esplanade and knows everyone’s secrets. But what lingers in the memory are Edwards’ perfect evocations of the past and present Harlems they inhabit:
“Graham Court at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue was an eight-story monolith of marbled halls and four columned entrances facing an interior court. It was built at the turn of the century by William Waldorf Astor for upper-class New Yorkers and was the last major apartment building in Harlem to become integrated.
“In 1928 the wrought-iron gates swung open to its first black tenant, but the Gothic gray-stone structure did not collapse as some had predicted.”
DEATH IN A COLD HARD LIGHT
By Francine Mathews
Bantam, $23.95
If all you know about the more distant island off Cape Cod (the one that isn’t trendy Martha’s Vineyard) is one of the limericks that begins, “There once was a man from Nantucket,” a good place to learn more is the Meredith Folger series, which combines pungent island atmosphere with strong characters and engrossing plots.
Francine Mathews’ latest book about intrepid Nantucket police detective Folger; her occasionally devious police chief father, John; and the fishermen, scientists, business people and criminals who populate the island has all the old-fashioned virtues of its increasingly popular predecessors.
Ordered back from a promising mainland vacation with her indignant fiance, Folger finds that her father seems to be withholding evidence in a drug-related murder that also has something to do with a plan to revitalize the island’s scallop trade.
SALAMANDER
By J. Robert Janes
Soho, $22
The latest book by Canadian author J. Robert Janes in his tremendous series about an unlikely team of detectives in occupied France brings Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the French Surete and Inspector Hermann Kohler, attached to the Gestapo in Paris, to Lyon on the day before Christmas 1942, where a terrible arson fire in a cinema has killed 183 people–many of them railway workers watching one of their favorite films, Jean Renoir’s “La
Bete Humaine.”
“They were a pair, these two detectives,” a Nazi officer muses. “St-Cyr was a patriot and therefore untrustworthy; Kohler a doubter of Germanic invincibility. They’d been in trouble with the SS far too many times.”
And indeed the two cops almost immediately raise the hackles of Lyon’s top Nazis and their most ardent French collaborators as they search for an arsonist known only as Salamander who has struck at least three times before.
As in previous books in the series, sex–twisted and perverted by the times–plays a large part in the investigation. “I do not condone what happened during these times. Indeed, I abhor it,” says Janes in an author’s note. “But during the Occupation of France the everyday crimes of murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how were they solved?”
THE PROBLEM OF THE MISSING MISS
By Roberta Rogow
St. Martin’s, $22.95
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, had a sizable ego, but even he would have surely been surprised to find himself becoming one of the stars of someone else’s fiction.
Doyle teams up with Rev. Charles Dodgson (better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, as the creator of another timeless character, Alice) in a polished, poignant first novel by Roberta Rogow.
The lovely resort town of Brighton is the setting for this story of Doyle and Dodgson’s search for the daughter of a crusading politician, which manages to describe the dark details of Victorian child prostitution with total honesty while also being nostalgic and funny.
MASKED DANCERS
By Jean Hager
Mysterious Press, $23
If Tony Hillerman first opened the door for Native American mysteries, Jean Hager is now holding it wide in grand style. Her Molly Bearpaw books are full of energy and controlled anger, and her series about Mitch Bushyhead, police chief of Buckskin, Okla., are deliberately cool-headed looks at volatile issues.
In “Masked Dancers,” Bushyhead, a recent widower and concerned parent of a teenage daughter, continues his education into his own Cherokee heritage as he looks into the possibly linked deaths of a game warden and a high school principal. The warden was investigating the illegal slaughter of bald eagles, whose protected feathers featured in the tribal dances staged by the educator. The most likely candidate for the killings is a racist fanatic, but the principal’s wife also has some odd moves to explain.
THE DOCTOR DIGS A GRAVE
By Robin Hathaway
St. Martin’s, $22.95
St. Martin’s nourishes the genre’s roots by giving out an annual Malice Domestic Award for what it labels best first traditional mystery. The hero of its 1997 winner would certainly seem to fit that category: At first glance, Dr. Andrew Fenimore could come straight from a book by Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers.
A Philadelphia physician who dabbles in criminal investigation, Fenimore manages to be both sharp and soothing as he digs–literally–into the mystery of why the body of a recently dead young Native American woman came to be buried, sitting up, in an ancient tribal graveyard.
It’s only as we become better acquainted with Fenimore and his colorful band of associates that we see what Robin Hathaway is really up to–using the boundaries of the traditional mystery to contain a very modern story about social and cultural change. But of course that’s also what Sayers and Christie were up to in their time. Welcome to the club, Robin Hathaway.
