KILLING ME SOFTLY
By Nicci French
Mysterious Press, $24
Why are mysteries about sexual obsession so hard to make believable? In “Killing Me Softly,” the British couple who write as Nicci French pull it off as well as anyone in recent memory. Only occasionally do we want to toss a bucket of cold water over research scientist Alice Loudon as she plunges into a dark chasm of desire and danger with mountain climber Adam Tallis; most of the time we watch in voyeuristic delight and hold on during the rough bits.
After locking eyes with total stranger Adam in the street outside her office, Alice goes back to his Soho flat and couples so furiously and in such detail that before long she’s consulting her doctor about wear and tear. She also walks out on her now-insignificant other, Jake, and leaves most of her friends behind in the dust.
Adam, of course, is hiding some dark secrets: Not only is he not quite the hero of the Himalayas that the press makes him out to be, but most of his previous female conquests have wound up dead. Will anybody believe the desperate Alice when she tries to convince them Adam is literally a lover to die for? The authors are so slick in their portrayal of mutual folly that we almost don’t care how it comes out.
ANONYMOUS REX
By Eric Garcia
Villard, $23.95
Vincent Rubio, the Los Angeles private detective hero of this loopy and inventive first novel by Eric Garcia, is a dinosaur–a velociraptor, one of those cute little guys in “Jurassic Park.” (Rubio hates the movie: “Rubbish, the whole thing, especially the way we poor Raptors were portrayed. We can be dangerous, yes, but we do not kill indiscriminately, and I’ve never known a one of us to kill a human for no good reason.”) To sum up a few thousand years of unrecorded history according to Garcia, dinosaurs never did become extinct: They secretly evolved and joined human society, masking their more unusual physical traits with clever costumes and cosmetics.
We first meet Rubio while he’s screwing up a simple job, photographing an adulterous iguanodon. Stoned on his drug of choice, basil, Rubio goes to the wrong house, gets his car towed and once again disgraces himself. A former representative of his species on the prestigious National Council, which sets the standards for dinosaur behavior, Rubio has sunk low after the supposedly accidental death of his beloved partner. Now he has to beg for crummy jobs from Teitelbaum, the brutal Tyrannosaurus rex who runs the largest detective agency in California.
But the private eye genre is nothing if not forgiving: Even a disgraced dinosaur can regain his place in society. Rubio triumphs after making a link between some suspicious deaths (including one during an arson fire at a popular dino disco called the Evolution Club) and the bizarre experiments being done by Dr. Emil Vallardo on interspecies breeding of humans and dinosaurs.
Garcia plays it almost completely straight, respecting all noir traditions, and comes up with lovely touches like Dressler’s Syndrome–when a dinosaur thinks he’s a human–and the fact that most National Football League players are brontosaurs.
BODY POLITIC
By Paul Johnston
St. Martin’s Press, $22.95
Like the outrageous, brilliant “Garnethill,” by Denise Mina, “Body Politic” also won a prestigious John Creasey Award for Best First Novel. It, too, is set in Scotland–not the bleak, present-day Glasgow slums but the Edinburgh of 2020, where a political movement called the Enlightenment has supposedly done away with crime. In a city fueled by foreign tourist dollars, ordinary citizens live quiet, sensible lives under the benevolently watchful eyes of “guardians” and elite cadres of auxiliary police.
It’s part Plato’s “Republic,” part Orwell’s “1984,” part Huxley’s “Brave New World,” all made original and exciting by Paul Johnston’s vision and imagination. His Quint Dalrymple is a former police star–the legendary Bell O3–who five years before stopped an infamous serial killer dead in his tracks. But he’s been demoted out of the ranks for insubordination and works as a common laborer, although he is allowed to moonlight as a private detective.
A new series of murders that mirror the crimes of his ex-adversary threaten the tourist industry, so Dalrymple is reluctantly invited back in to heal the body politic. Like Eric Garcia with his dinosaurs, Johnston sticks closely to the basic tenets of the genre: the corrupt boyhood friend, the mysterious little sister, the whiff of high-level connivance. “Since the Enlightenment won power in Edinburgh,” Dalrymple says, “the popularity of crime novels has gradually declined, though not as much as the guardians think. They would prefer citizens to read philosophical investigations rather than those of Holmes and Poirot, Morse and Dalgliesh, but even in the `perfect city’ people hanker after the old certainties.”
PLOTS AND ERRORS
By Jill McGown
Ballantine, $22.95
It’s only August, but I’m ready to declare the winner of the annual Agatha Christie Most Complicated Plot Award. And unlike Christie, Jill McGown not only knows how to devise a dazzlingly devious tangle of clues and coincidences, she can also create fully fleshed cops and villains who speak and think in recognizably human fashion.
As we work our way backward and forward through the maze of five murders connected to the wealthy and dysfunctional Esterbrook family, we also learn things about the relationship between Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd (no first name ever dropped) and Detective Inspector Judy Hill of the Bartonshire police. Hill is now pregnant with Lloyd’s child, although only one of her colleagues has guessed so far.
“Lloyd gave a low whistle, which just might have been his first genuine reaction that evening, Judy thought. But even she, after twenty years, rarely knew what was genuine and what wasn’t. That was one of the reasons she had never moved in with him. She never knew what he truly felt about anything; not even the baby. He just produced whatever reaction he felt appropriate. Or amusing. He could always fool her.”
McGown frames her complicated story like a play, with acts and scenes introduced by quotes from “Hamlet.” The one that best captures the rich flavor and ferocious mental energy of the whole enterprise comes from Act 2, Scene 1: “See you now;/ Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;/ And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,/ With windlasses and with assays of bias,/ By indirections find directions out.”
SAFE HARBOR
By Eugene Izzi
Avon, $24
First published in England in 1995 when Eugene Izzi was having trouble finding an American outlet, this is middle-range Izzi–which means it’s better than 75 percent of most other crime fiction. Since there won’t be any more after this, make a point of watching just how carefully Izzi builds his characters, by small touches and off-the-cuff words, so that before long even the outrageously camp hired killer known as James Bracken becomes as familiar as an old friend. And notice how Izzi does just the reverse with his lead character, former mobster Tommy Torelli, reconstructed as Mark Torrence after he turned government informer.
Although we’re on Torrence’s side in his battle with revenge-seeking Bracken, we gradually see why Torrence’s family members might have reason to feel he hasn’t been quite the loving husband and father he thinks he is.
Thanks to Avon for this epitaph to a great Chicago writer’s career. Now maybe it’ll think about putting some of Izzi’s greatest hits (“The Take,” “Bad Guys,” “The Booster,” “Prowlers”) back into print. Meanwhile, you can always take your chances at libraries and used-book stores.
IN BRIEF: As the larger houses trim their mystery lists, I’m glad to report that lots of the more interesting genre slack is being picked up by small presses. Poisoned Pen Press (6962 E. 1st Ave., Scottsdale, AZ 85251) is continuing the excellent 1930s New Orleans series about nightclub owner Wesley Farrell by Robert Skinner; “Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting” is its first title. . . . “Death at the Dog” is a wonderful 1941 British mystery by Joanna Cannan, handsomely reprinted by Rue Morgue Press (P.O. Box 4119, Boulder, CO 80306). . . . Perseverance Press and John Daniel, two small publishers in Santa Barbara, CA (P.O. Box 21922, ZIP code 93121), have joined to publish “Baby Mine,” by Janet LaPierre, and “Royal Flush,” by Shelley Singer–two promising new series. . . . Michael B. Druxman’s lively, cinematic “Nobody Drowns in Mineral Lake” has been published by The Center Press (30961 W. Agoura Rd., Westlake Village, CA 91361). . . . Greycliff Publishing (P.O. Box 1273, Helena, MT 59624) has reprinted a classic 1951 fishing mystery, McDonald Hastings’ “Cork on the Water.” . . . From the audacious Serpent’s Tail Press (available in good mystery bookstores) comes “The Dogs Are Barking,” by Australia’s John Dale, whose “Dark Angel” was also a vivid thriller. . . . And while I’ve asked all the publishers of electronic books to send me copies of upcoming mysteries, the only one that has responded so far is Hard Shell Word Factory, which happens to be my own publisher. Why should they suffer for their smartness? “Pig in a Park,” by Pauline B. Jones, is a lively, sharply written new cozy from Hard Shell (www.hardshell.com) that deserves attention.
