LISTEN TO THE SILENCE
By Marcia Muller
Mysterious, $23.95
When a mystery writer feels his or her fans are becoming too complacent in their perceived familiarity with a favorite protagonist, it’s sometimes a good idea to breathe new life into the series by rolling the dice and turning that crime fighter inside out. It’s hard to say what Marcia Muller was thinking when she started writing “Listen to the Silence,” but the consistently inventive California-based novelist must have had a lot of faith in her legion of admirers, because she’s really done a number on her high-flying P.I., Sharon McCone.
Because Muller has waited all this time to reveal that McCone was adopted as a child, the author certainly could be accused of playing a cheap trick on her readers and her lead character. Here, however, the device not only helps explain a great deal about McCone–who makes the discovery while going through the papers of her late father–but it gives her another family of eccentrics over which to obsess.
McCone always knew that some Indian blood ran through her veins, but her parents never told her how pure it was. They purposefully kept her in the dark about her Shoshone roots, mostly to keep her from learning of a deeply held family secret. Discovering that both her mothers had independently conspired in this subterfuge, for their own different reasons, only compounds McCone’s anguish. Nor does it help when, just as she’s about to introduce herself to her birth mother–a lawyer–the woman is seriously injured in a suspicious hit-and-run accident, possibly perpetrated by her birth father, who’s now a developer.
It takes nearly every one of the novel’s nearly 300 pages to untangle a mess that began building more than 40 years ago. McCone’s search into her background inevitably leads to concurrent investigations into the accident and the identity of her birth father and his planned defilement of a sacred lake several hundred miles from the reservation in Montana. While this gives McCone little time to feel sorry for herself, Muller is allowed the freedom to establish the credibility of several intriguing new characters–including a half-sister and half-brother, who almost certainly will pop up again as this fine series continues to unfold.
Muller’s husband, Bill Pronzini, is also represented this month, with “Crazybone” (Carroll & Graf, $23), in which his Nameless Detective tries to make sense of a widow’s refusal to accept delivery of a $50,000 life-insurance payment. Her subsequent disappearance convinces Nameless to take a closer look into the family’s dark corners, while a visit to his mother-in-law adds the weight of another investigation onto his shoulders. Fans of the 30-year-old series will want to check out Nameless’ new adventure.
LEAVIN’ TRUNK BLUES
By Ace Atkins
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Minotaur, $22.95
The recent revelation that blues legend Robert Johnson left behind a son and heir, who now can claim royalties on his long-dead father’s catalog of amazing songs, makes Ace Atkins’ debut novel, “Crossroad Blues,” look almost prescient. Even without the authenticating news, however, “Crossroad Blues” stands as one of the most impressive debuts in recent years, and Atkins’ blues-historian protagonist, Nick Travers, a welcome addition to the genre.
While “Crossroad Blues” put Travers on the trail of some missing Johnson master recordings, “Leavin’ Trunk Blues” finds the Tulane University musicologist in Chicago, where he hopes to interview Ruby Walker, a forgotten blues diva. Walker has been in prison for 40 years, wrongly convicted of murdering producer Billy Lyons. If you’re guessing that a bad dude named Stagger Lee might have had something to do with the murder, you’d be right. It becomes Travers’ task to not only document the stories of several Mississippi musicians who were part of the Great Migration from the Delta to Chicago, but to also turn up enough dusty clues to free Walker.
Travers, who acts and looks less like an academician than the professional football player he once was, is one tough hombre. He fits into the New Orleans and Chicago blues milieus as well as any white, middle-age harp player could, but seems to have met his match in Lee, a vicious hoodlum whose tentacles reach from the Robert Taylor Homes to the Checkerboard Lounge and beyond. Lee has mastered the fine art of ice-pick sticking, but he leaves most of the dirty work to two wicked wenches named Fast Lovin’ Fannie and Butcher Knife Totin’ Annie.
Trust me, it works. Atkins, a journalist when he isn’t turning out novels, doesn’t just use music as a vehicle for storytelling. He understands the blues and paints loving portraits of those musicians for whom it is a lifelong obsession–plus, he makes the unseen parts of New Orleans and Chicago really come alive. Having avoided the sophomore jinx in “Leavin’ Trunk Blues,” Atkins looks to be on his way as a major player in the mystery genre.
KILL ME TENDER
By Daniel Klein
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $22.95
While we’re on the subject of music and mysteries, how about a series starring that ace sleuth, Elvis Presley? Go ahead and scoff at such an absurd conceit (I did), but give credit to Daniel Klein, too, for making Elvis as credible a P.I. as Kinky Friedman’s wisecracking Kinky and most of the cats, nuns and reporters out there in the genre who are solving crimes.
Elvis, it seems, has just returned from the Army and basically is living in a vegetative state at Graceland, when he is alerted to the possibility that a serial killer is targeting members of his Tennessee fan clubs. In true good-ol’-boy fashion, the singer immediately takes it upon himself to comfort the survivors and investigate the mysterious deaths. The pursuit takes him from Memphis to Nashville and Chattanooga, and along the dusty backroads of the rural South, where he is tempted to cheat on teenage Priscilla.
Klein appears to have done his homework in Presley Studies 101. He has invested his mystery with plenty of things we know to be true about life in Graceland at the time–right down to peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches–and he’s always true to the singer’s spirit and legend. We want to believe that Elvis actually would come to the aid of his endangered flock, and, while doing so, find time to sing gospel songs in the back of a Cadillac with some newfound black friends.
Of course, some of us would buy Elvis as the Easter Bunny, too, so let’s hope Klein can find a way to keep this series fresh and entertaining, at least until the Second Coming or Priscilla’s inevitable lawsuit.
LITTLE MISS EVIL
By Lev Raphael
Walker, $23.95
Campus politics always provide a fertile ground for back-stabbing, double-dealing and murder. Perhaps, as some wag once observed, because the stakes are so small.
In the breezy “Little Miss Evil,” the English department of the State University of Michigan is all atwitter over the bestowing of an endowed chair in women’s literature to a hack romance writer from Boston. No one pretends to think it’s a good idea, so everyone becomes a suspect when she’s found dead.
Nick Hoffman, who teaches a course in crime fiction at the school, unavoidably becomes a central player in the drama when he begins receiving cryptic messages from an unknown source. Not that the amateur sleuth wouldn’t have inserted himself into the intrigue, anyway. There’s no way he could have kept his curiosity at bay.
Lev Raphael populates the department with a colorful lineup of pompous intellectuals and bumbling bureaucrats, all of whom could have done the dastardly deed. The most compelling of all is the title character, a feisty sex bomb who teaches classes in a get-up that wouldn’t be out of place at a Tina Turner concert. After trying to entice Hoffman into joining a departmental rebellion, she provides yet another mystery for readers: Can she get Nicky to switch teams by seducing him away from his lover, Stefan, if only for a quick roll in the hay?
DEATH IS NOT THE END
By Ian Rankin
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $11.95
At 73 pages, “Death Is Not the End’ is less a novella than a sketch developed from another, longer work, Ian Rankin’s “Dead Souls.” Still, Rankin offers a believable storyline, introduces interesting characters and establishes a sustainable pace.
Edinburgh Police Inspector John Rebus is enlisted by a couple of old high school pals to locate their son, who last was seen in a seedy Kirkcaldy pub sitting next to an exotic beauty. The local cops wrote off the disappearance as one young man’s way of dumping his fiance, but Rebus isn’t convinced, especially when his visit to the pub raises the hackles of some local hooligans. Soon the missing-person case becomes the least of Rebus’ concerns.
Even though “Death Is Not the End” is very much a Rankin product, it is a bit too much of a morsel to pass for $11.95 worth of prime rib. Nonetheless, completists will want to take a look at this book, which is part of the Criminal Records series of novellas, edited by the ubiquitous Otto Penzler.
