Mystery authors set a brisk pace

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

First, let me say what an extraordinary month this is for mysteries! If my column had more space, there would be reviews on excellent new works by Valerie Wilson Wesley and Reginald Hill. It was exceptionally difficult to whittle down the list to just three books; here are the results:

Writing separately, authors Jonathan and Faye Kellerman (who answered our questionnaire at right) have crafted bestseller after bestseller, most notably the mysteries featuring psychologist Alex Delaware (Jonathan), and the police procedurals with Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus (Faye). Now, for the first time, the Kellermans have co-authored a book, Double Homicide, which contains a pair of novellas set in Santa Fe and Boston. In the first, police detectives Darrel Two Moons and Steve Katz investigate the bludgeoning death of a well-loathed art dealer, dealt his mortal blow by a piece of lethally heavy sculpture. In the second, Boston cops Dorothy Breton and Micky McCain look into the shooting death of a young basketball star. One small problem, though: although the .32 was emptied into the young man's chest, the bullet wounds were apparently not the cause of his untimely demise. Quelle conundrum!

Both novellas are briskly paced and clearly well thought out in terms of plot development. By necessity, due to the truncated format of the novella, the main characters are perhaps not as fleshed out as their counterparts in a novel might be; that said, all four main characters come across as thoroughly believable, doggedly in pursuit of the truth.

Interestingly, the voice of the two-writer unit is distinctly different from the voices of its husband-and-wife components. Together, they rely much more heavily on dialogue and less on mood-setting prose than does either as an individual author. Word on the street is that Double Homicide marks the beginning of a new series. We're looking forward to the second installment!


The aftermath of disaster

The tragedy of 9/11 figures prominently in S.J. Rozan's Absent Friends, as well. Fireman Jimmy McCaffery, a New York legend for much of his life, made the final sacrifice of his career by leading a team of firefighters into the World Trade Center. Scant days later, a tabloid news article calls into question the character of McCaffery and threatens to open up a can of worms that has been quietly occupying shelf space for 20-odd years. When the reporter, old-school journalist Harry Randall, dies in unusual circumstances (a plunge from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge), the death is initially considered a suicide, but one by one his friends and enemies arrive at the notion that Harry's death had been hastened by person or persons unknown. Suspense builds as author Rozan cuts back and forth between past and present, tracing the lives of Jimmy McCaffery and his four closest friends from the innocent days of the '60s through to the sobering aftermath of 9/11. Absent Friends is truly a haunting novel of old secrets and the nature of friendships in the shadow of disaster.


Mystery of the month

I haven't done the research on this, but I think it is a good possibility that T. Jefferson Parker is the winningest recipient of the BookPage Tip of the Ice Pick Award to date. Congratulations to Mr. Parker yet again for his superb California Girl. The Becker and Vonn families have a history that dates back to a time when Orange County (California) still had more orange trees than people. As kids they had the occasion to rumble, and the Becker kids ran roughshod over the Vonns. By the mid-1960s, the Beckers had achieved respectability; the three brothers were a priest, a cop and a reporter. The Vonns, by contrast, were bikers and small-time criminals. As you might imagine, there was no love lost between the families. When Janelle, the youngest Vonn sister, comes forth with stories of sexual abuse, the Becker brothers come to her aid. It is to no avail, however; Janelle is found savagely murdered, decapitated, in an abandoned orange warehouse. The convoluted investigation touches on many of Southern California's cultural icons of the period: Richard Nixon, Charles Manson and Timothy Leary, to name but a few. As a police procedural, California Girl is first-rate; the true success of the book, though, is how well it captures the time and place, a sun-drenched, orange-scented utopia gone but affectionately remembered. If T. Jefferson Parker has any shortcomings as a writer, it is only that he can't pen them as fast as I can read them!


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