Category Archives: Detective

****Career of Evil

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package, box

(photo: Jonathan, creative commons license)

By Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling), narrated by Robert Glenister – Devotees of the heavy metal rock band Blue Öyster Cult will recognize that its allusive and sometimes violent lyrics give this book its title, chapter titles, and break headings. Chapter 1, for example, is “This Ain’t the Summer of Love.” Nor is it.

Former Army Special Investigator Cameron Strike runs a not-exactly-thriving London private detection business, aided by his attractive factotum Robin Ellacott. They have only two cases going when a delivery man shows up with a package addressed to Robin and containing the severed leg of a young girl. Strike can think of three people from his past with the misogynistic leanings, brutality, and sufficient grudge against him to make them suspects in such a crime and desirous to involve him in it. Sending a leg—instead of some other body part—seems a cruel reference to Strike’s own leg, lost in a land mine detonation in Afghanistan and replaced by a prosthesis.

Kinky theories also emerge, and Robin uncovers in their file of “nutter” letters one from a young woman who wanted to cut off her leg. Robin, a psychology major before leaving university, recognizes the syndrome. Her exploration of Internet sites for transabled people and Body Integrity Identity Disorder yields more leads.

Two of Strike’s suspects are people he encountered in the military. The third, Jeff Whittaker, is the much younger second husband of Strike’s mother. Strike is convinced Whittaker orchestrated her death from a heroin overdose, but he was acquitted. Strike and Robin reconstruct the decades-cold trails of their three suspects. They have plenty of time to do so, as publicity about the leg business has discouraged any other would-be clients. They are inevitably brought into conflict with the police, still smarting from previous cases in which Strike out-investigated them.

Meanwhile, Robin proceeds half-heartedly with her wedding plans, perpetually annoyed at fiancé Matthew’s repeated attempts to get her to quit her job and his apparent jealousy of Strike. Even her stalker can detect the chill between them. When Matthew reveals a secret of his own, she calls the wedding off. The book’s early action takes place around the time of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and those festivities are a painful counterpoint to the couple’s unhappiness.

Galbraith has constructed a well paced, compelling narrative. She leaves a few clues on the table and could have had the main characters learn more about themselves, but few thrillers do that. It works well as an audiobook, narrated by Robert Glenister, because there is not an overabundance of characters and the pacing keeps the listener well engaged throughout its nearly 18 hours.

A slightly longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

*****Clockers

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The Wire

Larry Gilliard, Jr., as D’Angelo Barksdale, second from right, on his perch, running his game in The Wire

By Richard Price – When I read Richard Price’s new crime novel The Whites earlier this year, I knew I needed to loop around and read his 1992 classic, widely considered his “best.” It really is knock-your-socks-off. In alternating chapters, it adopts the point of view of Strike, a young crack dealer in the housing projects of fictional Dempsey, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, and homicide detective Rocco Klein.

Strike is a lower-level dealer who wants to get out of it, but without even a high school education, he can’t see any other path forward. Rocco is a seen-it-all investigator working in the county prosecutor’s office. What brings these two together is the murder confession by Strike’s straight-arrow brother Victor. Strike was supposed to make the hit, and didn’t, but he doesn’t think Victor did it either, and he wants to save his brother whatever way he can. Rocco figures Strike for the shooter, but can’t get Victor to change his story.

It’s a story about poor people, mostly black, and lost fathers, in which a few heroic mothers struggle to maintain family order. Strike’s cocaine- and crack-fueled world (he himself never uses the product) is under constant yet ineffectual harassment by federal, state, and local police, housing police, and narcotics officers. The homicide detectives, who are a little higher on the law enforcement pecking order, are less frequent visitors to this milieu. They have their own agenda and sometimes cooperate with the other authorities, and sometimes not. Strike can never be sure where loyalties lie, even those of his own runners (the “clockers,” because the drug market operates 24/7), who may ally with rival drug lords at any time. He certainly can’t trust Rocco, who is always playing games of his own.

What makes the book so powerful are the deep portraits of the characters. Both the main players are both strong and weak, the reader likes and loathes them in almost equal measure. Supporting characters—Rocco’s partner Mazilli and Strike’s boss Rodney, especially—are fully drawn and absolutely believable. The writing, including the characters’ dialog, is pitch-perfect.

Price was one of the writers for the best-tv-ever series [!!], The Wire, and reading this book after seeing the show, I certainly saw echoes of some of its notable characters: D’Angelo sitting on his perch in the projects, managing a team of young runners; Omar, the invincible hit-man cut down by a child; Officer Thomas Hauc, the violent and racist enforcer. Spike Lee made it into a movie in 1995 starring Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, and Delroy Lindo.

Even though the narcotics picture has changed in the past 23 years, this remains a riveting book because of the strength of its story and the social dysfunctions it lays bare, which are still, by and large, unresolved.

***The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees

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honeybee

(photo: James DeMers for Pixabay)

By Serge Quadruppani (A Commissario Simona Tavianello Mystery) – On vacation somewhere in the mountainous part of Italy, police Commissario Simona Tavianello and her husband Marco, himself a capo commissario (police chief) encounter the dead body of an engineer for a major—and highly secretive—agricultural research firm. Local activists suspect the victim’s company of contributing to the disappearance of the area’s honeybees, and he’s been shot on the premises of a deserted beekeeper’s shop. While this case ordinarily wouldn’t involve the vacationing couple, it soon emerges that the murder weapon was Simona’s own gun.

A smarmy television reporter . . . an eccentric local scientist . . . a shady government spy . . . a ruthless industrialist—the full deck of eccentric personalities is here, against the backdrop of a real-life crisis in agriculture and some interesting speculation on the promise (or is it the threat?) of nanotechnology.

Possibly it’s an artifact of the translation of this mystery, but a time or two I was unclear which of the book’s many characters was under discussion. More puzzling was the author’s habit of having characters openly blurt out a confession, subverting the mystery. Poor Simona (who ordinarily works for the anti-mafia squad) is involved in the case because of her gun, and she’s also in the way, as the local police try to sort things out.

Her husband is retired and she herself is described as white-haired and a little thick around the middle, yet she still has an eye for the handsome beekeeper that arouses her husband’s jealousy, mostly good-natured. They are old antagonists, locked in a lifelong battle that pleases them both. Their relationship is quite fun for the reader, too.

Quadruppani has a distinctive, somewhat breathless writing style, moving his characters rapidly from one scene to another, and a facility with description of the Italian countryside and lifestyle. Fans of previous books in this series may have developed a fondness for Simona and Marco. As a first-time reader, I found the pace a little frantic—too reminiscent of a bee flitting from flower to flower, gaining information pollen grain by grain, but still needing some serious processing to produce honey.

***A Pattern of Lies

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Canterbury (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

By Charles Todd – In Book 7 in the Bess Crawford mystery series, Bess works as a World War I field hospital nurse in France (1918), where the terrible surroundings are well imagined and effectively described. On leave and waiting for a train in Canterbury, Bess encounters a past patient, Major Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay the night with his family, as a train to London is not likely before morning. Mark’s mother had come to France to help care for him, and Bess is happy to renew her acquaintance.

Mark tells her about the loss of the family business—a gunpowder mill—which blew up two years previously. A fire ensued, and more than a hundred workers lost their lives. At first, sabotage was suspected, but eventually the explosion—which created a shortfall in vital British armament production—was ruled an accident. Rather than rebuild on the site, the government relocated production to Scotland. The village economy was devastated by the loss of both men and their jobs. Resentments run high.

Recently, a spate of vicious rumors has circulated, accusing Mark’s father of causing the catastrophe. Allegedly, he was at odds with the government over the running of the mill and its possible disposition after the war. The father dismisses these rumors as something no thinking person would take seriously. Unfortunately, evidence of the increasingly uneasy relationship between residents of the Ashton manor and the fictional village of Cranbourne is not hard to come by, with minor, but escalating acts of vandalism and anonymous threatening letters.

Where these problems started—and, more ominously, where they will end up—is increasingly uncertain. Mark hopes that Bess’s arrival will help his parents take their minds off their current troubles, which local police seem loathe to investigate. But during her visit, the unthinkable happens: Mark’s father, Philip Ashton, is arrested on a charge of murder. In the ensuing weeks, the only people he’s allowed to see are his legal representatives. However, with their client facing possible conviction and death, they seem oddly unmotivated.

Bess spends much of her time on duty in France, but several short trips to England, accompanying patients who need more care than can be offered in the field, allow her to stay in touch with the Ashton family. She uses her contacts in the battlefield grapevine to find out about a witness to the tragedy, relying on an Australian sergeant—who has a quite obvious crush on our Bess—as her eyes and ears. She also has resources closer to home: her father, the “Colonel Sahib,” who had retired from the military but was called back for “special duty,” and his former Regimental Sergeant-Major. Both of them are apparently connected with military intelligence, and willing to look into matters for Bess and provide what information they can. Bess becomes more than an interested bystander when her investigations incite an attempt on her own life.

The thoroughness with which an amateur sleuth and an outsider can inject herself into the events of a plot is always a bit tricky to handle plausibly. Todd stretches logic thin in a few instances, but Bess’s interventions mostly work well. While the book has many strengths, in the end, the motivation behind all the trouble seemed to me rather weak.

A Pattern of Lies will especially appeal to fans of the recent television mini-series about British nurses in France in World War I, The Crimson Field. Charles Todd is a mother and son writing team based in Delaware and North Carolina. One wonders how such a team works, though, in their case, with numerous books behind them, the results are seamless and speak for themselves.

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Kick Back TV Mysteries

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tv, television, relaxing

(photo: Caitlin Regan, creative commons license)

We may spend the week grappling with the critical affairs of the world and leaky plumbing, but come the weekend, we hope Netflix offers us something entertaining—and nothing’s better than a little crime! You know, something about people with real problems!

These five U.K. and Australian series take you out of the United States altogether, for an armchair vacation to boot. Here they are, from light to dark:

  • Mr. & Mrs. Murder – found CDs of this 13-part Australian series at the local library. It’s about a husband and wife team (Shaun Micallef and Kat Stewart) who clean up after a murder and, of course, end up solving it. The real police detective (Jonny Pasvolsky), is sweet on the Mrs. and never misses a chance to put the husband down. Not one bit serious, just fun.
  • Midsomer Murders – Based on books by Caroline Graham, this veeeeery long-running British series—it began in the late 1990s—has outlasted its original cast. More lately, John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), the “cousin” of the long-running Tom Barnaby (John Nettles), is the lead detective. Tom should never have let wife Joyce out of the house. Whether she was at choir practice or off plein air painting, a murder inevitably ensued in these deceptively charming country villages. Lots of suspects. And, over the years, lots of entertaining sergeant side-kicks. Ever-amazed that the CME always arrives and the scene and already has some conclusions before Barnaby even gets there.
  • The Last Detective – great recommendation from a friend (thanks, B.T.!), based on novels by Leslie Thomas. In this London-base series, sweet, but hapless “Dangerous” Davies (Peter Davison) must deal with the breakup of his marriage, the couple’s shared custody of a very large dog, and the constant badgering of his doltish colleagues but always—yes!—solves the case. His boss, the self-medicating alcoholic DI Aspinwall (Rob Spendlove) is perfect. Friend and perpetual loser Mod (Irish comedian Sean Hughes) is the chief comic foil.
  • Case Histories – Several of Kate Atkinson’s excellent Edinburgh-based mysteries about protagonist Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) have been made into television programs (three two-hour ones and three 90-minute ones), including One Good Turn and When Will There be Good News? Jackson is a defrocked policeman working as a P.I, who’s still called in to advise the Department’s DI Louise Munroe (Amanda Abbington) when he stumbles on a dead body or a juicy case. A little too much flashback about “why he cares,” when the fate of dead young women is involved. Why wouldn’t he? His secretary (Zawe Ashton) is priceless. Cute daughter, too.
  • Jack Irish – Three television movies (Bad Debts, Black Tide, and Dead Point)have been made from the Jack Irish mysteries by Australian writer Peter Temple, with more to come. Guy Pearce plays the eponymous character, and these are the grittiest in this list. I’ve not read Temple’s originals so don’t know whether the excessive plot complications come from the original, but the shows would be better if they were a half hour shorter and without one of two of the endless twists. Between that and the heavy accents, I’ve gone a bit past caring a time or two. Girlfriend journalist Linda Hillier (Marta Dusseldorp) is a charmer. Like the touts and horses.

Deadly Ink: Pros vs. Amateurs

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(photo: Guzmán Lozano, creative commons license)

The annual Deadly Ink mystery writers’ conference last weekend included an array of “howdunit” panels for authors to discuss their craft. The “pros versus amateurs” panel had a lively discussion of the choice of protagonist and the flaws their creators give them.

A professional (police detective, private investigator, FBI agent, Harry Bosch) can do many things and get information that an amateur (a victim’s family member, the nosy neighbor, Miss Marple) cannot—and vice-versa. News reporters are in a somewhat intermediary position; they can get more information and have access to more sources than an amateur, but they still don’t have access to everything and may have to rely on the good will of the professionals to feed them vital clues. In general, non-professional investigators are much more likely to break the law in obtaining information than police detectives, who are thinking ahead to building a prosecutable case. They don’t want their evidence thrown out of court because their methods were improper. Private investigators who stray from the law risk having their license yanked. Of course, it’s when they do stray that things get interesting!

The idea of the lone investigator is strong in fiction, if not in real life, but amateurs often need to cajole the help of someone “on the inside.” If that amateur is a woman, when the case comes down to a confrontation with the baddies, “she has to end up doing the heavy lifting,” said panel moderator Jane Cleland.

The five panelists well illustrated the potential range of mystery-solving sleuths. Cleland’s New Hampshire protagonist is antiques appraiser Josie Prescott, whose profession (in nine books so far) brings her into contact with some pretty high-priced goods—the series has been called “the Antiques Roadshow for mystery fans.” I picked up her Blood Rubies about a fake—or is it?—Faberge egg.

When the authors were asked for a single word to describe their protagonists, what resulted was an impressive number of synonyms for “stubborn.” Here’s what else they had to say about their principals.

R.G. Belsky – Belsky is a former managing editor of the New York Daily News and metropolitan editor of the New York Post. It’s a natural that his series—three books so far—features prickly, big-mouthed reporter Gil Malloy, whose overriding motive in any situation is to get the story. Belsky says what was important to him was to have a character who operates out of a strong moral base. The most recent book in this series—“a personal ride through the investigative process of journalism” is Shooting for the Stars, probing the cracks in the closed-case murder of a Hollywood actress.

Sheila York writes historical mysteries set in Hollywood’s post-World War II Golden Age, and her protagonist is screenwriter, now reduced to script-doctor Lauren Atwill. Researching her scripts has given Atwill a plausible opportunity to acquire specialized knowledge—lockpicking, for example—which, well, why have a skill if you don’t use it? In a city where gossip reigns, poor Lauren is acquiring a reputation for having bodies turn up wherever she goes. In No Broken Hearts, fourth in the series, events soon make her wonder if these rumors about her are true.

Tim Hall writes “new adult” fiction (no hard-core violence), humor-filled mysteries set on Long Island and featuring Bert Shambles, whose name, Hall explains, “says it all.” He has a past brush with the law that requires him to stay employed, but he’s a bit of a ditz, a laid-back twenty-three-year-old thrift shop employee whose motto might be “If at first you don’t succeed, why bother?” Unfortunately, in addition to his brilliant career, Shambles also has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hall has two mysteries in this series. The most recent is Tie Died.

Annette Dashofy writes traditional mysteries whose main character, Zoe Chambers, is a female paramedic and deputy coroner in a rural Pennsylvania township where the main coroner takes the juicy cases and she deals with the leftovers. And yet . . . She teams up with the police chief when she needs a professional hand, but she’ll need a different kind of help to get over her biggest obstacle to advancement in her field: autopsies make her ill. The first in the series, Circle of Influence, was an Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel; third and most recent is Bridges Burned, in which Zoe takes in the victims of an accidental fire as suspicions of murder flare up.

Kathryn Johnson is the author of two current series, including the contemporary romantic-

suspense series “Affairs of State,” whose third title, No Mercy, is coming soon. Her historical thrillers each feature one of Queen Victoria’s five daughters. The most recent is The Shadow Princess, about the oldest, Vicky. When her husband, briefly the emperor of Germany, dies, the novel has Vicky returning to London just as the Jack the Ripper terror grips the city. Crown Prince Eddy is a suspect, and she is determined to clear his name. The “princess” books are written under the pen name Mary Hart Perry. As protagonists, Victoria’s daughters can command quite a bit of assistance and are used to getting what they ask for; at the same time, their work is more difficult because they are so famous. (Writers also may be interested in Johnson’s latest book: The Extreme Novelist: The No-Time-To-Write Method for Drafting Your Novel in 8 Weeks.)

****Blue Labyrinth

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apothecary bottles, poison

(photo: Michael Flick, Creative Commons license)

By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, narrated by René Auberjonois – This fast-paced thriller—book 14 in the wild escapades of FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast—follows the agent on the trail of the killer of his son, and, when he is knocked out of commission by an arcane poison, the action shifts to two women desperately seeking the ingredients for a possible antidote.

Pendergast is an eccentric, so wealthy he accepts an annual $1 salary from the FBI only for form’s sake. He has residences on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, an apartment in The Dakota, and a large Louisiana plantation called Penumbra. His wit and New Orleans courtliness pervades his interactions with everyone, even when he’s aiming his Les Baer .45 at them. His avocations have made him a connoisseur of food, wine, and art, an adept at of various combat disciplines, and the practitioner of a rare form of Eastern mysticism, Chongg Ran, that provides deep insight and, in this novel, allows him to see into the past.

The story opens with an unexpected knock on the door of Pendergast’s Riverside Drive mansion, answered by his ward Constance. A man—a dead man—falls to the ground. Pendergast’s son Alban. Whoever killed Alban is sending a powerful message and appears to have left not a single clue. Is it the perfect crime? Or clever bait to lure the agent into a trap?

Meanwhile, NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta is investigating a different murder, that of a low-ranking employee at Preston and Childs’s favorite crime scene, the American Museum of Natural History. D’Agosta learns the man had been working with a visiting professor who was interested in only one particular human skeleton. D’Agosta enlists the aid of scientist Margo Green to help him figure out what was so special about this particular set of bones.

There’s skeletons in Pendergast’s family closet, too. For some time, Constance has trolled the underground archives of the Riverside Drive house, becoming well acquainted with Pendergast’s shady ancestors and the basement laboratory filled with arcane materials and dangerous chemicals. When Pendergast falls ill, she and Margo team up to concoct an antidote, but if they are to obtain all the ingredients they need, they must go outside the law to do so. And time is running out.

Preston and Child never let up the tension throughout their complex, information-packed narrative, and they have created unique and well-rounded characters. Pendergast and the novel’s action may occasionally become too “shamelessly, gloriously over the top” (Washington Post review) for some readers, including me, but he and it are always interesting.

This was the first book in the series I’ve read, and I had no difficulty following the story or the subtext of the interactions, even though much had taken place prior to the current story.

Noted American actor René Auberjonois has narrated 13 other volumes by Preston and Child, and conveys Pendergast’s Southern gentleman charm quite convincingly.

A slightly longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Mr. Holmes

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Ian McKellen, Mr. Holmes, Sherlock

Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes

In Mr. Holmes (trailer), it’s post-war England, and the elderly Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen), lives on a remote property on the Sussex coast. He tends his bees and shuns detecting, ever since the tragic conclusion of his last case some 35 years earlier. But he’s bothered by John Watson’s account of the case and a movie about it, both of which got the wrong end of the stick.

Between stretches of mentoring his housekeeper’s young son Roger in the details of managing an apiary, avoiding his housekeeper (played to a “T” by Laura Linney), who is apprehensive his declining physical state and advancing dementia will soon be too much for her to handle, trying unproven botanical memory aids, and enjoying terrific view of Seven Sisters white cliffs, Holmes has taken pen in hand to write his own record of that final case. Its details are elusive and come back to him only in fits and starts.

The movie is based on a 2005 literary mystery by Mitch Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind, which “is not a detective story; it’s a work of literary fiction, and as such it’s much more interested in the mysteries Holmes can never solve,” said Salon reviewer Laura Miller.

Director Bill Condon obtained fine performances by McKellen and Linney, as well as the strong supporting cast, including Roger Allam (who plays Holmes’s doctor), Milo Parker (Roger), Hattie Moraham (as the principal in his last case), and Hiroyuki Sanada (who provides Holmes some of his botanicals, but issues his own challenge to the aging detective). Late in life, that challenge teaches Holmes an important lesson.

For my taste there was too much aging and not enough mystery. Perhaps Monsters and Critics’ Ron Wilkinson captured the problem when he wrote, “A charming but fatally slow exposition.” Too, more should have been done cosmetically to differentiate the 93-year-old Holmes from the flashbacks of him at age 58.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 87%; audiences, 78%.

****The Breaks

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streetwalker, San Francisco

(photo: David Selsky, creative commons license)

By Eden Sharp – In the hardboiled thriller The Breaks, readers are introduced to two engaging and memorable characters—private investigator Angela McGlynn and her sometime associate John Knox. McGlynn is self-assured and sassy, a computer hacking whiz and martial arts expert, not above using her attractiveness to lure bad guys into compromising positions. Knox is a recently discharged U.S. Marine with PTSD haunted by his Afghanistan experiences. McGlynn takes on Knox as a favor to a friend, who thinks the man needs something to occupy him, a way to feel useful again, and, as the case she’s embarking on turns darker and more dangerous, she’s damn glad to have him at her side.

This thriller takes place in San Francisco, where you can go from exclusive neighborhood to dangerous gang territory in a few steps. “The worst parts were only blocks away from the tourist traps and not marked on the map. It was easy to stray off track.” All strata of society are compressed on that small peninsula, and McGlynn and Knox stray way off track in this complex story, presented in short scenes from multiple points of view. McGlynn narrates in the first person, keeping her in the center of the action, but the scenes from Knox and others are third-person. There are quite a few characters to keep in your head, and I often had to use the search function to find the first mention of a name to place them.

Trouble begins when a retired suburban high school teacher asks McGlynn to find his teenage daughter. She’s run away from home, missing two weeks, and the police aren’t doing much. About all the father can tell McGlynn about the girl’s disappearance is that she had a serious cocaine habit and threatened to turn to prostitution to support it. Through her contacts in the community of working girls, McGlynn finds who the girl has been running with.

McGlynn suspects the girl was snatched because of an identity mix-up. She was carrying the stolen phone and I.D. of the daughter of a big-time narcotics smuggler. The police are trying to pull off an ambitious sting operation against him. But as they move forward, they keep tripping over McGlynn and Knox, and they aren’t happy.

Meanwhile, apart from her paying work for clients like the distraught dad, McGlynn uses her hacking skills to expose child pornographers. She’s tracked down a big-time seller of these images who lives in the city and is scheming to put him out of business.

These three skeins of criminality and investigation inevitably become tangled, which makes for a challenging guessing game among McGlynn, Knox, the cops, and the reader. Sharp has a talent for energetic prose that keeps this complicated story moving and the ability to put her characters in credible danger. The choreography of the final showdown scene is a little confusing, though the outcome is clear.

Ironically, I learned more about Knox’s character and motivations than McGlynn’s, despite the first-person narration. It makes for an interesting switch in expectations that McGlynn reacts to situations (after sex, in dangerous straits) in a coolly logical way typically associated with male protagonists, whereas Knox, because the trauma of his war experience is just under the skin, has more emotional reactions. One of the most interesting and insightful aspects of the novel is McGlynn’s running analysis of people’s psychology in various situations.

Sharp has a few troublesome writing tics, and the novel would have benefited from copy-editing and proofreading. Nevertheless, it’s an engaging read, and I look forward to more from her and the further exploits of McGlynn and Knox.

A slightly longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

***The Storm Murders

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farm, snow, winter

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)

By John Farrow – Farrow is the pen name that acclaimed Canadian writer Trevor Ferguson selected when he decided to try his hand at writing genre fiction, and, if I have this right, this is his fourth book featuring detective Émile Cinq-Mars and the first of a planned “storm murders” trilogy.

In this mystery/thriller, prickly retired Montreal Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars finds himself flattered and cajoled and inevitably drawn into helping in the investigation of a rural Quebec double-murder that culminated in the additional slaying of two young Sûreté du Québec police officers lured to the remote farmhouse by a phone call.

Perhaps Cinq-Mars decides to aid this investigation because he is intrigued by the crime itself, the lack of apparent motive, and the absence of the killer’s footprints in the newly fallen snow around the house. Perhaps it is the puzzling entreaties of a senior FBI agent, looking for answers in a case that’s way out of his jurisdiction. Perhaps it is the bleak persistence of a Canadian winter making the days weigh heavy on Cinq-Mars’s insufficiently occupied brain. Or perhaps it is his wife Sandra’s startling intimation that she might leave him, making the investigation a welcome preoccupation that might enable him to in some way resurrect the man she’d fallen in love with.

The FBI agent, frustratingly close-mouthed, at least reveals that the deaths of the Quebec couple share certain grisly similarities with a series of murders in the United States. All have involved a married couple, always they’ve occurred after a major calamity. As none of the neighbors know much about the couple, relatively new arrivals to the area, and in the hope of finding out more details that would suggest a connection among these deaths, Cinq-Mars travels to New Orleans. The first pair of murders occurred there, shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Sandra accompanies him, because the trip promises to be a semi-vacation. Both she and Cinq-Mars hope a change of marital venue will help them reconnect.

Booklist has called the Cinq-Mars books “the best series in crime fiction today,” and this is the first of them I’ve read. Farrow’s writing style, honed by writing literary fiction, is confident and sophisticated, and the book starts strong. In general, the characters and setting are interesting and well-developed, especially good-humored multi-racial NOPD detective Pascal Dupree and ambitious hotel security chief Everardo Flores, who enliven every scene they’re in. Unfortunately, the plot was not as robust as these other elements. I guessed early on (and I’m not a particularly insightful guesser) why the FBI was interested in this series of murders. Farrow receives praise from some reviewers for writing character-driven mysteries, but for my taste, Cinq-Mars’s examinations of his feelings about religion, his wife, and retirement are rather too long. The denouement also was drawn out past the point of believability, including both conversation and events that seemed unlikely.

While this book has much to recommend it, especially for admirers of the series, in the end it requires some suspension of disbelief.

A slightly longer version of this review appears—along with reviews of many new crime and thriller novels—at the Crime Fiction Lover website.