Burning Moon
By Richard Barre
Capra, $25.95
For anyone who has been reading mysteries on a regular basis for the last decade, it’s impossible to drive north on California’s Highway 101 between Ventura and Santa Barbara and not think of Wil Hardesty as you pass by the town of La Conchita, where an unlikely banana plantation flourished for a while. Hardesty–the Vietnam War veteran, avid surfer, mourning father and private detective creation of writer Richard Barre–made La Conchita his home in four perfectly crafted novels, beginning with “The Innocents,” which won a Shamus Award. Then, in one of those business mistakes that seem to ravage the mystery field like a plague of locusts every few years, Barre lost his publisher, and Hardesty dropped out of sight.
It is with extreme pleasure that I’m able to report–thanks to a smart little Santa Barbara publisher called Capra Press, which has hired Barre as associate publisher–the return of Hardesty in absolutely full flower. For those of us who saw the writer as the logical heir to another Santa Barbara novelist–the late, much-missed Ross Macdonald–“Burning Moon” has the smack and tang of a cold, fresh wave across the face. Like Macdonald, Barre uses old family sadness to help describe but not fully define his main character. Hardesty thinks of the son he lost in a surfing accident every time he goes out on his board, but it doesn’t stop him from going out. The pain of that loss and the breakup of his marriage still throb behind his eyes, but he works hard to keep a connection with his ex-wife, Lisa, who in “Burning Moon” needs his help more than she will admit.
A cold, proud Vietnamese fisherman who has built up a successful seafood business starts the story when he asks Hardesty to look into the suspicious drowning death of his rebellious son. The fisherman blames his half-brother, a shadowy and beautifully drawn villain whose unlikely compound is surrounded by a series of fascinatingly nasty police officers and federal agents with Machiavellian agendas, as well as by Chinese and Vietnamese gangsters grappling for power.
There’s also the welcome return of Hardesty’s old friend Denny Van Zant, from “The Ghosts of Morning,” who joins Hardesty in a surfing session that seems to a non-expert to be as evocative as anything since Kem Nunn’s”Tapping the Source.”
The truth is that nobody–not even Macdonald or his wife, Margaret Millar–has written as well about Santa Barbara and its unique environs as Barre. Here he is in his new book on the scabby suburb of Isla Vista, where generations of feckless University of California students and greedy landlords vie for new lows in gracious living:
“It did, however, boast his favorite name for a street.
“Sabado Tarde–Saturday afternoon–that sweet sadness marking the divide between Friday and Monday, the feeling that always accompanied his college reflections.”
That same “sweet sadness” shines through on every page of “Burning Moon.”
Good Morning, Killer
By April Smith
Knopf, $24
April Smith interrupts a female FBI agent’s search for a serial rapist to bring us a breaking story, and this act of courage and imagination immediately lifts her new thriller to a superior level. “FBI AGENT TO STAND TRIAL IN LOVE SHOOTING” shouts a headline in a Los Angeles newspaper–so close to a real life story in Los Angeles a few years ago that surely must have started Smith’s “What if?” engine racing.
By making her Ana Grey (who first appeared in 1996 in the much-heralded but somewhat disappointing “North of Montana”) the kind of woman who could get involved in a rough relationship with a Santa Monica police detective that ends in a burst of bullets at her apartment, Smith risks having Grey appear too flaky and emotionally fragile for her job. But real police officers and FBI agents get blindsided by sex all the time: Check out other recent headlines with Los Angeles and Chinese connections. The fact that Ana stumbles into a possible fatal attraction makes her more believable as a woman and an investigator.
It also helps that Smith is a writer with a laser eye that can record with cold precision the details of the daily life of her crime-solving subjects. A description of the office of an FBI supervisor recently transferred from Manhattan to Los Angeles (“A bookcase held his New York City horror show collection of Statues of Liberty, bound Playbills, NYPD mugs, a whip, a miniature guillotine, a human skull, a severed finger, possibly real, a dusty centennial quart of Guinness ale, a black wig and a replica of Poe’s cottage in the Bronx”)tells us almost everything we need to know about the man–especially when Grey adds, “I once saw him in his car, in the far reaches of the garage, sobbing.”
Compared to the other seriously flawed characters who surround her (her hot-wired lover, a frighteningly dysfunctional police widow, the self-destructive parents of a teenage rape victim and the sadly spooky serial rapist), Grey easily becomes the strongest person in the book. We know her, we trust her instincts, and we look forward to her return.
Persuader
By Lee Child
Delacorte, $24.95
Lee Child is the Thomas Hardy of the thriller world: Most of his terrific books about former military police officer Jack Reacher begin with a coincidence that would have delighted that old English master of the accidental plot device. Early in Child’s latest, Reacher is ambling through the streets of Boston of an evening when he spots in a crowd of concert-leavers a man he knows to be dead–because Reacher killed him 10 years before.
Reacher makes a phone call, and is almost immediately up to his neck in an off-the-books Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into the affairs of a criminal called Zachary Beck, who apparently runs a huge drug operation from a remote castle on the Maine coast. It looks like Quinn–the guy who returned from the dead–is Beck’s boss, and somewhere in that vast house is a female DEA agent whose cover has been blown.
The way Reacher gets himself into the castle is a beautifully devious scene that opens the book with a satisfying bang. Things slow down occasionally after that, particularly in flashbacks that show why Jack hates Quinn, a vicious former government employee turned rogue arms merchant. But there are always great bits of arcane knowledge to carry us toward the next explosion of action–such as how to use a couple of raincoats to turn your car over on a deserted road to confuse pursuers and then how to carefully put it back on its wheels with as little damage as possible.
There’s also Child’s perfect pitch about Reacher, a man with a reassuringly solid sense of his own abilities. “The best way to clinch a pending promotion is to let them think you’re just a little dumber than they are,” he notes when he’s angling to become Beck’s new head of security. “It had worked for me before, three straight times, in the military.”
The Book of Light
By Michelle Blake
Putnam, $24.95
As this reviewer has said before, the hard part of writing a good religious mystery isn’t showing us that the priest or rabbi is smart enough to solve crimes but convincing us that they really believe what they preach during their day job.
Michelle Blake, creator of Lily Connor, the tall Episcopal priest who still wears cowboy boots under her robes in the churches of Boston to remind her of her Texas roots, is an excellent example of a writer successfully walking that thin edge between faith and entertainment. This is the third book in the series, and in each Connor carries around with her an ample portion of doubt, enough to make her drinking problem a worry every time she orders a beer.
Making things even rougher in “The Book of Light” is the central presence of an unlikable colleague from Connor’s past: Samantha Henderson, a noted biblical scholar with a bad set of attitudes. Working as the temporary chaplain at Tate University, Connor–along with her police photographer boyfriend–gets sucked into an escalating dispute about the existence of some material that might be alternate sources for the New Testament Gospels.
Henderson and her young assistant appear to be in some danger, physical as well as spiritual. But the book’s greatest threat is Connor’s apparent inability to convince herself or any of the Tate students who come to her for guidance that she has any real answers. That’s the true cliffhanger in this beautifully crafted mystery.
Blood for Blood
By S.K. Rizzolo
Poisoned Pen, $24.95
Reviewers of S.K. Rizzolo’s excellent first mystery, “The Rose in the Wheel,” about a young woman trying to keep herself and her baby daughter alive after being set adrift in the London social stew of the early 1800s, evoked such writers as Kate Ross and Laurie R. King as role models. I’d like to add Anne Perry to that list, especially because of the way she and Rizzolo have solved the “Upstairs Downstairs” problem by each creating a pair of characters who can move freely on all levels of an extremely stratified society.
Penelope Wolfe, daughter of a diplomat, was trying to make her living as a writer in the first book, worn down by a shiftless painter husband. Now she’s a paid companion to Lady Ashe, a sympathetic socialite. The other half of Rizzolo’s investigative team–a crusty old Bow Street Runner named John Chase, who fancies Wolfe but is also a bit frightened of her–arrives at the Ashe house when one of the servants is found murdered.
With a range of suspects from Luddites to pro- and anti-Bonapartisans, Wolfe, Chase and especially Rizzolo (a high school teacher in Los Angeles) manage to keep their eyes on the ball with admirable restraint.
Legacy
By Alan Judd
Knopf, $24
It feels so good to have in hand a new spy novel by a writer with literary credentials and narrative skills that a reviewer might be tempted to overreact. So let’s begin with what’s not here. There are no fireworks in “Legacy”–no smashing escapes from the Louvre or chases through the glossy streets of Paris, no secret societies or vast business cabals ready to take over the world.
And Alan Judd’s hero–Charles Thoroughgood, a young Brit who has left Cambridge and the army in the mid-1970s to try his hand at espionage–is no budding James Bond or Harry Palmer, either. By choice or chance, Thoroughgood first comes across as a bit thick, a young man with no fixed ideas about what he should be doing, aside from a vague loyalty to his late father, who also worked for MI6. He’s not hard to like, but he’s also not the most exciting spy in his class.
That’s why it’s so exhilarating to watch him come to life and grow into his job–first to try to persuade his former classmate, a Russian named Viktor Koslov now working in the Soviet Embassy, to become a defector, and then to clear his father’s name when the old agent is accused of having worked for the KGB.
Judd has written several well-received novels and an excellent biography of Ford Madox Ford, another writer who knew how touching and involving it can be to show rather ordinary men rising to extraordinary challenges.
Unpaid Dues
By Barbara Seranella
Scribner, $25
City of Strangers
By John Shannon
Otto Penzler/Carroll & Graf, $24
Two memorable series out of Southern California reach their sixth episodes in new books deserving of more review space in a less-crowded month.
Once again, in “Unpaid Dues,” it’s her loyalty to old friends from her days as a biker/druggie/hooker that gets Munch Mancini into trouble–this time as the body of a salty character known as New York Jane links Mancini to a scam she pulled 10 years ago and threatens the life she’s fashioned for herself and her 8-year-old daughter, a marvelous creation called Asia.
Mancini probably suffers more for her past sins than any character since Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables,” but Barbara Seranella knows exactly when to make her stop whining and start fighting back.
John Shannon’s missions for his Jack Liffey are usually more socially conscious and less personal, but in his latest, the payback for a job finding several missing children includes some time for Jack on the psychiatric couch of one of their fathers.
Just dumped by his longtime ladyfriend and not allowed to see his teenage daughter because of unpaid child support, Liffey finds himself more lost and depressed than ever, breaking into tears at inappropriate moments. He’s eventually consoled by two women he meets during an investigation in Southern California’s Iranian community. But anyone expecting a lighthearted romp from angst expert Shannon is obviously new to the series.
