SOFT MONEY
By k.j.a. Wishnia
Dutton, $23.95
Filomena Buscarsela, the sharp and sexy creation of the male but very observant k.j.a. Wishnia, first appeared in 1997 in his self-published “23 Shades of Black,” which got so much attention it was picked up as a mass-market paperback. Now, in her second outing, Buscarsela has left the New York City cop shop “thanks to a premature mid-life crisis helped along by a full-blown drinking and drugging habit,” and has a beautiful, bright, 18-month-old daughter, Antonia, the result of a short but hot fling with a stud named Raul. To pay for food, rent and day care, the overqualified Buscarsela is working for an environmental foundation where she winds up learning to stamp envelopes.
But old habits die hard: She’s also looking into the murder of a local merchant, killed by voodoo-obsessed Dominican hoodlums, and trying to find out why a particularly nasty eco-villain from her first adventure is being allowed to wash his dirty money through her new employers.
Wishnia, who has an Ecuadorean wife and two children, has obviously watched them closely: The best parts of his hilarious and exciting book involve Buscarsela either taking Antonia with her on investigative jaunts or feeling bad because she has to leave her behind. He also has a perfect ear for female urban angst: “I take Antonia to the park. On the way, one of life’s little inconveniences broadcasts his desire to copulate incessantly with me. I decline.”
O JERUSALEM
By Laurie R. King
Bantam, $23.95
Was Laurie R. King afraid her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes were becoming too cozy as an old married couple? King has gone back to the edgy sexual tension of her first book in the series, “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice,” slipping in her latest story about them just as that memorable adventure ended.
It’s 1918: The 19-year-old Mary and her late-50s mentor have to get out of England to escape a deadly adversary, so Holmes’ well-connected brother Mycroft sends them to Palestine, where the fragile peace being held together by Gen. Allenby is threatened by dangerous forces.
It’s an inspired move on King’s part, because it also gives her the chance to do what she does better than virtually anyone else in the field: connect us, by thousands of details of language, custom, history and sensual impressions, to an alien environment. As Russell, Holmes and two marvelously imagined Arab guides named Mahmoud and Ali trek through the desert, visit ancient monasteries clinging like anthills to cliffs, take tea with Allenby in Haifa and skulk through or under the streets of Jerusalem, King puts us into each scene so quickly and completely that her narrative flow never falters.
And, as always in this audacious but respectful series, there is the continuing fun of seeing Holmes into and out of the web of fiction spun around him. Seated around a communal campfire, Mahmoud–a superb storyteller and reader–chooses from among many candidates (including an Arabic translation of a Nick Carter adventure) a nine-year-old copy of Strand containing a story “that Dr. Watson’s literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, had called `The Devil’s Foot.’ It featured a consulting detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes.” Holmes, King/Russell tells us, “jerked upright at the sound of his real name, badly startled. . . . Mahmoud very sensibly cut short the lengthy explanations of motive and method, simplifying both down to a few lines of dialogue and a dramatic conclusion.”
BLACKHEART HIGHWAY
By Richard Barre
Berkley Prime Crime, $21.95
You can make a strong argument that Richard Barre is the legitimate heir to Ross Macdonald as the dark poet king of California mysteries. His first three books about private detective Wil Hardesty (“The Innocents,” “Bearing Secrets” and “The Ghosts of Morning”) contain many moments of greatness, and his latest explodes into our senses in a perfect balance of action, suspense and emotion.
Hardesty has left his home base, the surfing paradise of La Conchita, to accompany his lady love to a TV-news convention in Bakersfield. He gets some local coverage himself when he breaks up a robbery attempt, which leads to a job offer from a powerful lawyer. The legendary country singer Doc Whitney, paroled after 20 years in prison for the drunken slayings of his wife and two daughters, has been seen back in town, bearing several grudges against the lawyer and his son, a racing driver and owner of music clubs. Hardesty’s job is to find Whitney and persuade him to do his menacing elsewhere.
Whitney turns out to be a complex, sympathetic character, the most believable fictional musician in recent memory, and Barre has filled his book with many other equally interesting people–including a thorny former cop and Whitney’s loyal first wife. As always, fatherhood plays an important part in the story: Wil, who lost a young son in a surfing accident, encounters similar pain at every turn. But the sheer beauty and strength of Barre’s writing gives “Blackheart Highway” a glow of redemption that’s extremely rare in any kind of fiction.
NO TIME TO DIE
By Grace F. Edwards
Doubleday, $22.95
What Grace F. Edwards does so well in her books about former New York cop Mali Anderson is to root us firmly and quickly in her Harlem setting. “The Lido Bar on 125th Street between Malcolm X Boulevard and Fifth Avenue is an old spot that has outlasted the Silver Rail, the Baby Grand, the Celebrity Club, the Midway, Frank’s Restaurant, Palm Cafe, Purple Manor, Vincent’s Place, and a number of other watering holes along the main artery,” she writes early in her third book about Anderson, due out next week, and this litany of historic icons from old record jackets and the pages of books about the Harlem Renaissance glows with past glory.
Then, just as quickly, she combines her novelist’s skills and her sociological instincts to capture the people of today’s Harlem: “When I stepped in, the barstools on the left were occupied by regulars who didn’t swivel an inch when the door opened. The television was perched strategically over the door and a newcomer could be appraised with a flick of a lid up, down, and back to the screen again. No motion to disturb the cool and chill and other casually maintained postures.”
Anderson is quickly up to her neck in a string of murders of women she has been close to. A sad lunatic called Ache, who gives new meaning to the phrase “serial killer” by sprinkling cornflakes on his victims’ kitchen floors, has Anderson in his sights–and he isn’t the only man who wants her dead.
In danger even though she’s surrounded by loving friends and family in her home on a historic, upscale block of houses known as Strivers’ Row, Anderson is our link to all the Harlems that ever were.
