Jury of One
By David Ellis
Putnam, $24.95
Chicago lawyer and political insider David Ellis certainly knows how to plot up a storm. As he did in “Line of Vision” (which won him an Edgar for best first mystery) and “Life Sentence,” he powers his latest legal thriller with a narrative engine that smashes through the barriers of coincidence and credulity, leaving readers breathless at the author’s audacity.
Not only is Shelly Trotter–a 35-year-old lawyer working for a non-profit firm as an advocate for children in trouble–the daughter of the current, conservative governor of the novel’s unspecified state, but she also turns out to be the birth mother of a 17-year-old boy charged with killing a police officer. That Ellis can make both of these rather large pieces of emotional baggage work inside an already complicated story is a tribute to his cleverness and compassion.
Trotter’s only chance of saving the boy she put up for adoption as a baby after she was raped at 17 is to take on his defense herself–to prove he was part of a federal sting operation against drug-dealing cops. But there are several problems: Trotter has never worked an adult criminal trial, and her father, who used up lots of political points covering up the rape and adoption, is afraid that escaping ghosts might haunt his political present.
As expected from past Ellis performances, there is a beautifully sustained trial sequence, with several surprises. But what really makes his third book so impressive are the human challenges he sets up and conquers.
Out of the Deep I Cry
By Julia Spencer-Fleming
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, $23.95
One of the great pleasures in a mystery reviewer’s life is watching a promising series take root and blossom into something strong and unusual. Julia Spencer-Fleming’s third book about Rev. Clare Fergusson, an Episcopal priest (and former Army helicopter pilot) in the small town of Millers Kill in upstate New York, is a perfect example: Worries about how the author would handle the building romance between Fergusson and Russ van Alstyne, the town’s married sheriff, are pushed aside by a growing awareness of the depth of each character’s commitment to his or her work, and we sense that it would take an emotional earthquake of some sort to endanger that.
Fergusson’s clerical abilities are also strengthened in her latest outing, as various choices between caring for people in peril and church traditions of property and history are made carefully. The season of Lent, with its emphasis on humanity beginning and ending as ashes, is particularly appropriate. And there’s a wonderfully detailed plot that takes the town of Millers Kill gradually back through the years to unveil the reasons for a current crime.
The Laws of Invisible Things
By Frank Huyler
Holt, $25
There are overtones of Michael Crichton (a mysterious disease), Stephen King (possible alien or diabolic intervention), even John Grisham (a young professional under pressure in a small Southern city) in Dr. Frank Huyler’s debut thriller, but he resists every chance to overhype his gripping story. And Huyler, an emergency physician, writes such subtly forceful prose–as shown in his 1999 book of short stories, “The Blood of Strangers”–that his novel quickly takes on a cool, uniquely powerful sense of dread.
Dr. Michael Grant, 35, has taken a job as partner and heir apparent to an elderly physician in a North Carolina city where he hopes to start a new life after his divorce from another, more-ambitious doctor. The practice of medicine has always been a problem for Grant, who seems to lack compassion: “Even the great struggles of his patients, the men and women whose lot he watched, felt distant, their real sufferings and deep fears and occasional pure bolts of joy as detached as a kaleidoscope or a freak show at a country fair.”
When a baby dies unexpectedly of a viral infection, Grant begins to feel guilty about not paying her illness enough attention. The child’s grandfather, a minister, questions Grant about her treatment but seems to forgive the doctor. Grant agrees to examine the minister’s son, the father of the dead girl, and finds traces of a strange and possibly rare new disease in the man’s eyes and throat. Then Grant becomes ill with the same symptoms: Huyler’s description of his emergency treatment is coldly honest and frightening.
As Grant recovers, he and the daughter of his sharply drawn medical partner (a man who is all head and very little heart) try to track down the truth about the disease. Is it indeed a medical breakthrough? Or does it have moral and religious roots, as the minister seems to believe? In lesser hands, the book’s ending could easily have turned into just a blast of weird science or heavy-handed symbolism. But Huyler’s wisdom and restraint make it something more original.
Doctored Evidence
By Donna Leon
Atlantic Monthly Press, $22
If Donna Leon ever decides to spin off her increasingly popular mystery series starring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venetian police, she could do a lot worse than devote a whole book to the elegant and intriguing Signorina Elettra, who ostensibly works for Brunetti’s stuffy and stupid boss but who spends most of her time on her computer, finding out secret things for Brunetti and his ace assistant, Vianello.
In Leon’s latest Brunetti outing it is Elettra (at one point wearing shoes “with heels so high they would have raised her above even the worst acqua alta,” Venice’s notorious floods) who finds the link between the murder of a nasty old woman and the secret past of a top government official. As Brunetti’s brilliant wife, Paola (who also cooks up a succulent dish of lamb stew and polenta), helps him discover from a book she is reading, the deadly sin that led to the old woman’s killing wasn’t greed, as everyone first suspected, but pride.
Aside from crime, great food and the sights and smells of Venice, Leon also gives us sharp insights into the way Italy is governed. “An English friend of his had once remarked that living here was like living in something he called `the loony bin,’ ” the commissario muses. “Brunetti had had no idea of what the loony bin actually was, nor where it was located, but that hadn’t prevented him from believing that his friend was correct: further, he thought it as precise a description of Italy as any he had ever heard.”
Hard Revolution
By George Pelecanos
Little, Brown, $24.95
Reviewers of George Pelecanos’ terrific crime novels have compared him to Zola and Balzac. I’d like to add, at the risk of appearing pretentious (which has never stopped me before), another major French novelist: Proust. The search through memories propels and colors all of Pelecanos’ stories; people who work at Greek-owned diners are the glue holding several worlds together; the flashy or reliably sturdy cars that the good guys and the hoodlums drive in this new book are earlier versions of the ones they’ll live and die in down through the years; the popular music they batter and soothe their souls with has lasting echoes; the sports stars they worship are equally eternal and interchangeable.
As in Proust, the characters move onstage and off with ingenuity: Nick Stefanos, a major player in several Pelecanos books, stumbles on the scene briefly in his latest; and a baby named Granville Oliver, helped by young, still-idealistic Police Officer Derek Strange, will grow up to be the fascinating heavy of another novel.
Readers of the last three Pelecanos books, “Soul Circus,” “Hell to Pay” and “Right as Rain”–the ones that finally pushed him into the arena of fame and fortune he has always deserved–will recognize Strange as the 50ish black private detective who tries to save young boys by teaching them to play football, but who can’t always resist his own temptations.
Pelecanos takes a big chance by making his new book a prequel to those modern outings. He shows us Derek first in 1959, a 12-year-old learning to live within the law and the racial tensions of the time, and then nine years later as a rookie police officer whose first major test is the riots that explode through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., after Martin Luther King Jr. is killed. But any chance that these earlier versions of the Strange we’ve already come to know will turn out to be mere psychological conjuring tricks is quickly blown away by the author’s most important talent: the ability to put us into a character’s skin and make everything about him understandable.
“Hard Revolution” is packed with many such revealed souls, from Strange’s heartbreakingly fragile older brother, Dennis, to a hateful but instantly recognizable threesome of white hoodlums whose determination to kill and die is a part of their DNA. Written in a clean, chiseled prose style that strips away sentimentality yet still makes you weep for the lives lost and wasted, it’s a major structure on our country’s highway of history.
Paperbacks in brief: When “Dia de los Muertos,” Kent Harrington’s tremendously atmospheric thriller about fallen federal drug agent Vincent Calhoun, was first published in a limited hardcover edition in 1997, there was a flutter of film interest. Like many other readers and ravers, I was particularly looking forward to the scene where Calhoun is trying to help a fat criminal escape from Mexico to the U.S. by jumping a Jeep over a narrow canyon. Would Marlon Brando be paid some huge sum for a small but vital role? The film was never made, but now, thanks to the inventive Capra Press, a new crop of paperback readers can share that priceless moment of noir imagination ($17.95).
