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On the road to murder

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Shamus Award-winning author John Connolly is back with The White Road, number four in the series featuring Maine private investigator Charlie Parker. Originally introduced in the groundbreaking mystery Every Dead Thing, ex-New York City cop Parker is beginning to rebuild his life after the brutal slayings of his wife and young daughter. Blinded by his hunger for revenge, he "crossed over the line" and killed his family's murderer. Since then, he has been living in semi-seclusion in Scarborough, Maine, working the occasional investigation and trying to come to terms with his demons.

When an old attorney friend calls, Charlie is reluctantly drawn into the investigation of a South Carolina murder, a homicide with the worst kind of racial overtones: arrogant young black man accused of killing beautiful young white girl, daughter of the wealthiest man in Charleston. As is so often the case in the South, the seeds of trouble reach back in time through the generations, in this case to the early days of the Ku Klux Klan. Elements of the supernatural are at play, or they seem to be, not unlike the eerie visitations in Sharyn McCrumb's She Walks These Hills. Connolly, based in Dublin, Ireland, displays a superb sense of place, both in rural Maine and in the hallowed halls of Charleston. One tiny giveaway to the author's roots, though: One of the bad guys drives a Nissan Terrano, a four-wheel-drive vehicle available in Ireland, but sadly, not in the U.S.


Payback from the past

In Robert Crais' latest, The Last Detective, freewheeling PI Elvis Cole returns to team up with LAPD Detective Carol Starkey (from Demolition Angel) and longtime sidekick Joe Pike in the search for a missing boy. The child is Ben Chenier—son of Cole's attorney amour, Lucy Chenier—and he vanishes from Cole's Laurel Canyon deck while our hero prepares dinner just a few feet away. Everyone would like to believe the boy is just off playing somewhere, or has run away, but as time goes by, it becomes evident that something more sinister has transpired. Cole's phone rings, and a voice, cold and low, says, "You remember five-two? This is payback . . . We have the boy."

It seems that Ben's disappearance is connected to events that transpired a generation before he was born, and half a world away. Elvis Cole served in the elite U.S. Army Rangers in Vietnam, and, in a mission gone horribly awry, was the only member of team five-two to survive a Viet Cong onslaught. But Cole received the Silver Star for bravery in that battle, so why would anyone want payback?

It would be helpful, but by no means necessary, to have read one or two other Cole novels before tackling The Last Detective. But if you read the new book first, you will surely go back to read the earlier ones.


Mystery of the month

The March Tip of the Ice Pick Award goes to George P. Pelecanos for his absorbing new novel Soul Circus, featuring Washington D.C. private investigators Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the heroes of 2002's Hell to Pay. Strange is a 50ish black man, mellowing with age, but still hip to the flow of the capital streets. Quinn is a hardass, plain and simple—edgy and brittle, ready to turn a real or imagined slur into something physical. These two characters enjoy one of the most complex relationships in contemporary crime fiction. The internal drama is easily the equal of the external as the two juxtapose working to find missing children with assisting in saving a known drug lord from the death penalty. Pelecanos is exceptionally insightful with regard to contemporary urban life: the poverty, the violence, the speech patterns, the environment, the relationships all ring true. He seamlessly weaves in characters from his other series, and he is no stranger to the shocking conclusion. Pelecanos is an author to read even if you're not a mystery fan; for those of you who are, he's in a class by himself.


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