LEGACY OF THE DEAD
By Charles Todd
Bantam, $24.95
You may have heard recently that those excellent post-World War I mysteries by Charles Todd are really a mother-and-son collaboration. However the Todds split up the writing and researching chores, the fourth in their series, “Legacy of the Dead,” is a most-impressive effort. Readers who were worried about how the relationship between a severely shell-shocked Scotland Yard inspector and the constant voice in his head of the man he was forced to execute for cowardice could develop into a series can breathe another sigh of relief and pleasure. Cpl. Hamish McLeod, the Highlander who finally cracked under the pressure of the Somme offensive of 1916, is as real and important a part of the Todds’ new book as his troubled host, Inspector Ian Rutledge.
It’s Hamish who provides the link to the strange, stubborn young Scotswoman named Fiona who refuses to defend herself against murder charges or to explain why the little boy she has raised as her own was given to her by the child’s missing mother. By making Hamish a key figure in the plot instead of just a bizarre (if totally believable) burden carried by Rutledge, the Todds have also brought to life the hundreds of thousands of ghosts who walked the British landscape after World War I. ” `They never saw him dead,’ ” Hamish says, after Rutledge visits his own godfather, a man who can’t seem to accept the fact that his beloved son is gone. ” `They never closed the lid over his coffin and watched the earth shoveled down on it. Like me, he never came home. And so they’re still waiting–‘ “
The British collective psyche has indeed never recovered from the lacerating losses of World War I; read such recent books as the novels of Pat Barker or Julian Barnes’ “Cross Channel” if you need proof. Now the Todds–Charles and Caroline–have shown that Americans can also play on those same sad strings of memory.
THE DEEPEST WATER
By Kate Wilhelm
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $23.95
There’s a strong and fascinating father-daughter relationship at the heart of Kate Wilhelm’s latest, a book that manages to grab our attention from the start with a maximum of rich writing about character and place and a minimum of narrative hype or hokum. But why should we expect anything different from an author who has shown us virtually every year since 1963 that genre fiction can support (and perhaps even encourage) such talent and intelligence?
When best-selling novelist and compulsive womanizer Judson Vickers is shot to death at his secluded home on a remote Oregon lake, his daughter, Abby, begins to suspect that his murder has something to do with the fact that his latest book was about to stir up some private passions. Suspects include Vickers’ current lady, Abby’s husband and a specter from the writer’s time in Vietnam.
In lesser hands, tossing all these ingredients into one pot could make for some predictable boiling over. But Wilhelm just lets everything simmer along nicely, dropping in new ingredients from time to time, avoiding almost all the cliches and pitfalls lurking below the surface of her fictional lake.
Twentysomething Abby is a smart and spunky hero, but I suspect that the character closest to Wilhelm’s heart and persona is Felicia Schaeffer, a 69-year-old artist and neighbor of the dead man who is so full of life, wit and wisdom that she could well anchor a book–and a series–of her own.
A SMALL DEATH IN LISBON
By Robert Wilson
Harcourt, $25
British author Robert Wilson lives in Portugal, and that enigmatic country’s recent past plays an important part in this wonderfully rich mystery. It begins with the brutal sex murder of a 15-year-old girl in 1998, then flashes back to the tangled, bloody saga of a Nazi-backed financial enterprise starting in 1941. Both stories are so strong and full of fascinating characters that our attention, and our faith that they will eventually be connected, never wavers.
A middle-age detective named Jose Coelho, better known as Ze, narrates the contemporary story in the first person. His British wife, whom he met while exiled in London with his military officer father during the anti-Salazar political uprisings of the 1970s, died a year before, leaving Ze the often-baffled single parent of a wise, artistically talented and sexually active 16-year-old daughter. The first part of the WWII story focuses on an ambitious, rough-edged but sympathetic German businessman, Klaus Felsen, enlisted by the Gestapo to seize the lion’s share of Portugal’s supply of tungsten, vital to the Nazi war effort. Later, we meet Manuel Abrantes, a much darker and more dangerous character, who turns out to be the main link between the sins of the past and the perversions of the present.
MURDER IN BELLEVILLE
By Cara Black
Soho, $23
As she did in her well-received debut novel, “Murder in the Marais,” Cara Black continues to play expertly on a fantasy probably held by most Americans who spend any time in Paris: What would it be like to live and work here permanently? Because her Aimee Leduc had an American mother (who split when Aimee was a small child) and a father who was a French police officer, this tall, occasionally gawky but modishly attractive young woman makes an ideal role model–mixing an outsider’s insights and an insider’s outlook on the full sweep of Parisian life.
“Murder in Belleville” is set in 1994, when that jaunty district (once the home of artists and performers like Edith Piaf) has become a predominantly Arab neighborhood and the French government is cracking down hard on illegal Algerian immigrants. Computer expert Aimee once again puts aside her dull but well-paying work designing an industrial client’s software system to dive headfirst into a crime scene–narrowly missing death in a car-bomb explosion that kills a young woman she was supposed to meet. The victim had ties to a government minister (“A member of the aristocracy, he’d once been a card-carrying Communist,” Leduc muses. “Now he’d become a watered-down socialist, like everyone else.”) as well as to a leader of a militant Algerian protest group. Not the least of Black’s many accomplishments is the way she serves up a wide array of Parisian types like spicy appetizers on a tray.
THE ICE HARVEST
By Scott Phillips
Ballantine, $19.95
It’s Christmas Eve 1979, on the shady side of Wichita, Kan., at the start of this astonishing debut novel from a writer who manages to put a funny, modernist spin on a piece of our noir past: Jim Thompson frosted with a blast of Jonathan (“Motherless Brooklyn”) Lethem.
“Frosted” is indeed the operative word: Cold creeps through the shoes, coat and soul of Charlie Arglist–once a promising lawyer, now a sad legal hack for criminal club owners–as he prepares to slip out of town with a suitcase full of loot from one of his employers. There’s enough blood, booze and tawdry sex to fill the stocking of any Thompson fan, but also a touch of perverse sentimentality that arouses our “It’s a Wonderful Life” instincts. As bodies fall around him, leaving the Kansas snow as red as Santa’s suit, Charlie manages to achieve a measure of humanity that keeps us rooting for him to make it.
BRIEFLY: “Paradise Square,” by E.M. Schorb, the only authentically electronic fiction entry to make it to the finals of The International eBook Award Foundation’s first set of awards recently handed out in Frankfurt (it shared the $100,00 Grand Prize with a Vince Lombardi biography), is a fine place to begin your own digital journey into eBook mysteries. Available online from Denlinger’s Publishers Ltd. (www.thebookden.com) for a download fee of $6.95, poet Schorb’s story of Edgar Allan Poe’s involvement in the investigation of the murder of a young woman who sold hot corn-on-the-cob on the seedier streets of New York is full of dark, Poe-like imagery and apparently impeccable research.
On the paperback front: “Iguana Love,” by Vicki Hendricks (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $11.95), gives fans of her explosively loony first novel, “Miami Purity,” a chance to see what a writer can do with the noir genre when she pulls out all the stops. Nurse Ramona Romano loves scuba diving as much as she enjoys sex, and she sends up lots of bubbles as she slides deeper and deeper into a doomed drug scheme.
Female sex obsessions of a different stripe propel the growing suspense in “Cracks,” by Sheila Kohler (Zoland, $12), an expertly creepy story set in a South African girls school in which author Kohler (or at least a character bearing her name) plays an important part.
And “An Uncertain Currency,” by Clyde Lynwood Sawyer Jr. and Frances Witlin (Momento Mori/Avocet, $14.95), stages a major coup by introducing us to a psychic who is occasionally amazing and totally believable. Mario Castigliani, who first realized he had psychic powers as a boy in Italy, is a 50ish semifailure and charlatan (he never knows when his real powers will visit him, so he leans heavily on show-business skills) when he wanders into Floraville, Ga., and gets hired to help the local law solve a series of murders. Sawyer and Witlin put us so quickly into Mario’s camp–especially as he suffers through a disastrous meal at the town’s only Italian restaurant and deals with a failed yuppie daughter–that his visionary powers don’t really matter.
