Barbara Clark

Author Michael Robertson successfully capitalizes on our never-ending fascination with Sherlock Holmes in his new Baker Street Letters mystery series, now updated with a fifth entry, The Baker Street Jurors.

This satisfying, dryly humorous book follows in the footsteps of the others Robertson has penned in the series. He uses the clever trope of following the contemporary tenants at 221B Baker Street, brothers Reggie (barrister) and Nigel (solicitor), who’ve found that their offices continue to receive mail addressed to the building’s famous former tenant. It’s clear that scores of people believe that Holmes is no fantasy and, what’s more, that he lives on. The duo can’t help picking up on some of the mail and following through on requests for the great detective’s assistance.

The Baker Street Jurors involves a wayward summons for jury duty mistakenly addressed to one Sherlock Holmes, coupled with one of the same for Nigel, who ends up as an alternate juror at the murder trial of a famous British cricket player. The trial comes at the same time as the big championship game, frustrating most of the population of England, who want him acquitted and ready to compete.

It’s odd, though—the jurors themselves seem to be mysteriously falling by the wayside one by one, victims of various strange mishaps, leading to the suspicion that someone’s trying to pack the jury in a particular way.

This isn’t just another legal thriller. It’s so smoothly written it sneaks up on you, as testimony slowly builds the case for and against, without the need for other chapters that revisit the crime. Activities are conducted in a conversational tone, and the author has done a superb job of character build-up, including the presence of one odd alternate juror whose pipe-smoking habits and Holmesian methodology strike a curious chord with fellow jurors. There’s enough background to pique interest, not enough to bore.

Understated humor lifts this tale a cut above the ordinary. While Nigel is a central character, it’s Mr. Justice Allen, the trial judge, who steals the show. As jurors succumb one by one to odd accidents, he can be heard to issue the warning “Don’t run with scissors” and other droll admonishments, or to comment on the jury members’ bad note-taking habits such as making “sketches of male and female naughty bits.”

Readers who pick up this book will want to visit Robertson’s earlier books and learn more about this treat of a series.

Lately it seems that each new crime debut must include some idiosyncrasy—the detective must have a quirk that sets him or her apart from the many crime solvers populating the suspense genre. They’re overeaters, opera lovers, poets, phobics, depressives or wise guys. Debut author David Swinson goes one step further, presenting his antihero, former cop and current part-time PI Frank Marr, as effectively part of the problem of drug-related crime he’s often out there solving.

In The Second Girl, Swinson makes sure we know only too clearly how Marr’s own drug addiction affects his day-to-day; how it can cloud the faculties and hold judgments hostage to the need for the next fix and a consistent resupply. Marr’s secret is a heavy one, though he stays away from crack and heroin, sticking to powder cocaine, pills and booze. But he’s constantly at risk of discovery by colleagues and friends. The only person who knows of his addiction is his former deputy chief, who forced the detective’s “early retirement” but left his record clean, due to both the fragility and success of the many cases Marr successfully resolved.

Marr has been on a days-long stakeout at the house of a D.C. drug gang. Only thing is, he’s hoping to score drugs for his own use on the sly. Instead, complications present as he searches the house and discovers a teenage girl, abducted and held captive. In the wake of the publicity Marr receives following her rescue, he gets tapped to help some former police colleagues search for another missing teen. He reluctantly agrees, walking an even more precarious line of possible discovery.

Readers learn in detail what it’s like to plan one’s whole life around scoring that next hit, maintaining a level of personal control and evading discovery. Just as lying and subterfuge are part of the world of crime Marr investigates, they are equally part of his own daily grind.

The crime story in The Second Girl is itself mildly interesting, and it’s clear that this detective doesn’t play by any rule book. He’s alternately clever, intuitive and violent in his pursuit of these street criminals. It’s Marr’s addiction and its effects on his life that take center stage here, and they’re given first-person immediacy in this fast-moving yet still introspective narrative. It’s often nerve-wracking, sometimes gruesome, but in the end carries a note of wearying sameness throughout.

Crime, books and libraries make for a heady combination in Murder at the 42nd Street Library, the first in a new series by Con Lehane that mixes mystery with some of America’s most famous institutions of higher reading.

The librarian/sleuth of this tale is Ray Ambler, who curates the crime fiction collection at the lion-guarded flagship building of the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan. In addition to its many literary allusions, the book is bursting with Big Apple sights, sounds and liveliness, with many neighborhoods, ballparks and landmarks sure to strike a chord with Manhattan aficionados.

Not one, but two people are murdered early on, one in a library office close to Ambler's, the other in Bryant Park near the library. The dead man in the park is a famous crime author whose papers have just been donated to the library’s crime fiction collection. Unable to help himself, Ambler begins to investigate. Not only is he an expert on every conceivable aspect and perpetrator of fictional crime, he also has the acquaintance of real-time NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove, and the two hook up to look into the backstory of these oddly coincidental crimes. Working their sometimes separate, sometimes diverging trajectories, they begin the task of smoking out a murderer.

Murder at the 42nd Street Library operates on a kind of slow burn, increasing in tension—and complications—as the pages progress. In fact, at times the characters can get downright confusing. Readers may need a cheat sheet in order to keep track of Max, Nelson, Kay, Laura Lee, Lisa, Jim, Dominic, Adele, Bennie, Arthur and Harry against a convoluted backstory that involves plenty of odd marriages, extramarital dalliances, sex with minors, intrigues and betrayals. Just about everyone’s lying about something.

There’s a cool youngster named Johnny who brings a welcome air of innocence to this often-tawdry tale of adults who just can’t seem to keep their dalliances and power trips under control. Our hopes lie with Johnny and those who support and protect him.

Ambler the librarian has a disarming, low-key aura that wins us over, along with his well-calibrated iron fist/velvet glove shtick. And wait for it, there’s a honey of an unexpected ending.

Rain Dogs, the fifth in Adrian McKinty’s Detective Sean Duffy crime series, glows with luminous portraits and firmly anchored scenes. Readers don’t have to search for some kernel of illumination in what the author is saying—it’s there in plain sight, a welcome change from many of the overstuffed tomes of the current day. There’s barely a wasted word, and actions are never belabored—the phone never rings, you just get “Briiinnnggg.” Yet the book contains everything for the crime enthusiast, including a locked room (or should I say, castle), a brisk procedural, mystery with a noir look and great dialogue. It’s all set smack in the midst of the “Troubles” in 1980s Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Early one morning, a young journalist named Lily Bigelow is found dead beneath a high parapet inside the walls of the Anglo-Norman Carrickfergus castle, a tourist venue just outside Belfast. Search after search of the courtyard, dungeons and battlements appears to show that no one (unless it was the night watchman) could have killed her, though there appears to be no reason why she’d jump to her death.

Detective Duffy painstakingly retraces Lily’s tracks leading up to her death, delving into her recent conversations with fellow journalists and her assignment accompanying a Finnish trade mission to Northern Ireland as they decide whether to open a business in the Belfast area. Duffy is closely accompanied by Detective Constable Lawson, a cheeky, dead-smart lad full of dry observations—the perfect counterpoint to Duffy, who often wonders if the joke’s on him. Duffy is a flawed, vulnerable Irishman, 40-ish and struggling to convince himself—or maybe us—that his just-under-30 girlfriend isn’t too young for him. He’s fun and down to earth, and he talks to the reader in abbreviated sentences, so we’re drawn right into the snap of the book’s dialogue.

Pointedly, McKinty makes us aware of the daily dangers in Northern Ireland, as Duffy checks his car for bombs before each trip. The tragic murder of one of his colleagues is expressed simply, with stark effect. On the other hand, Duffy is full of humorous asides about his colleagues: “I said hey to some grizzled old cops who looked like rejects from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.”

McKinty’s writing is so good it makes your head spin, and Rain Dogs has it all: intriguing plot, good Irish humor and a straightforward telling.