The month's new mysteries

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

    First and 10, do it again

    In the wee hours of the morning, NYC private investigator Bill Smith receives a call from a friend on the police force. It seems that Smith's nephew, Gary Russell, has been arrested for rolling a drunk, but the cops are willing to release him, provided that Smith take responsibility for seeing Gary safely home to suburban New Jersey. That's easier said than done, however; shortly after the pair returns to Smith's apartment, Gary makes his exit through a window and disappears into the night. Smith tracks Gary's movements back to Warrenstown, NJ, an upscale suburb obsessed with high school football; the athletes can do no wrong, and the police turn a blind eye toward any jock misbehavior short of murder. Looking for clues to Gary's disappearance, Smith stumbles upon the body of a high school girl, overdosed, sexually abused and badly beaten. The incident bears an eerie resemblance to another Warrenstown crime of 20 years earlier, only this time, the stakes are much, much higher. S. J. Rozan's Winter and Night is the eighth in the popular series featuring Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. In many ways, it is the best yet: the story line is, as they say, "snatched from the headlines," the dialogue is snappy yet thoroughly believable, and the main characters continue to deepen their complex and intense relationship.


    Park ranger returns to the chase

    Park Ranger Anna Pigeon returns to the Natchez Trace in Nevada Barr's latest mystery, Hunting Season. It's familiar ground for the author, a former park ranger, and for her protagonist, who served a stint on the Trace a couple of years back in Barr's excellent Deep South. When Anna answers a call to the scenic Mt. Locust plantation house, a bizarre tableau greets her: a pasty white and grossly overweight man, quite dead, dressed only in Fruit of the Looms, his body bearing marks consistent with sex games gone badly. In the words of an onlooker: "Major, major yuck! Like this is a sex crime! God! I'd think it would be a crime for a guy like this to have sex at all!" The case must be handled with kid gloves (some might say rubber gloves, but I digress), as the victim's brother is a prominent candidate for county sheriff. Meanwhile, office politics and a star-crossed romance plague Anna's existence. By turns witty and suspenseful, Hunting Season is a worthy addition to the Barr oeuvre.


    The tip of the ice pick

    It's high time that cult favorite George P. Pelecanos received the popular acclaim he so richly deserves, and his latest, Hell to Pay, just may be the book that puts him over the top. The oddly paired protagonists from last year's Right as Rain are back for an encore performance: Derek Strange, fifty-ish, African-American, torn between his lover and his addiction to "intimate massage" parlors; and Terry Quinn, thirty-ish, Irish Catholic, an ex-cop coping with his demons of racism, sexism and rage. Two seemingly disparate story lines converge as the drive-by shooting of a young black child and the search for a runaway teenage girl drag Strange and Quinn through the sex- and drug-driven underworld of the nation's capital.

    The characters are exquisitely drawn, the storyline fast-paced and compelling, the action brutal and immediate. But the heart of any Pelecanos book is in the details: the appreciation of Washington D.C. neighborhoods and culture, the music, the slang, the street life, the cars, the urban vibe. His works will find favor among readers of James Ellroy, Charles Willeford and Michael Connelly, to name but a few.


    Bruce Tierney is a Nashville writer and lifelong mystery reader who was weaned on the Hardy Boys.

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