GONE, BABY, GONE
By Dennis Lehane
Morrow, $24
Cheese Olamon, “a six-foot-two four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who’d somehow arrived at the misconception that he was black,” is telling his old grammar school friends Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro why they have to convince a mutual chum, gun dealer Bubba Rugowski, that Cheese didn’t try to have him killed: “You let Bubba know I’m clean when it comes to what happened to him. You want me alive. Okay? Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone.”
Of all the chilling, completely credible scenes of sadness, destruction and betrayal in “Gone, Baby, Gone,” Dennis Lehane’s fourth and possibly best book about Kenzie and Gennaro, this moment stands out because it captures the essence of Lehane’s success.
Private detectives Kenzie and Gennaro, who live in the same working-class Dorchester neighborhood of Boston where they grew up, have gone to visit drug dealer Cheese in prison because they think he’s involved in the kidnapping of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. Without sentimentalizing the grotesque figure of Cheese, Lehane tells us enough about his past to make us understand why he and the two detectives might share enough trust to possibly save a child’s life when all the best efforts of traditional law enforcement have failed.
By putting Kenzie and Gennaro just to one side of the law (but not totally outside; they have several police friends, an important part of the story), Lehane adds depth and edge to traditional genre relationships. The lifelong love affair between Patrick and Angie–interrupted by her marriage to his best friend–is another perfectly controlled element that grows and changes as we watch. In a plot heavy with dead, abused and missing children, Patrick mourns and rages while Angie longs for a child of her own.
So the choices made by both of them in the final pages of this absolutely gripping story have the inevitability of life and the dazzling beauty of art.
THE SWEET FOREVER
By George P. Pelecanos
Little, Brown, $23.95
George P. Pelecanos’ latest book is not only a detailed and emotionally powerful crime novel, it’s also a virtual compendium and update of his other excellent novels, which are all similarly rooted in the non-political neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. Brought back for major roles are Marcus Clay, Dimitri Karras and other important players from “King Suckerman,” and there are poignant cameos by Randolph of “Shoedog” as well as the two Nick Stefanoses–grandfather and grandson–from “The Big Blowdown,” “A Firing Offense,” “Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go” and “Nick’s Trip.”
As always, Pelecanos uses jabs of pop music, basketball, clothes and cars to quickly root us in time and place. It’s 1986, and a woman in her 30s wears a Susanna Hoffs-style haircut “from the cover of the `All Over the Place’ album, not the redone Hoffs look off the new LP.” Karras is now working full-time for his friend Clay’s expanded chain of four Real Right record stores; Karras drives a BMW 325 and wears his graying hair moussed and spiked. The doomed basketball star Len Bias–just finishing his college career and about to sign a huge deal with the Boston Celtics–is on TV screens everywhere, admired equally by former local hoops hero Clay and a conflicted cop named Kevin Murphy who has misplaced his moral compass.
The complicated, satisfying plot involves $25,000 stolen from a drug dealer, several children in peril, smart adults who screw up their lives in dumb ways and the speed with which violence grows and explodes in unexpected directions.
ON BEULAH HEIGHT
By Reginald Hill
Delacorte Press, $22.95
A young girl is remembering what happened when she was 7 and some of her friends began disappearing: “Now there were policemen everywhere and all the time. We had our own bobby living in the village. His name was Clark and everyone called him Nobby the Bobby. He was a big, fierce-looking man and we all thought he was really important till we saw the way the new lot tret him, specially this great glorrfat one who were in charge of them without uniforms.”
Even without a knowledge of Yorkshire slang, anyone who has ever read a Reginald Hill book should recognize the “great glorrfat one” as Detective Supt. Andy Dalziel–the bulkier, rougher half of a team that includes the gently raised, college-educated Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe.
Fifteen years after Dalziel failed to find out who took three girls from the village of Dendale, the pattern seems to be recurring in a nearby town. Pascoe’s involvement in the new investigation is limited by depression brought on during his last case and by a serious medical threat to his own 7-year-old daughter. So most of the hard work is done by the wonderfully complex Sgt. Edgar Wield–gay, spectacularly ugly, the best interrogator in the British Isles–and by an interesting policewoman named Shirley Novello, who walks a fine line between ambition and subservience.
FEVER SEASON
By Barbara Hambly
Bantam, $23.95
In New Orleans in 1833, appearance is everything for people of color. “His own coat and waistcoat . . . were one badge of his freedom,” Barbara Hambly writes about Ben January, a surgeon and teacher of music. “Even more than the papers the law demanded he carry–and as much as the well-bred French his tutors and his mother had hammered into him as a child–they said, This is a free man of color, not somebody’s property to be bought and sold.”
When veteran science-fiction writer Hambly first introduced January, in the stunning and heartbreaking “A Free Man of Color,” the only problem seemed to be that the book told us so much about a vanished world that it couldn’t possibly support a sequel. Fortunately, Hambly has found a way to make it work–by putting January into a real crime, the case of a woman named Delphine Lalaurie, whose savagery toward her slaves managed to shock even her contemporaries.
“She was a tall woman, imperially straight; and though nearly every Creole woman of her age had surrendered to rich food and embonpoint, she retained the slim figure of a girl,” Hambly writes of the majestic Delphine on her first meeting with January. She has come to the reeking, corpse-clogged hospital where he is working during a cholera epidemic to warn him about helping a runaway slave girl accused of murder.
Ignoring that warning puts January into a situation so full of danger that in lesser hands it could easily have become overwrought. Hambly, however, knows that readers connect to characters rooted in honesty, regardless of how alien their environment may seem to us.
THE DOG WHO BIT A POLICEMAN
By Stuart M. Kaminsky
Mysterious Press, $22
Stuart M. Kaminsky won an Edgar for “A Cold Red Sunrise,” the fourth book in his deliciously mordant series about Moscow cop Porfiry Rostnikov, and his latest–No. 12–might be even better. Rostnikov, a one-legged inspector who lifts weights and sleeps in a T-shirt bearing the message “The Truth Is Out There,” is one of the most engaging characters in recent crime fiction, a sharp and caring policeman as well as the perfect tour guide to a changing Russia.
Now working in the Office of Special Investigation under a corrupt but efficient boss known as “the Yak,” Rostnikov has been promoted and promised full support “if one or more of the varied criminal organizations and the confused state bureaucracy attempted to impede the performance of his duties. Up to now, the Yak had been as good as his word and had successfully bought the loyalty of Rostnikov and his staff.” That staff includes a mad pathologist who talks to cadavers; an obsessive detective named Emil Karpo who spends “all his waking hours relentlessly pursuing criminals from both the past and present”; and Rostnikov’s son Iosef, a failed actor-playwright and veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
While Rostnikov and Karpo try to head off a war between two Mafia leaders, Iosef and his partner are looking into the latest disappearance of a popular, Yeltsinesque politician with a drinking problem. Two other detectives pose as Ukrainian high rollers to infiltrate a burgeoning business in illegal dogfights–hence the possibly ungrammatical but definitely appropriate title for this beautifully researched and energetically written story.
