An Unpardonable Crime
By Andrew Taylor
Theia/Hyperion, $24.95
Andrew Taylor has always had a wonderfully sly way of dealing with his main characters: In his justly renowned Roth Trilogy, three mysteries about clergymen and their flocks and families in a fictional London suburb (“The Last Four Things,” “The Judgement of Strangers,” “The Office of the Dead”), he managed to make fun of almost everyone without slowing down the pace or spoiling the fun.
Thomas Shield, the young schoolmaster who narrates Taylor’s latest (which arrives with many rave reviews and an award from the British Crime Writers Association), is not exactly a fool–although he did spend some time in a mental institution because, wounded in mind as well as body during the Napoleonic Wars, he threw his Waterloo Medal at an army officer as a public protest. Hired to teach at a shady, Dickensian establishment in Stoke Newington, Shield stumbles through a series of chance encounters and odd events involving two of his pupils: a banker’s son and a 10-year-old American named Edgar Allan Poe, whose foster parents want him to have an English education.
Despite his good intentions (his caning of his charges is light and reluctant) and occasional heroic moments, such as chasing off an Irish drunk who claims to be Edgar’s real father, Shield is clearly in over his head. The two boys and their families turn out to be part of a plot that includes murder and bank fraud–not to mention erotic encounters for the naive schoolmaster with two desirable women.
Dickens, Charles Palliser (who wrote the engrossing “The Quincunx”) and the later Poe are clearly among Taylor’s influences here. But the real homage seems to be to Wilkie Collins, who invented the crime novel as we know it with such classics as “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone.” You couldn’t ask for better literary company than that.
Family Claims
By Twist Phelan
Poisoned Pen, $24.95
Would you hire a lawyer whose first name was Twist? Enough people obviously did to keep Twist Phelan busy until she decided to retire from her law practice and turn her talents and energies to such arcane activities as long-distance bicycling, paddling outrigger canoes, climbing mountains and writing mysteries about a tall, lean, hard-muscled lawyer named Hannah Dain.
Dain is the Cordelia figure, the peacemaker in a “King Lear”-like family law firm in an Arizona town called Pinnacle Peak. Weary of dealing with her grouchy father and her jealous older sister, she has decided to leave for a more congenial job in Boston. But when a real estate deal she put together falls apart and threatens to leave the family firm on the hook for $2 million, Dain has to put her plans on hold–investigating the failed deal and fighting off threats of physical and fiscal damage at every turn.
Phelan’s plot has occasional overtones of deja vu, but her writing has a spare toughness and lack of sentimentality that barrels you through the rough spots like a good road bike. Best of all are the legal details, those tiny moments of advice and decision that fill a lawyer’s day. Phelan has obviously been there and done that–even though she now prefers to write mysteries about it.
The Confession
By Olen Steinhauer
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95
There are many ways of continuing a mystery series, including the most familiar device of focusing on one central character. Olen Steinhauer has taken another route. His gripping, subversive first novel, last year’s “The Bridge of Sighs,” was set in 1949, in an unnamed East European country. In this second book of what has been billed as a trilogy, it is 1956, and Emil Brod, the hopeful young homicide detective who played the central role in “The Bridge of Sighs,” has turned into a settled, pragmatic secondary character, content to search for the perfect martini.
As the socialist promises of the immediate postwar years fade, Steinhauer now focuses on another homicide detective, the hulking Ferenc Kolyeszar, who wears on each finger a ring with a bloody personal history. Kolyeszar is a talented novelist himself, although his one published book is long out of print. The confession of Steinhauer’s title is to be his next book–a work as depressing about the fate of artists in the Soviet-dominated satellite countries as “The Gulag Archipelago” was about Russia.
Agonized by his wife’s infidelities and driven perversely into sins of his own, Kolyeszar also comes up against a frighteningly amiable KGB agent named Kaminsky who has been assigned to his office. As they work on several past and present murders, Kolyeszar digs a hole for himself that seems inescapable.
More ambitious in scope and action than “The Bridge of Sighs,” with deaths and betrayals exploding out of control toward the end, “The Confession” makes us wonder just what Steinhauer will do for his final encore.
A Death in Vienna
By Daniel Silva
Putnam, $25.95
As he has proven in such carefully crafted thrillers as “The English Assassin” and “The Confessor,” Daniel Silva knows how to combine an active intelligence with a fresh look at familiar material.
When a bomb at the Austrian Wartime Claims office leaves its chief investigator close to death, art restorer and secret Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon, who performed valiantly in Silva’s two previous outings, is persuaded to put aside his work on a Bellini altarpiece in Venice to go to Vienna to investigate.
It turns out that a leading suspect is Erich Radek, the Nazi officer in charge of wiping out all evidence of the Holocaust in the last days of World War II, now living under a different name, in charge of a prestigious business-development group in Vienna. Reading his own mother’s account of her time in concentration camps, Allon realizes that Radek is the man who almost had her killed, and he plunges into the chase with extra vigor.
Various groups of ex- and current Nazis want Allon to lay off, but they’ve got the wrong boy. Art isn’t the only thing he restores: He takes a stab at justice and human decency as well. And Silva keeps the pot from boiling over with cool brilliance.
In a late scene at Treblinka, Allon hears the mechanical details of the attempted cleanup of the camps from an unrepentant Radek:
” `It operated for a little more than a year.’
” `And yet they still managed to murder eight hundred thousand.’
” `Not eight hundred thousand.’
” `How many then?’
” `More than a million. That’s quite a thing, isn’t it? More than a million people, in a tiny place like this, in the middle of a Polish forest.’ “
The Game
By Laurie R. King
Bantam, $23.95
Laurie R. King has done some excellent work in her crime novels about contemporary female police officers, but I’d venture to guess that her series about Mary Russell–the young American woman who marries Sherlock Holmes in his later years–will earn her the most honors. King has managed to capture in Russell all the smart, angry, overqualified women who came boiling out of the world’s cities and colleges in the early 1900s, willing to risk everything from scorn to physical violence to be given a chance of proving their worth.
Russell’s scholarship–her knowledge of language, history and literature–plays a large part in the adventurous investigations she conducts with Holmes, and King cleverly uses her own erudition to set up the action.
In this seventh outing, a plea from Holmes’ ailing older brother, Mycroft, sends them off to India in search of British intelligence agent Kimball O’Hara–who, it turns out, was the model for Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” when he was a boy.
The other great strength of the Mary Russell books is that King never forgets the true spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps as underrated as a writer of thrilling adventures as he is overvalued (by some) as a writer of credible detective stories. “O Jerusalem,” the fifth book in the series, was a marvelous journey into Arabian politics, and “The Game” distills the essence of the decline of the British Raj into one extremely exciting volume.
