Review by New York Times Review
DON'T ask me how it happened, but a gang of great old guys nearly hijacked the American crime novel last year. I'm thinking of lone avengers like Michael Connelly's aging homicide detective, Harry Bosch, bringing belated justice to a cold case he might have botched in "Echo Park," as well as precinct-house saints like the Oracle, wising up the rookie cops in Joseph Wambaugh's "Hollywood Station." And how about those old lions who came roaring out of retirement in new novels by George Pelecanos and John Lutz? But no matter how vital its old guard, the crime novel always needs fresh blood, so it's gratifying to find a few promising writers tooling up to give the genre its next generation of heroes. These raw recruits may be younger and dumber, but they're no less driven. And if Theresa Schwegel's PROBABLE CAUSE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) is anything to go by, they're also more self-absorbed and anxious, more alienated from a criminal justice system that demands their loyalty but betrays their trust. In her first novel, "Officer Down," Schwegel got inside the head of a female cop who earns her independence the hard way when she's suspected of killing her partner. "Probable Cause" returns to this dark theme with its coming-of-age story about a third-generation Chicago police officer, 23-year-old Ray Weiss, who is ostracized by his fellow officers when he balks at participating in their shady deals with local merchants. Against his better judgment, Ray goes along with a rookie initiation rite that has him pocketing some rings from a phony jewelry-store robbery. But when the shop owner is murdered and Ray's field training officer bullies him into making a false arrest, the kid rebels. Schwegel has no trouble winning sympathy for Ray, whose awed love for his emotionally distant father and idealistic faith in the honor of his job make him sweet as well as vulnerable. And while Schwegel skillfully tightens the plot screws that force Ray to develop his own code of ethics, she also has fun riding with the cops through the best and worst of Chicago's neighborhoods. But there are plenty of ouch! moments in her writing ("the air in the room is as still as a dead man"), and the older her characters, the stiffer their dialogue. While Ray's personal appeal is enough to get us over these narrative humps, it would be nice to see more of his hard-won maturity next time out. Marcus Sakey works the same Chicago territory in his flashy first novel, THE BLADE ITSELF (St. Martin's Minotaur, $22.95), but from the other side of the law. His protagonist, Danny Carter, is a reformed thief who considers himself blessed because he holds down a responsible managerial position with a contracting outfit and lives with a woman who loves him. But seven years ago, Danny ran out on Evan McGann, his boyhood friend and partner in crime, during a pawnshop robbery that turned ugly when Evan "exploded" and shot the owner. Now Evan is out of prison and demanding payback by blackmailing Danny into kidnapping his boss's 12-year-old son. The narrative drive of this white-knuckle story owes everything to the raw tension between virtuous Danny and evil Evan, whose violent rages make him "a force of nature." But once Danny caves in to Evan's threats, the plot follows a familiar pattern. It's obvious that Evan is going to roll over Danny's efforts to control events and that Danny's ultimate triumph will be a way of proving himself to his disapproving father. It's also a given that there will be a lot of talk about growing up poor and Irish in a blue-collar neighborhood "that belonged to them less every day." But even if we've already read this in a Dennis Lehane novel, Sakey pulls it off by virtue of his cool, commanding style. He's already found his voice. Now he needs to expand his vision. Four years after the 1916 Somme offensive, the battle still rages in Ian Rutledge's head. Haunted by his wartime experiences, the Scotland Yard detective returns in A FALSE MIRROR (Morrow/HarperCollins, $23.95), the ninth novel in a remarkable series by an American mother/son team who write under the name of Charles Todd. Like all Rutledge's cases, a brutal assault in the coastal town of Hampton Regis can be traced back to the war. The victim, Matthew Hamilton, served in the Foreign Office and his presumed assailant, Stephen Mallory, was engaged to Hamilton's wife before they were separated by the war in which he was branded as a deserter. With Mallory holding Mrs. Hamilton and her maid hostage, Rutledge works his way through the village, opening up old wounds and reliving his own painful memories. The sad and shocking resolution only confirms Todd's thesis that war destroys minds and souls as well as bodies, and that the suffering never ends - not even for the so-called winners. War is also very much on the mind of Martha Grimes, another American author who sets her mysteries in England. Before the plot takes some dizzying turns, DUST (Viking, $25.95) appears to be yet another enchanting entertainment for devotees of Grimes's Scotland Yard detective, Richard Jury, and his irrepressible friend, Melrose Plant. When Billy Maples, a young philanthropist from a moneyed family, is found murdered in a boutique hotel on the Clerkenwell Road, Jury wonders if it has anything to do with Maples's docent duties at Lamb House, the historic residence in Rye where Henry James wrote much of his later work. Dispatching Plant to Rye, where he develops hilarious literary affectations, Jury focuses his attention on Maples's grandfather, one of the code-breakers based at Bletchley Park during World War II. While the war stories are sensitively drawn, they are trivialized by the lighter comic tone of the storytelling. Henry James would not approve. Theresa Schwegel Schwegel's new novel is a coming-of-age story featuring a 23-year-old third-generation Chicago cop.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Richard Jury, the urbane Superintendent of New Scotland Yard CID, has starred in 21 mysteries and is somewhat of a holdover from an earlier era of procedurals, when crime-scene investigation took a backseat to the leisurely examination of the victim's past life. This time out one of Jury's informants, a teen who works as a waiter in a posh London hotel, summons Jury (who is in bed with his forensic-pathologist lover at the time), saying that he's found a body. The victim is a wealthy man whose past connects him to secrets from the World War II code breakers and to the novelist Henry James. Jury's friend, the effete Melrose Plant, helps out by investigating Lamb House, where James composed three of his novels, while Jury indulges in an improbable, bodice-ripper of an affair with a sexy new detective inspector. Sprawling in scope, sketchy on plotting, but still a good old-fashioned read for Jury fans. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The rarely ruffled urbanity of Richard Jury is given an oral enhancement by reader Lee, whose plummy narration turns a bit more appropriately droll when it comes to delineating the New Scotland Yard superintendent's amateur partner in crime fighting, snooty, aristocratic novelist Melrose Plant. Both gentlemen detectives are involved in a complex but surprisingly obvious mystery surrounding the murder of a young man in a hotel room. Lee handles a gallery of contemporary British characters in addition to the leads, including Jury's lady friend, cool and collected Yard pathologist Dr. Phyllis Nancy; the working class and mildly abrasive detective assigned to the case, Ron Chilton; and an eager 13-year-old Jury prot?g?. They and the novel's grand dames, flirts, crusty old codgers, smarmy young hoteliers and feisty housekeepers fit easily into Lee's repertoire. So does sultry DI Lu Agular, who, Grimes writes, is beautiful enough to suck all the oxygen out of the room. Happily, Lee has more than enough to breathe needed warmth, humor and suspense into a tale that holds off its sole riveting surprise-and a good one it is-until the very end. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 27). (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Scotland Yard Supt. Richard Jury is dragged into his 22nd case by the first of many children wise and meddlesome beyond their years. Because he looks taller than 13, Benny Keegan is able to talk his way first into a job as kitchen help at the Zetter, a "restaurant with rooms" in Clerkenwell, and then into pinch-hitting for room-service waiter Gilbert Snow. That's why he's the one who finds the body of Billy Maples, and that's why his old acquaintance Richard Jury, whom he telephones, joins beautiful Islington Inspector Lu Aguilar on the case. (Joining her in bed--early, often and volcanically--is Jury's own idea.) It's hard to imagine who killed inoffensive Billy, who loved Henry James and contemporary painting and who died intestate, leaving his considerable trust fund to a wealthy father who scarcely needed it. It'll be up to Jury and his foppish friend Melrose Plant, in a role that suits him unusually well this time, to connect the dots between Billy's murder, James's novels and a long-buried WWII outrage so ghastly that it turns the heat on everyone in Billy's circle, from his confidential assistant Kurt Brunner to his ex-lover Angela Riffley to a brace of relatives who look more sinister on each return visit. Series fans will welcome the return of plausible psychopath Harry Johnson (The Old Wine Shades, Feb. 2006) and several key supporting players that Grimes presents with sympathetic insight. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
