A mystery-writing legend returns

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

P.D. James is a household name with mystery aficionados worldwide. Wildly popular in her home country of England, where most of her novels have been adapted for TV or cinema, James has garnered quite a following stateside as well with her series featuring Scotland Yard inspector Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh is an urbane, well-spoken, veddy British police officer, equally at home in the academic arena and the London underworld. He is an accomplished poet, he drives a Jaguar, and he investigates the murders that befuddle his lesser compatriots. The Murder Room, Dalgliesh's latest adventure, finds him involved in a series of homicides in a London museum dedicated to the years between the two world wars. Dalgliesh must uncover the tenuous connections between the disparate victims: a prominent psychiatrist, a fast living London social butterfly and a museum caretaker. And he must do it before there is any further loss of life. Crisply written and deliberately plotted, The Murder Room is a compelling achievement in crime fiction by a writer at the top of her form.


Death on the dark continent

French West Africa is the setting for Robert Wilson's second Bruce Medway novel, The Big Killing. Medway is a freelance "fixer," a man familiar with the vagaries of business and politics in the stretch of coastal West Africa between Benin and the Ivory Coast. Almost out of money, Medway reluctantly accepts an assignment to deliver a video for a shady local pornographer. The delivery, which should have been routine, goes very badly, culminating in the death of a courier and the discovery of a mutilated body; voodoo overtones abound. From here on, the situation spirals steadily downward, with little or no relief in sight. Wilson's voice is unique among current mystery novelists. He certainly employs several of the time-honored conventions: the first-person narrative, the world-weary worldview, the hard-boiled protagonist. Nonetheless, his work stands, if not above the crowd, then certainly well to the side of it. If the recently departed (and sorely missed) singer/songwriter Warren Zevon had written novels, I suspect they would have been along the lines of The Big Killing.


Mystery of the month

A tip of the hat and the November Tip of the Ice Pick Award go to veteran author William G. Tapply for Shadow of Death, the latest in his superb series featuring Boston attorney Brady Coyne. Hired by a political kingmaker to conduct a quiet inquiry into the affairs of the husband of a prominent senatorial candidate, Coyne enlists the aid of a trusted PI friend. When the investigator is murdered in a rigged car accident, Coyne is prohibited from sharing his knowledge with the police, an unexpected byproduct of attorney/client privilege. Needless to say, he feels responsible for his friend's death, and as he cannot in good conscience go to the police, he decides to enter the investigative fray himself. What he turns up will cost the life of at least one other person, threaten the career of a political hopeful, dig up a can of worms that has been buried for some 30 years, and put Coyne's license (and life) in jeopardy. Tapply is among the best of the current crop of mystery novelists. His plots are original and well crafted, the characters complex and believable, and the dialogue much more true to life than the endless wisecracking so common to the genre. He has been compared with the legends Dashiell Hammett and John D. MacDonald, and the comparisons are quite apt. With Hammett, Tapply shares the gift of milieu; each conveys the intimated details that evoke the essence of place and time, even to readers who have never set foot in California or Boston. With MacDonald, Tapply shares tales of the quests of the common man: an everyday guy-next-door put in harm's way by a series of events outside of his control. Brady Coyne, Boston lawyer, self-described slacker, ardent fisherman, is just such an everyday fellow. There are several Brady Coyne novels in the series, and an evening spent with Shadow of Death will surely nudge the reader to read one (or all) of the previous books.


Bruce Tierney is a Nashville-based writer who was weaned on the Hardy Boys.

© 2003 ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com