WHODUNIT?

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Do or die case for a troubled cop

I've been a Deon Meyer fan since reading last year's Heart of the Hunter, a harrowing tale of a motorcycle chase through Southern Africa. Now the Cape Town crime writer returns with Dead Before Dying, a gripping police procedural centered on a serial murder case in which the common denominator is that there is no common denominator. The case falls to Capt. Mat Joubert, a career policeman on a slow downward spiral. Two years back, his wife, an undercover cop, was killed in a botched sting, and Joubert has been unable to get back to solid ground. His friends on the force, diminishing in number as his malaise wears on, treat him with kid gloves. This will be the "make or break" case of Joubert's career. The victims have been selected seemingly from all walks of life—a coarse and well-loathed land developer; a free-and-easy office girl; a philandering businessman; a gay jewelry designer. Only the mode of their dispatch bonds them: one shot to the head, one to the heart with antique bullets from a turn-of-the-century German Mauser. Joubert will have his hands full sorting among valid clues and a string of red herrings, and the villain of the piece is a major surprise. Dead Before Dying is a plot-driven page-turner, but clear attention has been paid to character development, motivations and dialogue as well. Joubert is a haunted yet sympathetic protagonist; his character fairly begs for a sequel.


Rookie of the year

Jackson Workman "Work" Pickens is a young North Carolina lawyer, by most accounts not the go-getter his father (and one-time law partner) was before he went missing some months back. So there is more than a little irony in Pickens' nickname. When John Hart's The King of Lies begins, Work is something of a joke in the legal circles of Rowan County. His social-climbing wife routinely rags on him for his modest aspirations; his emotionally fragile sister will barely speak to him. Work has only one safe harbor, a onetime girlfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, to whom he runs when things spin out of control.

And things are about to do just that. The body of Work's missing father has turned up, and the evidence points to Work. There had been a good deal of animosity between the young lawyer and his tyrannical father, a fact not lost on Rowan County's dogged district attorney. Work has a pretty good alibi for the night his father disappeared: he was at home in bed with his wife. However, things have not been rosy on the home front for some time, and Work faces the distinct possibility that his wife, if she wanted to, could leave him twisting in the wind.

It is always a pleasure to review an outstanding debut mystery. The King of Lies goes a long way toward establishing Hart as the genre's Rookie of the Year.


Airport intrigue

Often the decision on whether a book belongs in the Whodunit? column is something of a judgment call. To some degree, most fiction falls into the "suspense" genre; after all, if there is no suspense, there is no story. The first time I was faced with this conundrum was with T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain, perhaps the quintessential latter-day Southern California fable, but hardly a whodunit. Leslie Larson's Slipstream presents a similar quandary. Owing as much to Sandra Cisneros as to T. Jefferson Parker, Larson spins a classic noir tale in contemporary L.A. The hub of the story is LAX (Los Angeles International Airport, to the uninitiated), where two of the main characters work: Rudy, who cleans airplanes between flights, and Wylie, who tends bar. From there the story fans out, embracing Rudy's wife, an Avon saleslady with clandestine plans to leave Rudy far behind; Carolyn, Wylie's on-again off-again girlfriend, who harbors a closely guarded secret; Logan, Wylie's parolee brother, who repeatedly turns up like the proverbial bad penny; and Logan's daughter Jewell, a late-blooming lesbian in a failing relationship. Some will go on to a happy ending; one will fall to a sniper's bullet. One thing is certain: L.A. will be a markedly different place for the survivors. Slipstream is Larson's debut novel (a big month for debuts, eh?); expect big things from this exciting new find!


MYSTERY OF THE MONTH

One of the most chilling and unforgettable events of the 20th century took place in a cellar in Ekaterinburg, Russia, in July of 1918. The czar, the czarina, Crown Prince Alexei and the four grand duchesses were executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries that warm summer night, their bodies consigned to an old mine shaft to destroy any lingering evidence. Then the rumors began: perhaps one of the grand duchesses had escaped. This was the story put forth by one Anna Anderson, a real-life character who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia. She could never quite explain her miraculous escape, claiming temporary amnesia, but she lived to the ripe old age of 82, never wavering from her claim to the Russian throne.

This month's Tip of the Ice Pick Award winner, Ariana Franklin's City of Shadows, poses an intriguing "what if" in this taut retelling of the Anastasia legend, set in pre-WWII Berlin. The details of "Anna Anderson's" rescue from a Berlin insane asylum dovetail quite nicely with Germany's flirtation with insanity in the heady 1930s. While the few remaining members of Russia's royal Romanovs would have preferred to discredit the would-be Anastasia, others in powerful positions, including Adolf Hitler himself, jockeyed for position in Anna's attentions, all the better to forge a favorable alliance in the event that the Russian Revolution should come to naught. And so, for a lifetime, Anna Anderson and Anastasia shared a history; even though later evidence indicated that Anderson was in fact a Polish peasant girl with a checkered past, many still clung to the fantasy that Anastasia and Anderson were one and the same.

Franklin's atmospheric rendering of Berlin is exceptional, her characters sharply drawn yet sympathetic. The story unfolds in staccato bursts, punctuated by insightful glimpses into the Russian Revolution and the Nazification of Germany.


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