Dreams of Justice

by Dick Adler

  Now events have come back to haunt him: a gun used in a fascinating, frightening scene of marital violence turns out to have been the same one fired during the ancient murder. Joe, who has moved through political and police thickets to become the field force commander for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, feels with some justification that he must look into the case again. While his ambitious lover Gail Zigman runs for state office and becomes too preoccupied to absorb Joe’s concerns, Gunther both instinctively and scientifically follows an old trail to a man who disappeared and was reborn.

  Mayor is especially good at writing about women, from the understandably distracted Zigman to Joe’s wise and funny mother and a terribly sad former high school queen who now can’t leave her shabby apartment because of chronic fatigue. As always, Gunther’s hand-built team of cops is both interesting and supportive—even that loosest of cannons, the “infamously difficult” Willie Kunkle, who moved with Joe to the VBI. Back in Brattleboro, Mayor says with the quiet irony that lights up his work, “Nobody here had ever admitted missing having Kunkle around.”

  SPEAK ILL OF THE LIVING, by Mark Arsenault (Poisoned Pen)

  Arsenault’s second mystery about investigative reporter Eddie Bourque, who’s now scraping out a living writing and teaching in the mill town of Lowell, Mass., is even better than his Shamus-finalist debut, Spiked. Like Archer Mayor in his Vermont-set Joe Gunther series, Arsenault excels at depicting ordinary folks adjusting to changing economic circumstances. He also has an abiding respect for the role of print journalism in telling their stories. “News writers can’t afford writer’s block; it’s a luxury for people without deadlines,” Bourque muses as he sits in a Lowell diner and punches into his laptop a story for the Associated Press about banker Roger Lime, supposedly carjacked and burned to death, who suddenly resurfaces alive six months later, as shown in a kidnapper’s photo sent to Lime’s wife.The published story brings a letter from Bourque’s older brother, Hank, who’s serving a life sentence for murder. “I know who’s doing this,” Hank writes, sending Bourque off on a dark and dangerous search for truths both personal and public. Arsenault’s extremely likable hero has a knack for getting info from tough female cops, but best of all, he’s a completely believable journalistic icon—a man who makes the right choices because he believes in the value of his work.

  SIX-POUND WALLEYE, By Elizabeth Gunn (Walker)

  If it takes a village to support an excellent police procedural series, Elizabeth Gunn’s fictional town of Rutherford, Minn., should have a statue to the genre in its town square. Her ensemble of police characters and her deadly eye for the telling details of everyday life put Gunn up there with the best: Ian Rankin and Reginald Hill in the United Kingdom, Archer Mayor in the U.S.

  The sports metaphors that have provided the titles for Gunn’s four books about Jake Hines, the head of Rutherford’s investigations unit, are an important part of her literary equipment: She makes even the most urbanized and/or anti-athletic reader quickly understand how large these activities loom in the lives of most Americans. In fact, it’s not fishing but ice hockey that takes up a lot of Jake’s attention here, as he has to skate carefully around the troubles of the teenage son of his friend and mentor, Rutherford’s chief of police, while looking into the bizarre shooting death of a boy waiting for a school bus.

  Readers new to the series might be surprised when the dead boy’s father, a pathetic bully, uses a racial insult to attack the dark- skinned Hines, the child of a mixed marriage. “I try not to waste any energy on dinosaurs,” Jake tells a colleague. “I mean, the N word, in the twenty-first century? Please.” But when Hines seeks to ease his soul with a casual visit to his foster mother, Gunn’s compilation of tiny details fills our heart with everything we need to know about this interesting and credible man.

  PILLAR OF FIRE, by Robert Irvine (St. Martin’s)

  Robert Irvine has written seven previous books about a Salt Lake City-based detective named (after an ancient Christian prophet revered by Mormons) Moroni Traveler, but his latest is so strong that he deserves to be treated as a genuine discovery. Set in a harsh Southwestern landscape made familiar by Tony Hillerman, where tangled issues of religion as tough as any fathered by Umberto Eco are stirred up by winds from the past as deadly as the best of Ross Macdonald, “Pillar of Fire” also manages to be original and totally riveting.

  Traveler’s complicated relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gives the book an immediate edge of danger and mystery. He and his father/partner know most of the Mormon leaders and have rattled the bones in many of their closets, but the Travelers also have status in the Gentile (non-Mormon) world that occasionally makes their services necessary.

  When the daughter of a church elder runs off to join a charismatic healer and a cult of radical dissidents in the desert town of Fire Creek, Moroni is persuaded to help rescue the elder’s dying grandson. Not the least of Irvine’s many accomplishments here is to make the town a major character in the book—a place first poisoned by an accident of geography and now doomed by warring theologies.

  TOTAL RECALL, by Sara Paretsky (Delacorte)

  The really good writers find ways to defuse our quibbles early on. On Page 86 of Sara Paretsky’s latest, and probably best, book about private detective V.I. Warshawski, a writer friend of her lover’s says about Warshawski’s frenetic work schedule, “If you learn anything as you bounce around Chicago like a pinball in the hands of a demented wizard, I will listen breathlessly to your every word.” And just a few pages later, Warshawski’s journalist buddy, Murray Ryerson, asks her:

  “ ‘What’s the real story for you here, Warshawski? Radbuka and Wiell? Or Durham and the Sommers family?’

  “I frowned up at him. ‘They both are. That’s the problem. I can’t quite focus on either of them.’ ”

  With those two deft strokes, Paretsky lets us know that she knows that Warshawski’s constant zooming around Chicago on foot or wheels, never stopping until she drops from exhaustion or hunger, is not just a distraction but an important part of this particular story, and that the tangled plot elements—possibly faked recovered Holocaust memories, historically vicious insurance fraud, the twisted ambitions of a black politician and a Swiss businessman—will eventually come together with a bang that lights up their darkest corners.

  By the time that happens, 200 pages further on, we have also been allowed to see another side of Dr. Lotty Herschel, Warshawki’s raspy, much-loved friend. In alternating, first-person sections, Herschel tells about going to England from Germany just before World War II as part of the Kindertransport program that saved many children but also split up many families; about the cruel treatment of a jealous relative and the cool kindness of a British neighbor that led to her medical training; about the terrors of wartime life and love, and the scars they can leave.

  Herschel’s memories are made necessary by the sudden appearance of a man calling himself Paul Radbuka, who claims kinship with Herschel and her friend Max Loewenthal. Sponsored and coached by Rhea Wiell, a fascinating, controversial psychologist, Radbuka stirs up a storm of avoided memories—and also precipitates several violent attacks.

  The other strand of Paretsky’s story deals with black factory worker Aaron Sommers, whose life-insurance policy was apparently fraudulently cashed in a decade before his recent death. Lurking in the background here is a charismatic black alderman named Louis Durham and a suave Swiss businessman and his wealthy Italian wife, who now own the insurance company. Poor Ralph Devereux, the Ajax Insurance exec who took a bullet in the shoulder for love of Warshawski in her very first case, “Indemnity Only,” is caught in the middle once again, asked to risk job and limb to help her find the truth.

  I do have a couple of quibbles about “Total Recall”: the way a radio obligingly blurts out relevant news updates several times too many, for example. And if a breakfast Spanish omelette at Warshawski’s favorite Lakeview eatery, the Belmont Dine
r, really costs $15 (including tip), she should probably consider switching to Denny’s.

  But those are very small potatoes compared to the riches on tap here: several terrific stories; new insights into one of the genre’s most interesting character actors, Lotty Herschel; a wonderfully graphic virtual road map of Chicago’s shifting geography. Oh, and did I mention that Paretsky still writes with the kind of dazzling, diamond-hard clarity that can break your heart on every other page?

  SOUTHTOWN, by Rick Riordan (Bantam Hardcover)

  There’s a particularly heartbreaking moment early in Rick Riordan’s new Tres Navarre mystery when a veteran FBI agent named Sam Barrera shows up for work at the agency’s field office on East Houston St. in San Antonio. First, the guard at the door doesn’t seem to recognize him, then Sam can’t find his ID. And finally an older agent comes by, sees that Barrera is in trouble, and gently reminds him that he retired from the FBI 20 years ago.

  Barrera’s deteriorating mental processes have a major effect on Navarre, the former UC Berkley literature professor who came back home to San Antonio to pursue a career as a private investigator four books ago (winning major awards and legions of loyal readers). Sam, who now barely manages to run his own detective agency by writing constant notes to himself, holds the key to a dangerous puzzle: why does a brilliant and cold-hearted man named Will Stirman, sent to prison for selling illegal Mexican immigrants as slaves and now on the loose after a bloody escape, seem so intent on taking revenge on Navarre’s boss, Erainya Manos, and her adopted 8-year-old son Jem who plays on a soccer team which Tres coaches?

  “Southtown,” named for an old Latino neighborhood now rocketing upscale and leaving its own memories behind, is in danger of stumbling over a too-familiar genre gimmick: the villain with apparently limitless brains and financial resources. But it never falls, thanks to Riordan’s inherent fairness and imagination. He manages to make Stirman totally understandable in his rage against the people he blames for destroying his life, and by doing so turns him into a worthy opponent for the shrewd, sensitive Navarre.

  IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER, by Julia Spencer-Fleming (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)

  St. Martin’s annual Malice Domestic contest has promulgated some interesting mystery debuts in its 12-year history—Donna Andrews’s “Murder with Peacocks;” “The Doctor Digs a Grave,” by Robin Hathaway; “Simon Said,” by Sarah Schaber; and Susan Holter’s “Something to Kill For” among them. Julia Spencer-Fleming’s first novel is an especially worthy addition to that list, not only because it covers some familiar narrative territory in fresh ways but because it is so perfectly rooted in and shaped by its location—the upstate New York town of Millers Kill, in the Adirondack Mountains. When Clare Fergusson, a newly-appointed Episcopal priest, remarks to a local doctor how hard it is to believe that the murder of a young woman could happen in such a place, the doctor replies, “I’ve seen way too much to think we’re invulnerable just because we’re small. Small towns have the same evils that big cities do, just in smaller numbers. And instead of some anonymous stranger, the evil is always someone’s neighbor or husband or friend. That’s the hard part, that you can’t blame some ‘other’ when awful things happen. The ‘other’ is one of us.”

  It’s this sense of community claustrophobia which hangs over Millers Kill and gives “In the Bleak Midwinter” so much paranoid power. Clare is a tough and resourceful woman, a former Army officer who has handled many stressful situations, but what happens in her new parish almost overwhelms her. First there’s an abandoned baby left out in the bone-chilling cold on her church doorstep. Then comes the discovery of the body of the young woman who was the child’s mother, and the growing knowledge that some members of her small, upscale congregation know more about both events than they’re telling her or the slightly thick but definitely attractive chief of police. In place of the witty dialogue which a less secure writer might serve up to indicate the growing bond between the married policeman and the feisty cleric, Spencer-Fleming is smart enough to leave spaces for our imaginations to fill.

  STREETS ON FIRE, by John Shannon (Otto Penzler/Carroll & Graf)

  Apocalypses of all sorts—from earthquakes to toxic clouds—frame the vision of Los Angeles shown in the blunt and brilliant crime novels of John Shannon, so when his Jack Liffey notices “dark columns of smoke rising up and then shearing off westward at several points in South Central, offerings unacceptable to the gods” quite early in this fifth book in the series, you know that fiery hell is soon to break loose. Michael Connelly’s best-selling L.A. cop is named after the painter Hieronymus Bosch, but Shannon’s backgrounds are straight out of Goya—savagely sardonic comments on the quirks of life. Watching a parade of African-Americans protesting police brutality, Liffey is amazed to see the marchers suddenly break step and execute a perfect pair of Zulu war kicks. “Even here in the world of cell phones and MTV, the Zulu strut carried a kind of bizarre menace, as if thrusting onlookers into a dimension where ordinary defenses might not work.”

  Liffey, who specializes in finding missing children, knows from the start that the pair of lost young people he has been hired to trace this time are almost certainly dead: the black boy and his white girlfriend have disappeared after a run-in with a racist motorcycle gang called the Bone Losers—so far down on the mental food chain that they can’t even spell their chosen name right. But the boy is the adopted, much-loved son of a famous activist couple in South Central, and his detective friend Ivan Monk (on loan from Gary Phillips’s excellent series) recommends Liffey for the job.

  As it turns out, the search is anything but straightforward, especially when another adopted child—heartbreakingly lonely and articulate—points out to Jack that the missing white girl might be the key. Shannon steers his detective through minefields of Christian white supremacists and black nationalists with a great deal of angst but also a surprising amount of wry humor. “He didn’t think he had ever before gotten himself into a situation quite as ludicrous as this: a white man in old VW with Rustoleum red fenders parked in the heart of a full-bore riot in a black area to defend a black man from other white men who were—perhaps—sneaking up on the neighborhood. It was like zebras trying to slip into the middle of a high school prom to stage a duel…”

  SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI, by Naomi Hirahara (Delta)

  Talk about an unlikely hero for a mystery: Mas Arai is a hard-headed 69-year-old Japanese-American gardener living alone in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena. His income and his health are failing; his beloved wife (who kept him mostly on the straight and narrow by discouraging his worst habits) is dead; his estranged daughter is living in New York where she’s about to have a baby—a fact that Mas has to discover from a family friend.

  But Mas has hidden strengths and a terrifying past: born in California, he was one of many who went back to live in Japan during the Great Depression—and the city where his family settled was Hiroshima. When Mas returned to California as a young man, his scars were not on the surface (unlike those of his best friend, Haruo, who still wears his hair long to hide the burns from what the Japanese call the pikadon—the 1945 atomic bomb which leveled the city), but more than 50 years later his soul is still tortured by the event.

  Arai’s summer of the big bachi (a blast of really bad karma) begins when two visitors from Japan—a sleek and dangerous private detective and an appealing young journalist—show up at his door, looking for another friend who survived the Hiroshima bomb. Mas hasn’t seen or heard from Joji Haneda, who owns a plant nursery in Ventura, for many years, but the mention of his name brings back many bad memories and one frightful shared secret.

  In her first novel, Naomi Hirahara uses a wealth of fascinating historic and social details (Mas’s mixed feelings about another friend who still takes pride in having fought as an American soldier against Japan in World War II, for example) to create an original and exciting mystery. But her real strength is the way she keeps the background from taking
over a poignant story of loyalty and betrayal, full of real people who could be ourselves.

  THE ENEMY, by Lee Child (Delacorte)

  When did it begin, this fascination among writers of mysteries and thrillers with prequels—taking their main characters back to earlier parts of their lives? Did the “Star Wars” phenomenon have something to do with it? The high-flying and justifiably lauded Lee Child is the latest to succumb to this trend: his eighth book about former military policeman Jack Reacher happens in the first few days of 1990—when Major Reacher is still a top Army cop, abruptly and apparently randomly yanked back from Panama and the anti-Noriega Operation Just Cause to thankless duty at Fort Bird, in North Carolina.

  The death by heart attack of a two-star general in a nearby motel sets Reacher off on a beautifully-structured and increasingly exciting search for enemies—most of them inside the U.S. military hierarchy, men who are twisting and struggling to become top dogs in a changing world. Jack finds out that he was one of 20 similarly high-ranked MPs who were shuffled around the globe at the same time—but that it’s his own transfer which holds the key to the puzzle.

  As Child builds suspense in a deceptively spare, wiry prose style that doesn’t waste a word or miss a trick, we learn more about his older brother, Joe—a mysterious government official who played a vital part in the Reacher series’ first outing, “Killing Floor.” We also find out much more about the Reacher boys’ French mother—mentioned in passing in previous books, now seen bravely dying in Paris. “All my life I had assumed I was what I was because of my father, the career Marine,” Jack says. “Now I felt different genes stirring… [My mother] had lived through desperate times and she had stepped up and done what was necessary. At that moment I started to miss her more than I would have thought possible…”