The month's new mysteries

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Spenser returns for another walk on the wild side

Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels have consistently served as the benchmark by which other modern-day private eye novels are measured. Over the course of 28(!) books and a similar span of years, the Boston-based investigator has grown older, perhaps less fleet of foot and keen of eye, but no less crusty and irascible. In his latest outing, Widow's Walk, Spenser is called on to investigate the death of the elder member of a May-December couple. It seems the young bride had every reason (million$ of reasons, actually) to dispatch her aged banker husband to his eternal reward. Motive, opportunity, smoking gun, it's all there, only she says she didn't do it, and Spenser almost believes her. With the aid of his psychologist girlfriend Susan, and his too-cool-for-you sidekick Hawk, Spenser delves deep into the heart of the Boston financial community, with surprising and deadly results.


Asking all the right questions

If you can block out the time to read a book in one sitting (because you will not be able to put it down!), try Thomas H. Cook's hypnotic The Interrogation. The scene is an interrogation room in a dismal urban police station on September 12, 1952. Homeless drifter Albert Jay Smalls is starting to show signs of cracking. The police think they have him dead to rights in the murder of young Cathy Lake, and they would like nothing more than to wring a confession out of him. Three world-weary cops take turns pummeling the suspect with questions, analyzing his every word, every nuance. When a slip of the tongue betrays Smalls, one detective abandons the interrogation to pursue the slimmest of leads, the one chance in a million that could break the case wide open. A dark and chilling suspense tale, The Interrogation is a complex psychological drama of the interplay between hunter and prey.


All that jazz: the mystery behind a musician's murder

Evan Horne is not a private eye; he's a jazz pianist with perhaps more than an average amount of curiosity about things that are none of his business. Still, he seems to get involved in more than his fair share of mysteries, five thus far, counting the latest, Looking for Chet Baker. Real-life jazz trumpeter Chet Baker died in 1988 in Amsterdam at age 58 when he fell, or jumped, or was pushed from his hotel window. When Horne begins following the trail of the events leading to Baker's mysterious death, he is swept into a vortex of events beyond his control. He must use all his talents just to stay afloat, let alone solve a mystery. But the "whodunit" aspect is not what makes the Evan Horne novels stand out; it is the characterizations, the music, the milieu, as writer Bill Moody, a jazz drummer himself, enfolds you in the soft sad sounds of Chet Baker's mournful horn.


Tip of the ice pick

This month's award for mystery of the month goes to Elizabeth Dewberry's Sacrament of Lies, a literary thriller of the first order. Grayson Guillory, the daughter of the governor of Louisiana, faces the sad task of sorting through the effects of her recently deceased mother, an apparent suicide who had long suffered from manic depression. When Grayson discovers a well-hidden homemade videotape, a feeling of foreboding washes over her, for it is her mother, from beyond the grave, accusing her father of plotting her murder. As Grayson initiates a furtive investigation into her mother's allegations, she finds herself walking a razor-thin line between reality and paranoid delusions. Skillfully crafted with gripping suspense, Sacrament of Lies will keep you guessing until the end.


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