Dreams of Justice

by Dick Adler

  When Yayoi, the youngest and most attractive of the women, strangles her philandering husband with his own belt in a blast of range, she turns for help to her co-worker Masako, an older and wiser woman whose own family life has fallen apart in less dramatic fashion. To help her cut up and get rid of the dead body, Masako recruits Yoshie and Kuniko, two fellow factory workers trapped in other kinds of domestic troubles. All of Kirino’s characters are sadly recognizable, and also like Miyabe she shows us another, darker view of a consumer economy undergoing some uncomfortable changes.

  INSPECTOR ANDERS AND THE SHIP OF FOOLS, by Marshall Browne (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Minotaur)

  “Anders had his hat and overcoat on. Not unusual, Matucci thought. He always appeared ready to depart, as if he was at home nowhere. It was a hint that his best work, best thinking, was to be done in solitary perambulations around whatever city was outside…”

  The mordant irony of a one-legged policeman doing his best work while stomping around in a strange European city is what energizes Marshall Browne’s second book in one of the most promising new mystery series in recent memory. We first met Anders—a top Italian cop who lost a leg to a 1980s terrorist bomb—when he was mopping up the Mafia villains in a city much like Naples, in “The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders.” Now he’s with Interpol in Lyon, where he and his flamboyant partner Matucci are treated like vaguely embarrassing relatives—until all 16 members of the board of directors of a giant chemical company are blown up in Frankfurt.

  Anders’s background as a bomb victim and expert is important here, but so is another unusual skill: he has just finished writing a biography of a distant relative, a poet named Anton Anders, and is the perfect person to interpret the clues left by the Chemtex bomber—in the form of quotations from a 15th Century poem called “The Ship of Fools.” With the help of an alluring French librarian, Anders works to connect the poem to an environmental action group calling itself Judgement Day, which appears intent on killing everyone involved in a proposed merger of several huge companies.

  Thanks to author Browne’s enviable ability to bring a setting to life with just a few unusual details (what would an Italian restaurant in a city half French and half German be like, for example) and the relatively deep pockets of Anders’s Interpol employers, we also get to visit some places off the beaten tourist track: Frankfurt, Munich, Lyon and especially Strasbourg—where on my next visit I’m sure I’ll be able to hear, if I listen carefully in the night, the wanderings of a man with a prosthetic leg…

  SOME BITTER TASTE, by Magdalen Nabb (Soho)

  If you didn’t make it to Florence this summer, don’t despair. It was probably too crowded, anyway—and there’s a new Marshal Guarnaccia investigation to keep you abreast of the sights, smells, tastes and traffic problems of that great Italian city.

  Guarnaccia, of course, is a non-commissioned officer in the caribiniere, the cops who keep the peace and solve local crimes. Above him is a sleek, smart captain—an officer who Guarnaccia fears thinks too highly of the Marshal’s intuitive skills (we know better: they are superb). Not only is the Marshal a rather bulky and decidedly unsleek figure who has to wear dark glasses because of an allergy to sunlight, he’s also a Sicilian—separating him even further from the ancient, wealthy Florentines whose domain he supervises.

  Part of the wonderful joke kept afloat by British-born author Magdalen Nabb is that this unwieldy outsider knows the city better than its landed gentry. “Isn’t that a copy of a statue in the Boboli Gardens?” the Marshal asks a soon-to-be-dead Brit in his stately garden. “Sir Christopher followed his glance and smiled. ‘No, no, it isn’t, but your memory doesn’t deceive you. The one in the Boboli Gardens is a Renaissance copy of this one, which is Roman, the second century A.D.’”

  Like Florence itself, Nabb’s books are not just about old artifacts. This one deals with a modern problem—Albanian immigrants, many of them illegal, with criminal backgrounds—and the still-smoldering fires of resentment of Italy’s treatment of its Jewish citizens during World War II. And the author never forgets that it takes fully-realized characters (including Guarnaccia, his loyal but often baffled wife and their two teenaged sons) to bring a series to life, no matter how glorious its setting.

  UNIFORM JUSTICE, by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly)

  Much of the world is still in a mess, but at least the American mystery scene has had some order restored to it: after several years of absence caused by a dispute between the author and her original publisher, a new Donna Leon book about Venice police commissario Guido Brunetti—the 12th in a memorable series—is ready for our immediate pleasure.

  Leon, an American who lives in England and Italy, is probably the best mystery writer you’ve never heard of—unless you’ve picked up her bestselling books at foreign airports or bought copies of the British editions on the Internet. She uses the relatively small and crime-free canvas of Venice (she has admitted in interviews that there are many more murders in her books than in the real life of that floating city) for riffs about Italian life, sexual styles and—best of all—the kind of ingrown business and political corruption which seems to lurk just below the surface of every enterprise. She also has Brunetti and his family eating better than any actual meal I’ve ever had in Venice (his wife, Paola, a college teacher of English literature, is a superb cook, and their teenage son and daughter always manage to make it home for lunch and dinner).

  Brunetti himself is a somewhat dour figure, who reads Greek and Roman history for pleasure and often seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Not for the first time in his career he found himself wondering how much longer he could do this work,” he thinks at one point during a frustrating, sad investigation into the faked suicide of a military cadet which quickly takes on political and social overtones.

  We share his distress, and silently urge him to continue—especially now that the publishing dispute has been settled. Luckily, Paola is waiting at home with something called “Gugliemo’s soup,” which contains 12 heads of garlic, is believed to be a sure cure for everything from worms to high blood pressure—and is, as Mrs. Brunetti adds, “an even surer way to get yourself a seat on the vaporetto tomorrow.”

  DON’T LOOK BACK, by Karin Fossum (Harcourt)

  If you miss the great Martin Beck mysteries by Maj Sowall and Per Wahloo, set in Stockholm, or find Henning Mankell’s currently popular series about the dour Swedish cop Kurt Wallander just too much of a downer, you should be as delighted as I am to welcome to American bookshelves Inspector Konrad Sejer—a disarmingly thoughtful, refreshingly gentle and totally likeable senior police investigator in Oslo, Norway.

  This is the fifth in Karin Fossum’s Sejer series, well-received in Europe but the first to be published here. From Felicity David’s expertly unobtrusive translation, we learn gradually that Sejer is a widower with one daughter and a half-Somalian grandson, Matteus, on whom he dotes. (He even enjoys taking the child to Legoland.) There’s also a large dog called Kollberg, who is cut some slack by Sejer’s condo association because they like the idea of a detective inspector living there.

  But Sejer’s bland exterior hides a fierce intelligence and the sharp instincts of a natural-born cop. Called in to investigate the disappearance of a child in a mountain village, Sejer deftly alternates respect for the family with a toughness toward possible perps that’s frightening because of its rarity. That case is solved quickly: the child went to look at some rabbits at the home of a harmless man with Down’s Syndrome. But when they both report somewhat belatedly that they saw the naked body of a woman at the edge of a nearby lake, Sejer and his ambitious, able young assistant Skarre return to the town, where a dark mystery of loss and repression begins to take shape.

  It turns out that the murder victim, 15-year-old Annie Holland, was an enigma—an athlete full of strength and vigor, but also the troubled victim of physical and mental turmoil. Various scenarios about her fate are explored, and the one Fossum ch
ooses to conclude with is as stark as a classic tragedy and as common as the people next door.

  “You have good instincts,” Sejer’s boss says to him at one point. “But there’s one thing you do have to realize… You are not the hero of a detective novel. Try to keep an objective mind.” Fossum’s subtle, understated artistry makes sure we all do.

  SOUTHWESTERLY WIND, by Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza; translated by Benjamin Moser (Holt)

  The next stop on our Grand Crime Tour is Rio de Janeiro, where the estimable academic and novelist Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is ending his beautifully sad and seductive series about a memorable cop—Sergeant Espinosa, in charge of the Copacabana Precinct in that Brazilian city. A 29-year-old man named Gabriel, who works at a boring job in a large office, has no love interest and lives with his overprotective mother, comes to Espinosa with an unusual problem: a psychic has predicted that Gabriel will kill someone before his next birthday—just two months away.

  Where other policemen might give Gabriel the rude boot or suggest a trip to a psychiatrist, the sympathetic Espinosa decides to have Gabriel followed—by one of his associates who is recovering from bullet wounds received in a previous book. Two murders of people within Gabriel’s fragile orbit occur quickly, and the way Garcia-Roza goes about having Espinosa find out what’s really happening should send readers scrambling for the first two books in the series—“The Silence of the Rain” and “December Heat”—as well as hoping he’ll change his mind and bring back his extremely interesting creation.

  BELSHAZZAR’S DAUGHTER, by Barbara Nadel (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)

  The Jewish community of Istanbul is the unlikely but fascinating setting for this first mystery by British author Barbara Nadel, who manages to quickly convince us that she has a deep understanding of the long and basically friendly relationship which Jews have enjoyed with their Turkish neighbors.

  That relationship is threatened by a series of crimes that start when an old man named Leonid Meyer, a Russian Jew, is found beaten to death in the shabby Balat district, his body disfigured by acid and his room smeared with blood in the shape of a swastika. A veteran police inspector, Cetin Ikmen, is put in charge of the investigation. As Robert Cornelius—a young Englishman involved in the case through his affair with a mysterious young Jewish woman called Natalia—describes him, Ikmen is “disheveled, red-eyed, reeking of both booze and cigarettes… like some sort of crime novel character, a refugee from the 1950s.”

  But Ikmen is also the best cop on the Istanbul beat, a mix of Maigret and Columbo with more recent dashes of Michael Dibdin’s Auerlio Zen and Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti. Aided by his assistant, Suleyman—a young man from a privileged family who often surprises the working class Ikmen with his insights and intelligence—the inspector plunges into several murders that link many layers of cultural crimes. If we’re lucky, the success of Nadel’s first novel in her native England will translate into a similar triumph here, prompting her to bring Ikmen back in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  DOCTORED EVIDENCE, by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press)

  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 Elletra, 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 the Commissario and his ace assistant, Vianello.

  In Leon’s latest Brunetti outing it is Elletra—at one point wearing shoes “with heels so high they would have raised her above even the worst alta acqua,” 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 which 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 once remarked that living here was like 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.”

  DEAD LAGOON, by Michael Dibdin (Pantheon)

  Here’s a wonderfully mixed bag—a mystery about an Italian policeman, written by a British author currently living in Seattle. Michael Dibdin brings his ironic investigator Aurelio Zen (star of “Ratking,” “Vendetta” and “Cabal”) back to his Venetian roots for a book that glistens with sadness and crackles with energy.

  Zen’s temporary return to Venice from Rome is a private affair: He’s using his vacation time to earn some extra money by poking into the disappearance of a wealthy American. Since his family home sits damp, empty and unrentable, Zen camps out there-which brings back a flood of memories and connections. There is an old contessa tormented by household ghosts; a boyhood friend neck-deep in a dangerous political movement; even a Hamlet-like wraith with a revelation about Zen’s own family history. Dibdin’s descriptions of daily life in the non-tourist sections of Venice in winter are instantly evocative, deepening our interest in the narrative without slowing it down for a second. The same can be said of his mordant observations about current Italian politics and police work. “Dead Lagoon” is rich and complex, the kind of mystery novel that enriches the form and justifies all those hours we spend reading books we hope will be like it.

  THE OTTOMAN CAGE, by Barbara Nadel (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)

  Having explored Istanbul’s Jewish quarter with much artistic force in “Belshazzar’s Daughter,” Barbara Nadel now brings to equally interesting life the large Armenian population of the Turkish capital. A major part of Nadel’s success is due to the continuing presence of Cetin Ikmen, a veteran detective who is the brains of the city police’s homicide division. Constant smoker, drinker of large quantities of anything alcoholic, this father of nine children is very smart but seriously underpaid. Ikmen lives “the life of a struggling working-class Turk”—in a “crowded, reeking apartment in Sultan Ahmet, an area of the city that not only boasted most of the famous Istanbul monuments but also a large shifting population of backpackers, drug dealers, pimps and illegal immigrants.”

  Ikmen’s best friend since they were schoolboys, Dr. Arto Sarkissian, also works for the police—but in the much better paid position of criminal pathologist. In spite of a certain snobbery on the part of Arto’s wife, the two men are very close—and it’s Sarkissian who opens the door to the generally more affluent Armenian community when the body of a young drug user at first thought to be Armenian is found in a strangely empty apartment in a building attached to the famed Topkapi Museum, in a neighborhood known for its “Ottoman Mansion Hotels” as an inducement to history-obsessed foreign tourists.

  If Cetin is a very modern Turk, his young and able assistant, Mehmet Suleyman, reflects another tradition. “It hadn’t been so long ago that he had existed safely inside his old beliefs,” Nadel writes of Suleyman. “If you lived a good life, Allah would provide a lovely perfumed garden complete with willing little slave girls in the next, far better existence beyond the grave… Exactly when that had all changed so drastically, he could not now recall.”

  Ikmen’s investigation into the young man’s death becomes tangled up with ambitious plans funded largely by wealthy Armenians to curtail public drug use. And if some of Nadel’s villains are too obvious too early, her impressive ability to conjur up a character like Citen and the details of the city in which he lives is more than enough to make such flaws unimportant.

  10

  American Blood

  I haven’t spent nearly enough time in New Orleans, but thanks t
o the mysteries of such writers as Dick Lochte, James Sallis, Julie Smith, James Lee Burke, Toby Dunbar and Robert Skinner I feel I know it well. Detroit is another terra incognita, alive in my mind because of books by Jon A. Jackson, Loren D. Estleman and Elmore Leonard. Chicago, of course, belongs to Sara Paretsky—but she has lots of competition.

  Alaska warms up under the touch of John Straley and Dana Stabenow; the Southwest (and especially its Native American population) is the turf of Tony Hillerman, Kirk Mitchell, et al. My visions of Cincinnati have been shaped originally by Jonathan Valin’s Harry Stoner series and more recently polished by the husband and wife team writing as Cathie John.

  California mystery stars include Michael Connelly, John Shannon, Jan Burke, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, Stephen Greenleaf, Domenic Stansberry and T. Jefferson Parker—a few names from a long list.

  Boston is the home of Jeremiah Healy, William Tapply, Dennis Lehane, the ubiquitous Robert Parker and the much-missed George V. Higgins. And just a few miles south, in Brattleboro, Vermont, Archer Mayor shines with a singular light…

  THE SURROGATE THIEF, by Archer Mayor (Mysterious Press)

  Far from the flashier big city settings of bestsellerdom, Archer Mayor—rooted in the rough granite soil of Brattleboro, Vermont—is producing what is consistently the best police procedural series being written in America. Only Reginald Hill, creator of the Yorkshire odd couple Dalziel and Pascoe, is a serious rival—and his books do have the colorful hook of a protagonist (the original 600-pound gorilla, Andy Dalziel) who might explode at any moment.

  Mayor’s books about Joe Gunther range from strictly local crimes to national concerns which link Brattleboro to the world’s problems: his last one, “Gatekeeper,” manages to make a sudden wave of drug-related violence in Vermont a believable problem. In “The Surrogate Thief,” Gunther is involved in a case that is painfully personal. Thirty-two years ago, when Joe was a young Brattleboro cop anxious to learn his trade, he made some mistakes and compromises as he investigated the murder of a sullen grocery store owner who nobody liked. Gunther’s wife was dying of cancer; the killing seemed to have been the work of a burglar who soon vanished; Joe let it slide into a cold and neglected file.